MASAUM Journal Of Reviews and Surveys, Volume 1 Issue 1, September 2009 20 Abstract—This research paper aims at comparing both quantitative and qualitative methods in evaluating web sites. The purpose is to identify the various methods and factors that have been used to perform the evaluation. Analysis in terms of popularity of methods and ranking of factors are presented. The research serves as an initial study to explore various measurements that have been found in past literatures. The result provides useful information to those who are doing research in this field and related areas. Index Terms— E-commerce, Quality, Quantitative analysis, evaluation I. INTRODUCTION he increase in growth of information technology, web technology, and communications all over the world have resulted e-commerce to become one of the most famous business models. Many enterprises begin to take e-commerce websites construction in their strategic planning [1]. While the web technology transforms all business into information-based activities, many organizations moved away from the traditional way to electronic way to be competitive and sustainable [2], [3]. In general, e-commerce can be defined as a business process of selling and buying products, goods, and services through online communications [4]. In other words, e-commerce means exchanging goods and services on the Internet as on-line shopping [5], [6]. E-commerce is considered as one of the factors that changes the way payment is made. According to [5], E-Commerce allows organization to know about their customers, to tell them more about their services and build strong relationship between the customers and the organization. A large number of e-commerce websites have been established by companies to enhance the reputation of their brand and provide good services to the customers. Manuscript submitted on August 30, 2009. Omar Husain Tarawneh. Dept. of Information Technology, UUM College of Arts & Sciences, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010, Kedah, Malaysia, Phone: 6-012-6292150; e-mail:omar_traw@yahoo.com. Faudziah Ahmad, Dept. of Information Technology, UUM College of Arts & Sciences, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010, Kedah, Malaysia, Phone: 604- 9284787; e-mail: fudz@uum.edu.my. Jamaiah Haji Yahaya, Dept. of Information Technology, UUM College of Arts & Sciences, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010, Kedah, Malaysia, Phone: 604-9284788; e-mail: jamaiah@uum.edu.my . E-commerce is considered as an ideal way for organization to reach new customers, reach the global development [7]. The important of companies’ websites have been recognized by many. According to [8] the web plays a main role in diverse application domains, such as business, education, industry, entertainment and there are concerns of quality development of web-application. The quality of e-commerce websites is the most important factor that affects the evaluation of websites. This is because quality represents the sight of organization to keep it competitive, sustainable, and beneficial for customer loyalty. There are many characteristics controlling the quality of websites and each consists of sub characteristic and attributes. Evaluation of websites is thus an important issue. The reasons are many websites have been found to be unsatisfactory by users. A large percent of websites are in accessible from the user view points and many have short lives. Moreover, many of websites fail to meet companies’ objectives. There are concerns about ways in which web applications are developed and the degree of quality delivered. Thus evaluation of websites can benefit companies in providing a quality and sustainable sites. The study aims to compile the various methods of evaluation, investigate the availability of quantitative and qualitative methods, and identify factors used in evaluating websites. II. REVIEW OF PAST LITERATURES There are many approaches to evaluate websites. In general, two approaches are widely known: quantitative and qualitative. In this paper, the quantitative and qualitative approach are studied and discussed. A. Quantitative Methods It has been found that several quantitative methods have been used in evaluating e-commerce websites. [9] and [10] used Quality Evaluation Method (QEM) to measure the functionality (global search, navigability and content relevancy), usability (site map, addresses directory), efficiency and site reliability of websites. The method was also used by [2] to evaluate product quality. Another method known as Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), developed first by Satty in 1971 was used to solve the scarce resources allocation and planning needs for the military. AHP later had become one of the most widely used tools for making decisions based on multi criteria. Grey analysis Comparison of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods of E-commerce Websites Evaluation Omar Husain, Faudziah Ahmad and Jamaiah Yahaya T brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by UUM Repository