Impacts of Globalization on E-Commerce Use and Firm Performance: A Cross-Country Investigation

This article develops and tests a model examining the relationship between firm globalization, scope of e-commerce use, and firm performance, using data from a large-scale cross-country survey of firms from three industries. We find that globalization leads to both greater scope of e-commerce use and improved performance, measured as efficiency, coordination, and market impacts. Scope of e-commerce use also leads to greater firm performance of all three types. Globalization has differential effects on B2B and B2C e-commerce, however, such that highly global firms are more likely to do B2B but less likely to do B2C. Our findings provide support for Porter’s (1986) thesis that upstream business activities (namely, B2B) are more global while downstream business activities (B2C) are more local or multidomestic.