Website Evaluation Criteria: An Owner’s Perspective

Background And Motivation Of The Study

Business organisations that have a website as a sales channel need to be engaged in an evaluation effort as part of their management practices. Such evaluations promise strategic benefits such as a positive return on investment (Park & Gretzel, 2007; Stockdale & Lin, 2008) and help the progression to higher levels of e-commerce activity (Ally, Cater-Steel, & Toleman, 2007).

Throughout the literature, e-commerce website evaluation has been studied from the user perspective or the technical aspect, while there are fewer studies that deal with the owner perspective (Barnes & Vidgen, 2003; DeLone & McLean, 2004; Elliot, Moّrup-Petersen, & Bjoّrn-Andersen, 2000; Molla & Licker, 2001; Petre, Minocha, & Roberts, 2006; Quaddus & Achjari, 2005; Schubert & Selz, 2001; Torkzadeh & Dhillon, 2003; Turban & Gehrke, 2000; Udo & Marquis, 2001; Van der Merwe & Bekker, 2003). Nevertheless, the owner perspective presents an important supplement to the user perspective aspects, as they may provide answers to the impact of e-commerce investment (payoffs resulting from investment). The reasons for such shortcomings are mainly due to the emphasis given to the user and the need to understand what is suitable for them. Another reason is that owners are usually not willing to divulge financial data or even user statistics on their websites, making the investment payoff analysis more difficult.