Research Article Open Access

A Multicriteria Model to Evaluate E- Commerce Websites Under the Perspective of the Customer

Abstract

E-Commerce is reaching a new stage of conspicuous and widely disseminated development also due to the recent challenges of COVID 19. Thus, the process of shopping includes a first decision problem quite critical to the success of any business: which site of e-commerce should be selected by the consumer?

This means that the selection of such site should be studied in terms of the satisfaction of the consumer when using it for shopping compared with other competitive sites rather on its descriptive features. The list of studies comparing and evaluating the E-Commerce sites is quite long but almost no attempts have been made to model the satisfaction function of the consumer and so they are not particularly relevant to study the competitive choice of sites by the consumer.

In this paper a new model of consumer satisfaction is proposed using an approach–TRIDENT-based on the Multi Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) and the critical stage of estimating the weights of multiple criteria is solved using an original method OptionCards which avoids the shortcomings of more traditional surveys.

The utility function describing the satisfaction function concerning websites of E-Commerce is estimated using the OptionCards method for a group of young professionals and university students confirming a similar importance assigned to the three major criteria.

Such utility function was used to estimate the rating of the 14 major Portuguese websites of E-Commerce using the answers of a group of young professionals using E-Commerce and the overall score confirms their relative level of popularity.

Keywords

E-commerce; Customer satisfaction; Multicriteria model; Optioncards method.

Luís Valadares Tavares

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