E-commerce quality and evaluation framework based on technical and user perspectives

The study produces an e-commerce quality and evaluation (ECQE) framework based on consumer perspectives.It was conducted in four main phases that include: 1) theoretical study; 2) empirical study; 3) e-commerce quality and evaluation framework construction and development, and 4) confirmation study. The ECQE framework includes four components: quality factors that deal with user expectation and satisfaction; assessment entity, assessment specification, and quality level.The framework was tested on six e-commerce websites.Results show that the ECQE framework is applicable and realistic.The ECQE framework offers a guidance and standard procedure for e-commerce website quality evaluation that can be used to improve organization websites to meet the consumers need and to keep the organization competitive and sustainable

Quality assessment of e-commerce websites using Bayesian belief networks

This thesis raises the issue of quality in E-commerce websites and addresses methodologies and approaches to standardize their assessment. The thesis blends the knowledge of academic research with the opinions and insights from experts and practitioners in the field to provide a comprehensive view of the issues and their remedies. The most experienced and successful E-commerce companies are beginning to realize that key determinants of success or failure are not merely a web presence or a low price but delivering a high quality website. Recent research shows that price and promotion are no longer the main draws for customers to make a decision on a purchase. More sophisticated online customers would rather pay a higher price to a provider with high quality service. Given that the establishment of an E-commerce website is mainly a software development effort; there are several standards that apply in governing the quality of such development. There seems to be an almost overwhelming abundance of quality standards that lead to a high level of cynicism and skepticism surrounding them and the eventual lack of use. Furthermore, no standard can directly predict the quality a website under development is going to achieve. Past approaches concerning the quality of E-commerce websites emphasize usability standards using techniques like feature inspection and collecting data about end-users' opinion by questionnaires. These methods provide important feedback and their results can be utilized as a useful background for future work, however, they do not contribute directly to a dynamic model that enables forecasting. The study of quality in the domain of the Internet in general, and E-commerce in particular, poses new challenges as technology evolves, including methods and metrics for estimating, managing quality during the product life cycle and quality-of-use measurement. The solution proposed by this research is to use a Bayesian Belief Network model. This model provides a consistent and practical approach to assessing the quality of the website. The assessment can be carried out before the completion of the website development, thus, providing insight on the trend and direction for correction and improvements. It can also be carried out on completed and operational work, providing analysis of areas for improvement. The model should be relatively quick and practical in providing an overall comprehensive assessment with root-cause analysis that would lead to corrective measures to improve the quality of the E-commerce website. In this research idioms were applied in realizing a complete Bayesian Belief Network model. The conclusions are measured against comparative assessment to validate the practical benefits of the work accomplished. The WebQual method was utilized to validate the "belief" established by the model.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Quality assessment of e-commerce websites using Bayesian belief networks

This thesis raises the issue of quality in E-commerce websites and addresses methodologies and approaches to standardize their assessment. The thesis blends the knowledge of academic research with the opinions and insights from experts and practitioners in the field to provide a comprehensive view of the issues and their remedies. The most experienced and successful E-commerce companies are beginning to realize that key determinants of success or failure are not merely a web presence or a low price but delivering a high quality website. Recent research shows that price and promotion are no longer the main draws for customers to make a decision on a purchase. More sophisticated online customers would rather pay a higher price to a provider with high quality service. Given that the establishment of an E-commerce website is mainly a software development effort; there are several standards that apply in governing the quality of such development. There seems to be an almost overwhelming abundance of quality standards that lead to a high level of cynicism and skepticism surrounding them and the eventual lack of use. Furthermore, no standard can directly predict the quality a website under development is going to achieve. Past approaches concerning the quality of E-commerce websites emphasize usability standards using techniques like feature inspection and collecting data about end-users' opinion by questionnaires. These methods provide important feedback and their results can be utilized as a useful background for future work, however, they do not contribute directly to a dynamic model that enables forecasting. The study of quality in the domain of the Internet in general, and E-commerce in particular, poses new challenges as technology evolves, including methods and metrics for estimating, managing quality during the product life cycle and quality-of-use measurement. The solution proposed by this research is to use a Bayesian Belief Network model. This model provides a consistent and practical approach to assessing the quality of the website. The assessment can be carried out before the completion of the website development, thus, providing insight on the trend and direction for correction and improvements. It can also be carried out on completed and operational work, providing analysis of areas for improvement. The model should be relatively quick and practical in providing an overall comprehensive assessment with root-cause analysis that would lead to corrective measures to improve the quality of the E-commerce website. In this research idioms were applied in realizing a complete Bayesian Belief Network model. The conclusions are measured against comparative assessment to validate the practical benefits of the work accomplished. The WebQual method was utilized to validate the "belief" established by the model.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Evaluation of cyber-tools in cultural tourism

