The digital revolution has transformed many offline retailers to perform their business activities online, resulting in tough competition in a dynamic marketing environment. A well-built, user friendly, and attractive e-commerce website will result in high traffic intensity and eventually impact the market position of the online vendor. Over the past few decades, a number of studies have been done to predict the key determinants of e-commerce system success. This chapter considers the criteria, namely system quality, content quality, use, trust, support, personalization, and electronic word-of-mouth. Evaluating objects based on a single criterion may pose to be subjective, which have shifted these decisions towards multiple criteria, and hence has popularized the concept of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM). This chapter combines Pythagorean fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (PFAHP) and complex proportional assessment of alternatives with grey relations (COPRAS-G), under multiple decision makers, to select the best e-commerce website from five alternatives.
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The unstoppable growth and rapid advancement in the internet technologies have given rise to electronic shopping (e-shopping) and selling through e-commerce websites. E-shopping is an activity of purchasing product/service using the internet. In the last ten years, the internet based technologies have continuously gained momentum and changed the way of marketing and selling the product/service by companies. In 2015, more than 12 billion devices were connected to the internet and it is expected to grow 8 billion within the period of 2015 – 2020, from 12 to 20 billion (Evans, 2015). This significant growth of technology has led to the enhancement in virtual shops, which become popular as e-shopping. E-shopping seems to be growing in all over the world including developing nations. A market research report published in 2015 on the growth of online shoppers across the globe indicates that online consumers will grow from 1.079 in 2013 to 1.623 billion in 2019(Evans, 2015). E-commerce provides various options such as payment alternatives, delivery options, convenience, and also allows flexibility regarding product/service. This saves cost, time, and creates an opportunity to generate high revenue from consumers’ as well as retailers' prospective (Anu Gupta; Aggarwal & Aakash, 2018). It is an interactive medium which is not bound to any place, people, or time. Online shopping is a more convenient way to shop in comparison to brick and mortar stores, as it enables the customers to avoid travel related hassle to reach physical store for buying their desired products/services.
The technology revolution has changed the way of doing businesses online. In this digital world, there is a growing need of many offline retailers to do their business online due to sturdy competition in a dynamic market environment (Andam, 2003). One of the basic requirements of e-business is its website. Therefore, many companies are endowing huge finance in maintaining their website, through which customers can buy the required products/services. Indeed, customers are buying online more than offline, but the number of prospect customers does not actually transform into actual buyers (Hidayanto, Herbowo, Budi, & Sucahyo, 2014). This shows that customers might browse for product/service but do not make an actual purchase. From marketers', management's, and customers' prospective, there exists a number of factors that affect buying intention as well as website selection decision, which helps e-tailers to provide products/services accordingly. Due to availability of a number of e-commerce sites offers identical products/services, customers as well as marketers find it difficult to choose the best site for buying & selling goods. Thus, the main goal of this chapter is to provide the best solution for selecting the best e-commerce websites on the basis of various success factors with respect to customers. Over the last two decades, studies concerning the variables affecting information system (IS) success factors have been a topic of interest among the researchers (DeLone & McLean, 1992, 2003). Various combinations of these factors have been adopted by them to predict the key determinants of e-commerce system success. Though, much of the initial studies focused on the success with respect to the online system, recent studies have succeeded in adding the customer oriented measures that lead to success of these online platforms (Aggarwal; & Aakash, 2017; Molla & Licker, 2001). In the light of these studies, this chapter considers the criteria namely System Quality (SQ), Content Quality (CQ), Use (US), Trust (TR), Support (SUP), Personalization (PER), and Electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM).