National Culture In Amazon And AliExpress Website Design And Online Shoppers’ Individual Culture Reflected From Their Preferences For It

With the advent of “Go Global‖ strategy and ―Internet Plus‖ policy, cross-border electronic commerce(e-commerce) is growing faster and healthier. More and more domestic e-businesses, especial online retailers like Alibaba, will go global and the key medium for intercultural communication between cross-border e-businesses and foreign online shoppers is website. The construction of the website in terms of culture is of overarching importance. However, few scholars did cultural studies on website design of cross-border online retailers, and online shoppers’ individual culture reflected from their preferences for cultural features of such website design. Therefore, first of all, the research analyzes 51 webpages of AliExpress.com which belongs to Alibaba Group and 51 webpages of Amazon.com to find cultural dimensions in the design of the two websites. The method applied is content analysis and the analytical tool is an integrated cultural category framework from Marcus’ and Singh’s cultural category framework which are based on cultural theories of Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions and Hall’s high/low context; then based on the results of content analysis, an online questionnaire is made to investigate online shoppers’ preferences for cultural features of the two websites. The purpose of the research is to find whether online-shoppers’ individual culture reflected from their preferences corresponds to their national culture and which website is more culturally congruent with respondents’ individual culture, and to offer suggestions for website design to domestic cross-border e-commerce companies and online sellers.The study results indicate that the cultural dimensions found in website design of Amazon are individualism, low power distance, masculinity, high uncertainty avoidance, short-term orientation and low context; while those found in AliExpress website design include collectivism, high power distance, femininity, high uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation and high context. The survey results indicate that respondents’ individual cultural dimensions include individualism, low uncertainty avoidance, high power distance, femininity, long-term orientation and low context among which high power distance, femininity and long-term orientation are not in line with their national culture. In addition, AliExpress website design is more culturally congruent with respondents’ individual cultural dimensions. However, the data analysis results indicate that the mean difference between low context and high context is the most significant among all the tested variables, which implies that respondents are more likely to shop on the website with low context cultural dimension features, and AliExpress website design presents cultural features of high context while Amazon website design shows low context cultural features.