Measuring the Effectiveness of Egyptian Electronic Commerce Websites

Using the Web Assessment Method

Laila Elfangary and A. Sharaf Eldin

Information Systems Department, Helwan University,Egypt

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to measure the effectiveness of Egyptian commercial Websites using the web assessment method. There are several studies related to the effectiveness of websites but most of them focused on websites of developed countries and did not include Egyptian Sites. The evaluators of the web site were students at the Faculty of Computers and Information – Helwan University. Several methodologies were used. One is the evaluators rating from 1-100 to each criteria within each phase regarding a certain category of Egyptian Web Sites (Newspapers & Magazines, Bazaars & Gift Shops, Tourism, Banks, Real Estate, Hotels and IT Shops). Another methodology that took into account the fuzziness of the evaluators rating was to choose one description of each criterion whether unimportant, fairly important, important, very important, or extremely Important. Those descriptive evaluations were then quantified using fuzzy set approach. Also each of the 61 sites in the study sample was evaluated by eight students who chose a value range from +2 (strongly agree) to -2 (strongly disagrees). The results of the relative and fuzzy rating of the web effectiveness criteria in each phase were compared. The weighted mean of each criterion was then calculated and analyzed. The standard deviation analysis revealed that it is safer to use the weighted values. Thus the minimum and maximum of rating of criteria, the correlations and ANOVA analysis were calculated only for the weighted means. Based on the fuzzy set rating, the sorting of the mean evaluation of criteria for Egyptian Sites in the study sample were used to propose a model for the effectiveness of Egyptian Web Sites explaining the Egyptian environment. Future studies could be related to comparing the proposed Egyptian model to other web effectiveness models in other countries.

Keywords: Web Assessment, Effectiveness of Egyptian Web Sites,

 E-commerce, Fuzzy Sets.