Identification of e-commerce driving forces in MENA countries and their relevance in policy formulations

Abstract

E-commerce has been the mainstay of e-economy with the advancement of internet. Worldwide growth of e-commerce has been around 13 percent since 2010. It is high time that MENA nations develop good policies on e-commerce, and review those dynamically due to rapidly changing digital landscape, taking into account the interplay of the driving forces. In broad terms, the driving forces in e-commerce comprise high quality services and social trust given the culture. Services include availability, reliability and performance of web services; infrastructure and institutional framework for prompt delivery of goods; and efficient online payment services across currencies, borders and languages. Social trust includes creditworthiness of the vendors and their marketing strategy alignment with the culture of the society encompassing traits, norms, habits, hedonic motivation, generation divide, etc. Thus, there are technological aspects as well as cultural aspects. In order to promote e-commerce in MENA countries, this study suggests that the technological aspects can be addressed using the theory of constraints as proposed by Goldratt in his book “The Goal”, and the cultural aspects imbue policy developments for online marketing, webpage design and communications. The cultural aspects of some MENA countries are captured through indices such as Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, Hall’s cultural patterns, and Trompenaars’ dimensions of culture. This study further investigates how cultural attributes can influence the adoption of e-commerce in MENA countries. Ultimately, there is the need to develop expressive trust motifs in webpages that can be assigned objective semantics which can substitute face-to-face cues to derive trust