Three international barriers to Electronic Commerce
Charanpreet Singh
Sullivan University

Abstract
E-commerce revolution is increasing day by day with thousands of new customers joining in everyday for shopping goods and services online. But still in today’s age of internet, some of the barriers exist which hampers the growth of E-commerce. Few of such barriers are Lack of trust, language & culture and infrastructural issues. A joint effort is required to put in place a proper process by which these issues can be addressed so that the effects are minimal.

Lack of trust (Werthner, 2001)
It is very important for the businesses to establish trust with their customers but the online businesses which exist through online websites have anonymity and it is hard to establish then said. The existence of business through website and lack of physical presence at a place is a factor which affects a person’s trust in a company.
The issue of anonymity can be explained by an example that no one can know only through a website that how established a bank is only through their website and unless and until one trusts a bank they will not become a customer with the bank.
Therefore, companies really need to have a plan to how they can make their customers trust a business. Also, when designing a website it is very important that we address all the needs of the customers in a good manner so that they do not get an impression that this company does not provide the services which the customer are looking for. In E-Commerce, the websites should be designed in a very user friendly manner so that the customer can get a feeling that all their needs can be fulfilled by this business. Websites should be easy to browse as they are the primary source of contact with the customers and should give them an easy to do business feeling with the business. The established brands build their trust easily as compared to the brands which are new in the market as the customer’s expectations from the brand are pretty clear. For example if a customer files for a refund with an established brand and will be under the impression that the company will provide him a refund and will co-operate better on all the issues.

Language and Culture (Werthner, 2001)
To conduct business with people of other cultures is easy if you are a part of that culture and language plays an important role in it. The 50 percent of the world population cannot read English out of the 6 billion world population. Businesses which need to do business with people of other culture should have their websites built in local languages or should provide an option to translate the website in a local language. The translation for the website should be on an auto-translation mode so that customers feel that the website is built keeping in mind the needs of the community and is solely for that community. Also, software packages can be made available which can translate the website in a user friendly language and if the websites are huge then only a part of them can be translated. The two approaches which are used for translating the pages are.
The first approach is that when a customer tries to connect to a server then the default language for the customer’s browser is communicated to the server and then the server can automatically translate that page to the browser’s default language. The second approach is to provide a link to the different languages on the website so that the customer can click on the language to which he wants the page to be translated to. A lot of languages exist in the world and it will be interesting to look into the languages which the business wants to provide the translations in.
It is also important to look into the cultural part of the E-commerce when dealing with different cultures. A car manufacturing company might want to name a car ‘Nova’ but for the people of South America it will mean ‘it will not go’ in Spanish. It is very common in United States to put picture of babies on the baby food but in some parts of Africa it is customary to put pictures of the contents of the food jar.

Infrastructure Barriers (Werthner, 2001)
Internet infrastructure is the software and hardware through which the data packets of information are transferred. In most of the countries, the internet structure is either run by the government or is strictly regulated by the government bodies (Friberg, 2002). In most of the developing countries, the government has limited the bandwidth of the internet services as they see it as a threat to the country.
In Europe, the cost of surfing the internet is pretty high which discourage the people on spending too much time on internet browsing, thus, discouraging E-Commerce. International freight movements are monitored by the custom services of that country and hamper the quick movement of goods through the different carriers and discourage the E-commerce in a way. Therefore, a joint effort is required by the government agencies, freight carriers and businesses to simply the process of moving goods through the international borders (Friberg, 2002).
Almost half of the transactions are turned down by the businesses because of the lack of the proper infrastructure to move goods through the international borders and result in the loss of millions of dollars.

References
Kamel, S. (2005). Electronic business in developing countries opportunities and challenges. Cleveland: Idea Group Publishing.
Werthner, H., & Bichler, M. (2001). Lectures in E-Commerce (pp. 21-22). Springer.
Adapting Commercial and Legal Frameworks. (2002). In E. Friberg (Ed.), International Electronic Commerce: Definitions & Policy Implications: Report to the Joint Economic Committee (pp. 53-60). Diane Publishing.