The cross-national comparison of website feature preferences: a practical approach

Tailoring consumer shopping sites to fit diverse national markets requires a grasp of the similarities and differences among those national markets in preferred site features. The past literature indicates five issues that can cloud attempts to gauge the national differences in the preferability of Business-to-Consumer (B2C) site features. This paper proposes the 'Preference Component Perspective', a conceptual-methodological approach to overcome these challenges and more meaningfully assess these national differences. The framework identifies two independent components of site feature preferences (elevation and priority) and provides a means to distinguish the societal-level and individual-level effects. A survey of online shoppers in the USA, the People's Republic of China and Poland demonstrated the approach's ease of application and the validity of its core assumptions in the data sample. It was shown that the approach can yield insights that are valuable to practitioners who devise effective B2C websites for international markets and to marketing/behavioural/information scientists who develop theoretical models of online shopping adoption.