Using a fuzzy classification approach to assess e-commerce Web sites

Abstract

E-commerce Web site assessment helps determine whether a corporation's Web site is effectively designed to meet its business needs and whether the investment in Web sites is well justified. Due to the complexity of commercial Web sites that may include hundreds of Web pages for many big corporations, there may inevitably exist uncertainties when human assessors express their subjective judgments in assessing e-commerce Web sites. Fuzzy set theory is widely used to model uncertain and imprecise information in applications. Prior studies in e-commerce Web site assessment identified some key factors to assess commercial Web sites by using a numeric assessment scale that may not be effective and efficient in modeling uncertainty. This study intends to propose an e-commerce Web site assessment framework using a fuzzy classification approach. Based on this framework, a Web-based e-commerce assessment system was designed and developed, which can provide online assessment services to corporations on evaluating their commercial Web sites. An empirical investigation into assessing commercial Web sites of the top 120 Fortune Corporations of the USA was conducted using the developed online assessment system to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed framework. Research findings and implications are discussed.