Culture Design of Information Architecture for B2C E-Commerce Websites

Culture is widely treated as an essential factor for the success of e-commerce, yet the concept itself is still clouded in bewilderment. Furthermore, there has been little research on usage behavior in the context of developing countries; e.g., Islamic countries. By using Islamic culture as the case study, this study highlights the website information architecture practical design indication and reports the partial analysis of the investigation on how culture design of information architecture (IA) for B2C e-commerce website will has a positive affect to the user performance tasks (browsing, searching and purchasing books activities). Analyses of one-way between-groups multivariate analysis of variance (one-way MANOVA) and paired-samples t-test were performed. The result showed that the task time performance of the Middle East and the Malaysian users are different and faster when using the culture centred e-commerce website. Thus, provides empirical evidence on the positive influence of culturally design website to performance.