This paper identifies, analyzes and interprets key challenges that e-retailers face when they decide to expand their e-business into a new market. The main topics are the cross-border factors and e-commerce strategies based on theories from previous studies to drive profitable growth. The paper illustrates the case study of an e-retail company, Dateks, in expansion in the Baltic countries. The findings show that the localization strategy in e-retail companies is more highly used when expanding to a new market. The challenge for an e-retailer in expansion is to be cost-effective.

Yes / The rapid rise of many e-commerce platforms for individual consumers has generated a large amount of text-based data, and thus researchers have begun to experiment with text mining techniques to extract information from the large amount of textual data to assist in sales forecasting. The existing literature focuses textual data on product reviews; however, consumer reviews are not something that companies can directly control, here we argue that textual product descriptions are also important determinants of consumer choice. We construct an artificial intelligence (AI) framework that combines text mining, WaveNet neural networks, multiple regression, and SHAP model to explain the impact of product descriptions on sales forecasting. Using data from nearly 200,000 sales records obtained from a cross-border e-commerce firm, an empirical study showed that the product description presented to customers can influence sales forecasting, and about 44% of the key phrases greatly affect sales forecasting results, the sales forecasting models that added key product description phrases had improved forecasting accuracy. This paper provides explainable results of sales forecasting, which can provide guidance for firms to design product descriptions with reference to the market demand reflected by these phrases, and adding these phrases to product descriptions can help win more customers. / The full-text of this article will be released for public view at the end of the publisher embargo on 24 Feb 2025.

The aim of this study is to examine if there are any factors that influence young Swedish consumers' willingness to participate in the cross-border e-commerce market. Another aim is to examine the perceived risks associated with e-commerce in Sweden and overseas. The authors generated ten hypotheses to test this. The authors employed a quantitative approach and sent a survey to 162 people, with questions based on applicable theories, to investigate if there are factors that affect young Swedish consumers when they transact on the cross-border e-commerce market. The questions were sent through the authors’ social media. The findings suggest that seven factors influence young Swedish consumers’ decision-making when conducting cross-border e-commerce. Furthermore, the findings show that these factors have an impact on young Swedish customers, such as opinions from friends and family, perceived risk, loyalty to their own country, all of which affect when young Swedish consumers opt to use the cross-border e-commerce market.