Online shopping in different cultures and levels of technologies in relation to Customer Satisfaction: Accra (Ghana) and Stockholm (Sweden).

Sammanfattning: Background: This study examines online shopping in different cultures and technologies in relation to customer satisfaction in Stockholm and Accra; a developed city with a developing city respectively. In recent times, the use of the internet has rapidly increased around the globe and with it emerged online shopping as a means employed by which business organizations and individual sellers and service providers to maximize growth. Customer satisfaction is an essential element for attaining stability and growth in the business world and online shopping is no exception. Even though customer satisfaction is a universal phenomenon, it can be controlled by culture and technology.  Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to compare a developed city with a developing one and the interplay of culture and technology in achieving customer satisfaction in online shopping. This thesis therefore seeks to investigate the different cultures and technologies on satisfaction by ascertaining the degree to which factors relating to culture and technology affect customer satisfaction in online shopping. Methodology: Quantitative research method is employed to conduct this thesis. By the use of the snowball sampling method, residents of both Stockholm and Accra were sampled and data collection was done by administering survey questionnaire. SPSS software package was used to analyse research data. The Spearman rank correlation and Mann-Whitney U test were performed using the SPSS software package to arrive at the research results and draw conclusions. Results & Conclusions: This research demonstrates the existence of differences in the culture and technology of Stockholm and Accra. It also demonstrates the impact of selected factors for independent variables (culture and technology) on customer satisfaction in online by showing their inter-relationship. It also reveals the factors which most affected customer satisfaction in online shopping in this thesis. In general, the correlations demonstrated that culture had more impacts on customer satisfaction in online shopping as compared to technology. A good relationship was found between customer satisfaction and culture, and technology provided by the participants from Accra. For Stockholm participants, customer satisfaction in online shopping had a relationship with cultural factors. It was shown in the findings that all four factors measuring culture such as trust, moral, law, and knowledge, and only two factors measuring technology such as internet speed and tools affected customer satisfaction in online shopping in Accra with the most affected factors being trust and moral. In the case of Stockholm, only two factors measuring culture, such as moral and trust affected customer satisfaction in online shopping and moral most affected customer satisfaction. None of the four factors measuring technology affected customer satisfaction. All in all, considering both independent variables, we argued that culture (factors) affected most customer satisfaction in online shopping. Recommendations for future research: Further research can be done by employing both qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques to know how these factors affect customer satisfaction in online shopping. In addition, to better generalize the results, further research could be done with the same concepts but with more factors used to measure the independent and dependent variables. Moreover, similar research could also be done by considering only one group of products or items bought online. Furthermore, the same or similar research can be done using more than one question to describe the factors or sub-variables. Last but not least, further research can deploy a larger sample size to facilitate generalization.