Architectural Metrics for E-Commerce: A Balance between Rigor and Relevance

Abstract

Metrics for the architectural quality of Internet businesses are essential in measuring the success and failure of e-commerce. This chapter proposes six dimensions of architectural metrics for Internet businesses: internal stability, external security, information gathering, order processing, system interface, and communication interface. For each of the six metrics, we have constructed questionnaires to measure the perceived level of architectural quality and identified feature lists that might be closely related to the perceived quality level. Large-scale empirical studies were conducted both to validate the proposed metrics and to explore their relevance across four Internet business domains. The results indicate that metrics have high validities and reliabilities in three different domains. The relevance of the metrics was also proved by the meaningful relations between design features and customer loyalty. This chapter ends with the implications and limitations of the study results.