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Does Culture Explain The Online Shopping Adoption?

Ines Soltani

Online shopping is often touted as a global phenomenon that has known its growth especially in the developed countries. However, developing countries in general and Tunisia in particular have fallen far below expectations. The noticed statistics don?t overtake a simple regulation of bills. The research in hand tends to put the accent on variables that are expected to explain the online shopping adoption. Using dimensions of national culture and attitude as theoretical, this research investigates the weight of culture in the explanation of individual?s online shopping behavior. Results indicate that for the Tunisian sample, culture is an important predictor of attitude towards online shopping. Secondly, similar to literature, the attitude is the predictor of the intention to shop online and the online shopping intention succeeds to be the intermediary variable between attitude and behavior. As a consequence, when the attitude is positive, it will be transformed in an intention which in turn will be translated into a behavior. Introduction The study of online consumer behavior in various regions of the world has shown that there are a lot of differences in the way distinct people use the Internet and online shopping which is largely due to their habits and cultures. Consequently, the study of consumers? adoption of online shopping in an inter-cultural context has indicated that culture does affect behavioral intentions and actual behaviors (Jarvenpaa and Tractinsky, 1999; Choi and Getsfield, 2003). The cultural influence has played a major role in consumers? decision-making as discussed extensively in the literature (Henny, 1976; McCort and Malhotra, 1993; Tse et al.1988). Most of these studies have shown that culture plays a significant role in individual?s decisionmaking since it affects attitudes, norms and other cognitive processes. This research aims to explore the impact of culture on online shopping adoption in the developing countries (Tunisia). Hofstede?s culture theory has been used as the theoretical foundation. Five dimensions as individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and long-term/ short-term orientation are presented. E-commerce in developed and developing countries Businesses in developing countries face many challenges (Shemi and Procter, 2013) compared to the developed ones. In fact, they suffer from many deficiencies. BtoC's global e-commerce revenue was $ 244 billion in 2017, up 24.8% from 2016, according to eMarketer. Online sales now account for 10.2% of total retail sales worldwide, up from 8.6% in 2016 and 7.4% in 2015.