Performance evaluation of electronic Commerce websites from a business Value perspective: A case of walmart.com

Abstract

E-business management is an on-going process of understanding consume rneeds and developing online solutions to meet those needs. To be effective in today's competitive environment of e-commerce, e-businesses cannot afford to neglect justifying the return on investment (ROI) of their online operations. Ideally, companies would like to understand how users are using their Web site and how this translates into value creation (or value leakage) so that online solutions can be implemented to increase business performance. However, current evaluative approaches for the performance of e-commerce Web sites fail to adequately address senior manager concerns about the returns on investment (ROI) of corporate efforts to develop and deploy software applications that support Internet-based selling due to the lack of tools and methods that can provide a clear link between systems design and business performance. The purpose of this project is to explore the basis for developing a new approach to the evaluation of electronic websites by presenting a value driven evaluation methodology. The focus of our methodology is on identifying value-creating opportunities an~C~lvalue-diminishing problems through the analysis of actual customer Web si.te usage behaviors through Web usage mining. The identification of value-creating opportunities and value-diminishing problems enables us to plan for designing additional Web site features and for redesigning existing functionalities to increase business performance and maximize design ROI. To illustrate this perspective, we examine the qualities of currently available evaluative approaches in the context of the Internet-based sales activities in general, and in particular Walmart.com, and propose a new framework to guide research that aims to formulate a new value-driven metrics suite for e-commerce Web site performance that emphasizes the ROI outcomes.