Unit 2: Assignment 1: Global Challenges Associated with E-Commerce
December 18, 2012
IT500-01N: Critical Concepts and Competencies for the IT Professional
Instructor: Dr. Sheila Fournier-Bonilla
Kaplan University

Unit 2: Assignment 1: Global Challenges Associated with E-Commerce E-Commerce has changed the ways that companies do business, they are no longer confined to certain areas, regions, or even countries. "E-Commerce and m-commerce offer enormous opportunities by allowing manufacturers to buy supplies at low cost...they also offer enterprises a chance to sell globally.." (Stair and Reynolds, 2012). E-Commerce is not an easy venture and there are many challenges that are associated with all global systems wishing to implement e-commerce. The challenges that will be discussed and analyzed in this paper are; cultural, language, time and distance, infrastructure, currency, and state, regional, and national law challenges. It is very important that companies wishing to implement e-commerce systems in a global market pay very close attention to dealing with these challenges or they just might fail in their venture.
Cultural Challenges The first thing that must be realized when implementing e-commerce is that you are going to be dealing with people from other cultures and not all cultures are the same. According to Kamel (2008) "cultural differences have a profound impact on the usability, acceptability, and user performance of Web sites". Companies must understand that different cultures contain different, religions, customs, core values, norms, social and ethical opinions, practices (both business and social), and even tastes and gestures. The company's Web site cannot contain any content that other cultures may find offensive, it needs to be appealing to people of different cultures to catch their attention, and it needs to be relatively easy to use.