Using the World Wide Web for international marketing: Internet use and perceptions of export barriers among German and British businesses

Eighty-nine German and 148 UK businesses known to possess sites on the World Wide Web and to export to the Far East and Japan were surveyed in an attempt to evaluate the respondents' perceptions of (1) the contributions of Internet use to their companies' export marketing efforts and (2) the extents to which the availability of the Internet reduced impediments to selling in foreign countries. Overall, the results supported the proposition that executives in firms employing World Wide Web sites for international marketing perceived certain export barriers as less problematic than pre-existing theory in this area might suggest. For the UK sample, five significant clusters of export barrier variables emerged (psychic distance, practical export problems, resource constraints, trade restrictions and market risk) matching closely the variables indicated by the literature in the export marketing field. However, psychic distance from foreign markets did not appear important to German firms. The latter seemed to adopt more structured approaches to World Wide Web site management than their UK counterparts and to rate more positively the contributions to export marketing that the Internet could provide.