Nowadays, e-services technology has demonstrated a pervasive character in the modern tourism industry. E-services implemented by the tourism industry, e.g., e-tourism, appeared to produce significant cost reductions and market efficiencies. Since online services are continuously accessible, time and geographic differences do not hinder the interaction between tourism service providers and their customers anymore. By usingICTs, (small) tourism organisations can enlarge their markets or operate in niche markets by serving a specific group of customers. The increased use of ICTs has thus resulted in a significant change in the structure of the tourism industry. The present paper aims to provide an overview of experiences and findings that address the socioeconomic impacts of e-services for the (cultural) tourist industry, on the basis of a systematic impact analysis. We use a SWOT approach to organise a systematic evaluation of various e-services effects, which are specifically differentiated for e-services and e-tourism (including cultural heritage) of socioeconomic importance. The main sources to identify the strengths and weaknesses of e-services are the academic and management literature that describes the experience in practice of various stakeholders. Copyright © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd

The First 25 Years of the Bled eConference: Themes and Impacts

The Bled eConference is the longest-running themed conference associated with the Information Systems discipline. The focus throughout its first quarter-century has been the application of electronic tools, migrating progressively from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) via Inter-Organisational Systems (IOS) and eCommerce to encompass all aspects of the use of networking facilities in industry and government, and more recently by individuals, groups and society as a whole. This paper reports on an examination of the conference titles and of the titles and abstracts of the 773 refereed papers published in the Proceedings since 1995. This identified a long and strong focus on categories of electronic business and corporate perspectives, which has broadened in recent years to encompass the democratic, the social and the personal. The conference\u27s extend well beyond the papers and their thousands of citations and tens of thousands of downloads. Other impacts have included innovative forms of support for the development of large numbers of graduate students, and the many international research collaborations that have been conceived and developed in a beautiful lake-side setting in Slovenia

The impact of e-service quality on atitude toward online shopping

The research was designed to fill the gap in the existing body of knowledge regarding attitudes toward online shopping and differences in electronic service quality perception between two different geographical and cultural countries. In addition, this research extended previous effort done in an online shopping context by providing evidence that high service quality increase consumers’ trust perception, which in turn results in favorable attitude toward online shopping, with risk perception moderating the impact on consumer’s trust. Cluster random sampling was used to select respondents with previous online shopping experience. Correlation and hierarchical regression was used to analyze the direct and indirect relationship between service quality, risk, trust and attitude, while t-test was used to compare the two cultures in e-service quality perception. The present study demonstrates that e-service quality is affected by consumer’s culture. This research also provides evidence that trust in Internet shopping is built on high service quality. Notably, risk moderates the effect of e-service quality on trust toward online retailer. Finally, the research highlights the significant effect of trust on the attitude towards online shopping

Are Citations to Academic Journal Articles a Measure of Quality or Something Else? An Exploratory Analysis with Emphasis on Design Science and IS Technical Research

