General context - E-health research - Business model (BM) research - Combing e-health and BM research: international research project - Preliminary conclusions / discussion
Cross-border e-commerce is flourishing worldwide and is particularly intriguing because it allows sellers and buyers to regularly cross national borders to distant and distinct countries via the Internet. Marketers need to understand the challenges retailers and consumers may face to develop effective marketing strategies, attract foreign consumers to retailers’ websites, and convert their visits into actual purchases. This dissertation contributes to the growing literature on cross-border e-commerce by examining how e-retailers can shape their marketing strategy to reach foreign consumers who may make a purchase and what drives consumers’ perceptions and preferences before making thatpurchase. To this end, study 1 examines how and to what extent small e-retailers can shape their marketing strategies to increase their use of digital marketing tactics and thereby improve their performance in foreign markets by comparing e-retailers originating from developed and emerging e-commerce markets. Study 2 focuses on how store values and country stereotype perceptions leadto higher trust between consumers and retailers in foreign e-stores, and how this differs for European consumers shopping at U.S. and Chinese e-stores. The thirdstudy addresses why consumers buy from foreign e-stores when they can buy domestically. It examines three different categories of determinants across generational cohorts: e-store characteristics, domain-specific values, and human values. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates the drivers of small retailers’ business performance and consumers’ purchase intentions in cross-bordere-commerce while showing that neither e-retailers nor consumers should be considered uniform or generalizable.
Current e-learning tools offer a multitude of possibilities for the exchange of various types of documents and for communication between students as well as between students and teacher(s). But education is intrinsically process-oriented and current technology in the field of elearning offers no support for the activity which is the core of learning. In this paper the possibilities and limits of current technology as used in an extensive program (a minor) on e-business, are demonstrated. Furthermore, a first impression of a new, activity-based tool is given, which has been used in one of the courses of the program.
