"This is a request to help a Saudi student in the UK who is working on her Ph.D. She has to collect over 500 responses to her survey and after sending out 1,000 emails she received only 40 responses," Sait stated.

How can you help? Click to and take the survey about your perception of online shopping in relation to Facebook. The survey is available in Arabic or English. This survey is anonymous and is open to anyone, of any nationality, living in Saudi Arabia. Completing the survey takes 15 to 20 minutes with Oct. 20 the deadline for participation.

Arab News contacted the researcher, Khulood Abdulla Rambo, a doctoral student at the Informatics Research Centre, University of Reading in the UK. Rambo hails from Makkah and is a Dar-Al Hanan graduate who earned her BS degree in Computer Science from King Abdulaziz University. This mother of two, is a self-financed student who is doing her best to juggle the demands of doctoral research while fulfilling her role as mother to Abdullah, nine years old and Fatimah, six years old.

"The literature of technology and IT development in the Middle East and more specifically Saudi Arabia revealed to me a clear pattern of how IT is developing in my world," remarked Rambo. "It is apparent to me and to all researchers in this area that the penetration, diffusion and adoption rates of e-commerce in Saudi Arabia are quite small —  close to zero. This is surprising when comparing these rates to the rates of penetration, diffusion and adoption of social media, social networks and more specifically Facebook in the Kingdom."

Rambo decided to focus her research on the reasons behind this disparity, particularly the social and cultural factors. Is the problem credit card payment? Issues with the delivery of goods? The need to examine goods in person? Shopping as a social experience?  Fear of purchasing online? Rambo decided to go to the source —  consumers in Saudi Arabia —  to elicit their views. As part of her research she will be turning to a new analysis method called "Organizational Semiotics," that will examine the nature, characteristics and features of the data she collects in order to best use the information so that it might make a valuable impact. In this case, Rambo hopes that the information she gathers will eventually help to improve eCommerce experiences for the Saudi market.

"One of the goals of my research is to create a theoretical model to integrate IT applications developed by the Western world into other cultures, in addition to online application design requirements for Saudi society," commented Rambo. "The Western world clearly is not aware of these cultural differences as it assumes that all users in the world will interact with IT applications exactly the same way a Western user would. I hope that Internet users across Saudi Arabia will be interested to take my survey in order to lend their views to this important research."  

—  MYBI