Abstract: With the rapid development of the cross-border e-commerce, consumers’ complaints on the service quality of cross-border e-commerce have increasingly grown. In order to explore the strategy to improve cross-border e-commerce service quality, a model is proposed that captures the impacts of IT-enabled knowledge sharing in virtual communities on the service quality of cross-border e-commerce, which includes dimensions such as ease of use, reliability, responsiveness and empathy, based on the perspective of customer perception. Questionnaire surveys are conducted with the consumers who have the experience of cross-border online shopping. AMOS21 are used to analyze 458 collected questionnaires. Results indicate that customers with different levels of knowledge sharing have significant differences in the perception of ease of use, responsiveness, reliability, and empathy of cross-border e-commerce. In addition, IT-enabled knowledge sharing in virtual communities significantly affects ease of use, responsiveness, reliability, and empathy of cross-border e-commerce. Based on our findings, managerial implications are given so that managers can improve cross-border e-commerce service quality through IT-enabled knowledge sharing in virtual communities.

Key words: information technology (IT); virtual communities; knowledge sharing; cross- border e-commerce; service quality