The rapid proliferation of internet has turned the growth of e-commerce into a global phenomenon including both, in the developed and developing countries. Several studies have been conducted in the perspective of consumer level e-commerce adoption for different developed countries.
There felt a need to look into whether the same pattern of studies has any implication on other countries, especially the developing countries. This study aims at analyzing the pattern of e-commerce adoption on consumer perspective and the factors that have greater influence in the adoption of e-commerce by conducting a comparative study between Sweden and Pakistan.
The factors of trust on online sellers, national culture, infrastructure involved in the overall e-commerce activities and education level of consumers are found to have significant impact on the adoption of e-commerce. Trust plays a pivotal role in e-commerce adoption due toa higher level of uncertainty followed by risk, invisibility of the parties involved in exchange and lack of control mechanism.
Same is the case with the national culture whereby the propensity to trust on the online seller and risk taking are influenced to a great extent by different cultural orientation of consumers. Hofstede‘s (1980; 2001) frame work of cultural dimensions provide agood insight on national culture to draw their implication for the e-commerce adoption.
Swedish culture appears to be more adaptive towards e-commerce than the Pakistani culture, due to its wider difference on the Hofstede‘s cultural dimension indices. Moreover Swedish customers exhibit more trust on suppliers‘ of online services and products.
On the other hand, infrastructure and education are two important contextual factors that serve as support function to e-commerce activities and complement each other such that without them e-commerce activities cannot beexecuted or flourished. Insufficient infrastructure and low education level are also the main hurdles that refrain most of the consumers in Pakistan to make online purchases.
Source: Linköping University
Authors: Baig, Mirza Kashif | Raza, Hussain | Farooq, Umer