A Study of the Factors that Influence the Acceptance of e-Commerce in Developing Countries: A Comparative Survey between Iran and United Arab Emirates

National culture is an important factor in any study of global information system attitudes, recent studies [1,2] also indicate that gender and previous behavior may also play roles in attitude towards technology. Thus, with the advent of the Internet and the importance of electronic commerce and the previous studies indicating the relevance of the dimensions of culture, gender and previous experience to information technology, it becomes imperative to also understand the role of these dimensions to electronic commerce. This paper examined each of these by using electronic commerce as the common technology. This paper provides significant data on identifying the areas and issues important to the success of e-commerce, and shows the impact of culture, gender and previous behavior upon those issues. To determine if there are differences in attitude about technology in general and e-commerce in particular, among the independent variables of culture groups, genders and those having experienced an ecommerce activity, 136 people from Iran and the United Arab Emirates were given surveys allowing them to express their opinions on several important issues. These issues included national control, privacy cost, property rights, access rights, internet infrastructure and consumer preferences. The findings resulted in support for two of the hypothesis. Further, it was clear that culture groups differ in attitudes about national control, property rights, access rights, and internet infrastructure. More importantly, this paper found no statistically significant differences among culture groups or gender in attitudes about privacy cost and consumer preferences