An Intercultural Study on the Security Factors of Global Internet Shopping

The development of Global Internet shopping has opened up exciting opportunities for finding new and efficient way of doing businesses. Although the advance in information infrastructure makes connectivity possible to reach almost anywhere in the world, it does not necessarily ensure a successful development of an Global Internet shopping environment. Many constraints, such as the security constraint, exist. Especially, the fears on the information theft and other security concerns keep this mode of Global Internet shopping from developing as rapidly as it could. Based on the literature study, several variables are selected to investigate any cultural differences between the U.S. and S. Korea and a conceptual framework of the study is suggested to investigate the security concerns of the Internet shoppers. For a better understanding of security aspects in Global Internet shopping, the survey among more than a hundred shoppers for both in the United States and Korea are performed. An one-way ANOVA for each non-metric variable and two metric dependent variables was performed. As expected, The results of ANOVAs indicated that on-line shoppers with different cultural background were significantly different in their perception on a variables identified-Copyrights and other proprietary information. Compared to the U.S. shoppers, Korean on-line shoppers were more likely to agree with the idea that the Internet service with copyrights is more favorable for their shopping satisfaction concern. Variables such as credit card information and data, privacy, and message security did not make any difference in the concerns of on-line shoppers.