Your question is very broad.

Culture can also be defined by borders and countries. Some countries are slow to embrace e-commerce due to the lack of internet and computer technology while other countries that have a strong internet infastructure might be hesitant to go outside their own country to shop. But all of this is changing.

For example, those in Japan have been on the internet for years, but it’s only been the last few years that their culture has gone beyond ‘mail ordering’ of items to shopping online. Much of this due to their culture.

Here in the U.S. we have many diverse cultures and often those groups will shop at websites where their language is represented or shop at places they feel very comfortable shopping at. Much of that do to word-of-mouth advertising from others within their culture who had good shopping experiences with specific websites.

If you walked into a WalMart in China and saw nothing but signs and special all in Chinese, you would be lost. Imagine the same thing on the internet.

Accordingly, for an e-commerce site you need to know your marketing audience, who are your customers and what markets do you want to reach, and then adjust accordingly.

Today, security is becoming a big issue and more and more internet users are becoming more ’security savy.’ So security crosses over to all cultures.

However, there are ways to measure and monitor your internet users and what languages they are browsing in and in turn you decide what language groups, or cultures, you want to reach and go to the people. It might mean having your web server in that country, a domain specific to that country, having support staff that can speak that country’s language.

But with the internet you can almost do this anywhere as the internet is global and allows us to work, and sell, to a global economy from almost anywhere. Cultures now become borderless and e-commerce sites need to think of ways to reach specific language groups and adjust their sites and web pages and support staff to accommodate them.