Cultural Adaptation on the Web: A Study of American Companies' Domestic and Chinese Websites

In the academic literature and the business press, there seems to be a lack of guidance and lack of cross-cultural models to support companies localization strategies on the Web. To address this deficit in literature and to provide marketers and Web designers with insights into website localization, this paper conducted a comparative analysis of the U.S. based international companies’ domestic websites and their Chinese websites. A framework to measure cultural adaptation on the Web is presented. Forty U.S.-based Fortune 500 companies are surveyed to investigate the cultural adaptation of their Chinese websites. Content analysis of the 80 U.S. domestic and Chinese websites reveals that the web is not a culturally neutral medium, but it is full of cultural markers that give country-specific websites a look and feel unique to the local culture. INTRODUCTION The year 2001 was significant in the history of e-commerce. Despite the economic slow down and the present vulnerability of dot com ventures, online sales revenues worldwide are expected to have reached $550 billion, a 92% increase from 2000 (eIDEA GROUP PUBLISHING This chapter appears in the book, Advanced Topics in Global Information Management, vol. 4 edited by G. Gordon Hunter and Felix Tan © 2005, Idea Group Inc. 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Suite 200, Hershey PA 17033-1240, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.idea-group.com ITB11272