Design and Evaluation of E-Commerce Websites' Best Practices

Wang Shuhuan

Abstract

E-commerce is a successful business in the age of computer. In this project, we look at several outstanding e-commerce websites to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, in order to design a website that integrates the strengths.

Three different E-commerce businesses (Taobao, Amazon and eBay) are studied in this project. We attempt to investigate the difference between them, and look at what are the different factors that support their competitiveness. By using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), we selected six different criteria to evaluate these businesses and rank them accordingly. These six criteria are: Information Quality, Service Quality, System Quality, Price/Quality of Goods, Reputation, and Delivery Time.

Through our evaluation we learned that Amazon is the industry leaders in advantages in most of the criteria except Delivery Time. Taobao is weak in most criteria but number one in Delivery Time, while eBay is an average performer that is generally better than Taobao.

Using the understanding we achieved in the AHP evaluation, we then proposed a new Integrated Website that incorporates the major strengths of the 3 online retailers that we studied. This website will have similar strategy as the industry leader Amazon, while we also tried to copy the efficient logistic of Taobao in achieving a best in class delivery time. We found that this Integrated Website can outperform our comparison businesses in all criteria we evaluated. With this new Integrated Website, we go one step further to investigate the impact and relative importance of different sub-criteria under the six main criteria. In this study, we have found several interesting points, such as improvement or higher focus on several sub-criteria might bring a negative impact to our model because they undermine some of the more important and sensitive criteria. Some of these sub-criteria might be counter-intuitive, for example we found that higher weightage in Personalization actually brings down the ranking of the Integrated Website, possibly because most of the websites we study already have a high level of Personalization hence improvement in Personalization does not directly translate to more attractiveness to potential customers. In the next section, we carried out a simple case study by designing and implementing an Integrated Website to subjectively collect the real world performance of this Integrated Website vs. the three comparison online retailers. We also test the effectiveness of the integrated website. Unsurprisingly, the Integrated Website, with its optimized business model, gains better business opportunity than the rest of the websites.

Finally, we discuss the impact and potential usage of this project. We propose that while we attempted to study AHP by creating a completely new website, it does not prevent these e-commerce businesses to apply the results of the study to further improve and enhance their performance and delivery of a better business model.