Author’s response to commentary

doi:10.1016/j.elerap.2016.05.004

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

Volume 19, September–October 2016, Pages 91-93

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2016.05.004 Get rights and content

Section snippets

Response on the pairwise country comparisons results and use of linear regression

Van Hove has argued that the “pairwise country comparisons in Table 6 (of the original article) were not systematic enough and not strict enough.” He also suggested that I accepted a hypothesis when the results were mixed by indicating there was Overall Support for the hypothesis. He did additional comparisons to say that my “results are weaker” than I indicated. His assessment suggests an inappropriate interpretation of the results occurred to support my hypotheses – but this was not the case.

On the hypotheses and outcomes in the research

I have reproduced the contents of my Table 7 on Hypotheses and Outcomes above. One point to note is that the scores I chose to elaborate the support (or lack of support) for each of the hypotheses were the mean scores as they appeared in Table 5 in my article. The reader can see exactly what was presented. For each county mentioned in the hypotheses, the score is presented in the adjacent column in the table. Van Hove is correct in that not all scores support the hypotheses. On the other hand,

Regarding the issue of website localization

Specific to his critique, Van Hove suggests the use of localized websites is inappropriate. However, Van Hove is an economist who has focused his work on monetary pricing issues. To my knowledge he has not done research in the field of cross-cultural topics, although he did publish one paper in which he reviewed previous literature on website design. Therefore, it is my assumption that Van Hove has not undertaken any research in which he collected primary data using websites, nor has he