Modeling E-Commerce Website Quality with Quality Function Deployment

The quality of a Web site is a crucial determinant of whether visitors are likely to return to the site. The research of e-commerce quality, such as Loiacono´s WEBQUALTM, neither saw the e-commerce Web site as a product, nor did it analyze e-commerce quality from the quality management and quality assurance. The main contribution of this paper is to construct an e-commerce Web site quality model from the users´ quality requirement, based on total quality management theory and tools. The e-commerce was seen as the product of an activity process in this research. By quality function deployment, the users´ demands were transformed into the quality requirement of the e-commerce Web site, so the customer satisfaction was met. First, 98 image words about e-commerce quality were collected through user survey and literature review. Using KJ tool, the words were reduced to 15. From them, the most frequent 5 quality words were chosen using user questionnaire survey. Surround the 5 words, the users´ quality requirements were acquired and showed as a level table, based on 5 sample Web sites and user interview. In the next phase, the quality characters were sorted and analyzed quantificationally. In the end, a hierarchical e-commerce Web site quality model was built.