Purpose – The popularity of e-commerce has increased significantly over recent years. However, this growth is not shared by all European Union states. One reason for this discrepancy is culture which impacts on e-commerce acceptance. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the effect of acculturation process on e-commerce acceptance. Design/methodology/approach – Structural equation modelling is employed to test three research models: technology acceptance model, theory of planned behaviour model and motivational model. Findings – The findings show that attitudes towards e-commerce change in relation to the perception of control and the influence of subjective norms, which impact intentions to use e-commerce before movement to a host country’s culture. However, its effect diminishes after the exposure to the influence of a host culture. Originality/value – This is the first study to demonstrate the existence of the effect of acculturation process on mingling and migrating consumers and their changing attitudes towards e-commerce acceptance.

Introduction

Online shopping or e-commerce has become a common practice for consumers. In 2015, nearly 1.5bn consumers worldwide purchased products via e-commerce (Statista, 2017a) and this number is forecasted to be in excess of 2bn globally by 2019. E-commerce therefore is a vital shopping channel for consumers worldwide (Chaparro-Pelaez et al., 2016). Furthermore, it is an important accelerator of global trade (Deng and Wang, 2016) as it generates US$3.4tn in B2C e-commerce sales worldwide (Statista, 2017b). North America is currently the largest regional market for online shopping, with predicted sales growth of US $1.5tn by 2018 (Statista, 2017c). This is followed by China and Europe, where among the 28 European Union member countries (EU), one out of five businesses sell its products via e-commerce (Eurostat, 2017). To this end, the EU represents an interesting case study. Despite the lack of internal borders ensured by European Single Market policy, there appears a wide variation in the share of e-sales across its member countries. For example, while e-sales in the UK in 2016 exceeded €۷۱٫۰۵bn, e-sales in countries such as Poland and Sweden only amounted to €۶٫۰۳bn and €۵٫۷۴bn respectively. Furthermore, despite the EU directive of free movement of goods and people, it appears that cross border e-commerce has not been fully exploited by EU businesses. Statistics show only 8 per cent of EU businesses made e-sales to other EU countries (Eurostat, 2014). This implies that although e-commerce, being an unarguably attractive strategy for consumers and businesses, not all EU consumers uniformly use it as a shopping channel. There is evidence to suggest that this discrepancy is due to the effect consumers’ culture has on technology acceptance.