Relationship Between Culture Localization and Customer-to-Customer Website Performance

The rapid development of Internet technology has been driving companies to expand businesses globally across different cultures; decision-makers of companies need to decide whether to take the approach of globalization or localization for their website design and how to implement it. But managers of international businesses do not necessarily know how local culture may impact their businesses, especially with regards to website localization for customer to customer (C2C) online business. The need has emerged to investigate the relationship between culture localization and website performance. The purpose of this non-experimental quantitative comparison and non-experimental quantitative multiple-regression study was to investigate how the web cultural contents of eBay and TaoBao related to their performance, and the relative importance of each of Hofstede's cultural dimensions to performance. Data were collected from 160 platforms associated online stores on the websites of eBay (Eachnet.com) and TaoBao (TaoBao.com). Singh's coding sheet was used to code cultural contents, and the performance was indicated by the bounce rate retrieved from Alexa.com. ANOVA was applied to measure the cultural value differences between the websites of eBay and TaoBao, and multiple-regression was used to examine the relationship between each of Hofstede's four cultural dimensions to the website performance. The results indicated significant differences of the culture dimension values between the websites of eBay (Eachnet.com) and TaoBao (TaoBao.com); the collectivist culture oriented dimensions were significantly higher on the website of TaoBao.com than that on the website of Eachnet.com, p < .001. Results also indicated that a negative relationship between collectivist culture oriented dimensions and bounce rate (r = -.99 for collectivism; r = -.97 for uncertainty avoidance; r = -.98 for power distance), which revealed that there were strong positive relationship between collectivist culture oriented dimensions and performance of C2C online business in a collectivist country, China. Recommendations for future research included online observation for the cross-culture study, revision of the instrument to specifically fit C2C online shopping environment, investigation of the relationship between culture dimensions and performance on C2C online business in other Asian countries, and a follow up longitudinal study between culture localization and the performance of online C2C business.