Website Quality Evaluation: Tools, Methods, Applications, and Impacts

Abstract

The explosion of internet use today has led to a massive number of websites. Corporate websites are increasingly ubiquitous in today's economic landscape and are essential for success in the marketplace. Thereby, evaluating website quality is a crucial step for any organization in building a successful website. Also, website quality evaluation is a multicriteria assessment problem, which may not be as easy as it seems. Website quality evaluations deal with multiple criteria that are often subjective and difficult to define, and components that may involve both quantitative and qualitative factors. Therefore, this paper provides some studies that demonstrate the importance of website quality. Then, some of the traditional and MCDM methods to evaluate the quality of websites in different aspects, such as e-banking, hotel, e-commerce, and educational, are provided. Traditional website quality evaluation methods include E-QUAL, E-S-QUAL, WebQual, SITEQUAL, eTail, SERVQUAL, and others. Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is a formal and structured decision-making approach for dealing with complex issues. Whereas, MCDM methods that are used in assessing the website quality are AHP (Analytical Hierarchal Processing), TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution), VIKOR (VIšekriterijumsko-KOmpromisno-Rangiranje), PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations), ELECTRIC (ELimination and Choice Expressing REality), etc. Finally, the paper showed the impact of website quality on customer satisfaction, purchase intention, loyalty, etc.