One pervasive belief about scholarly citations that underlies several studies appearing in the IS literature is that the number ofcitations to a paper reflects the quality of the study. For example, a paper that receives 200 citations is perceived as havinghigher quality than another study that receives 50 citations. While most experts acknowledge that there are other factors thatdrive citations, such as the number of years a paper was available to be cited – or possibly “gaming” of citations by authorswho cite themselves frequently (author self-citations) or over-zealous editors who incent prospective authors to cite theirjournals (journal self-citations), there is an underlying assumption that, barring such unscrupulous behavior, citations are ameasure of research quality. This paper critically examines this assumption using a validated typology identifying 13 distinctsubject areas that characterize IS research. Results show that papers on some topics (e.g., IT adoption and use; newmeasurement development and validation) consistently receive more citations than average – while some topics consistentlyreceive below-average citation rates (e.g., IS development; IT project/risk management). Unless one assumes that all paperson a given topic are consistently of higher quality than all papers on other topics, our data suggest that a key driver ofcitations are the subject area of the study and, in turn, the size of the research community that conducts research on the topic

E-commerce as a successful strategy of internationalization : Business plan

55 páginasEste trabajo pretende aportar una visión estratégica sobre cuáles son los factores de éxito de una estrategia de comercio electrónico internacional teniendo en cuenta el fenómeno real de la rápida internacionalización de las PYMES y las start-ups denominado Born Global. Esta investigación puede caracterizarse como una integración de la estrategia empresarial, el marketing, los negocios internacionales y el objetivo personal de convertirse en una empresa a gran escala sobre la base del mercado de mascotas y su rendimiento en los mercados nacionales e internacionales. Este trabajo establece una revisión bibliográfica sobre el concepto de comercio electrónico, la diferencia entre negocio electrónico y comercio electrónico, el fenómeno Born Global, la internacionalización de las PYME y Born Global a través del comercio electrónico, y sus factores de éxito aplicados a un plan de negocio estratégico de un modelo de negocio en el sector de las mascotas.This paper aims to provide a strategic vision on what are the success factors of an international e-commerce strategy taking into account the real phenomenon of the rapid internationalization of SMEs and start-ups called Born Global. This research can be characterized as an integration of business strategy, marketing, international business, and the personal goal of becoming a large-scale venture on the basis of the pet market and its performance in domestic and international markets. This paper establishes a literature review on the concept of e-commerce, the difference between E-business and E-commerce, the Born Global phenomenon, the internationalization of SMEs and Born Global through e-commerce, and its success factors applied to a strategic business plan of a business model in the pet industry.Maestría en Gerencia InternacionalMagíster en Gerencia Internaciona

An Algorithm for inferring consumer-to-consumer trust on twitter

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Information Technology (MSIT) at Strathmore UniversityTrust amongst users engaged in consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce on Twitter as well as other social media platforms has been on the decline. The cost effective manner and timely delivery of C2C content makes it possible to reach a wider consumer base across the globe. However, this is under threat partly because of the risk of being scammed by other consumers on these platforms and the uncertainty related to this kind of e-commerce. Social media platforms such as Twitter are experiencing a decline in active user partly because of misuse of their platform. Twitter features can be used to build a consumer-to-consumer trust inference algorithm that can be relied upon by consumers in determining who to engage with in C2C e-commerce for specific contexts having not interacted directly with the seller/buyer in the physical world. There is a need by consumers to know whom they can trust on important C2C e-commerce transactions to limit their exposure to scams and fraudulent users on Twitter. This research sought to develop an algorithm to infer the trust score of a user engaged in consumer-to-consumer e-commerce using features present on his/her user profile. The algorithm utilized machine learning techniques. The algorithm provides consumers with a sense of trust in C2C engagements on Twitter. The research employed an experimental approach that involved the development of an algorithm and its validation. Wrapper approach was adopted for feature selection using data mined using Twitter Search API using C2C keyword-hashtag (#). Multi-class classification was successfully applied to infer a consumers trust score. Potential users can then use the proposed algorithm to check and choose trusted consumers on Twitter for different transactions