E-commerce and Export Performance By Munib Karavdic

Chapter 1

Introduction

This chapter discusses the rationale for studying the role of e-commerce technologies in exporting. More precisely, the chapter will present a brief overview of the background of this study, motivation for the research, research questions and objectives, contributions towards marketing theory, and limitations of this study. The final passage summarises the outline of the remainder of the study.

1.1 Background of the study

This research is built on Cavusgil and Zou’s (1994) export marketing strategy-performance relationship model, and extends their work by incorporating e-commerce determinants into the model. Cavusgil and Zou’s (1994) model was chosen for two main reasons. First, their model is considered the most comprehensive export marketing performance model in terms of what determinants are measured and how they are measured (Styles 1998; Zou and Stan 1998; Katsikeas et al. 2000). Second, their paper, published in the Journal of Marketing, has attracted substantial attention from export marketing researchers internationally and it is considered a significant influence on the direction of global marketing research in the past decade.