Multi-criteria analysis approach based on consumer satisfaction to rank B2C E-commerce websites

Abstract

Assessing business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce websites quality can be considered as a multi criteria decision making (MCDM) problem because of its complex structure including qualitative and quantitative factors. The Decision-making involves choosing the best e-commerce website or constructing a total or partial ordering over a multitude of websites. The existing ranking process doesn't assign each website to a consumer satisfaction levels. Moreover, despite the volume of research dedicated to prioritize influencing factors on online customer satisfaction, and considering the multiple attribute decision making (MADM) methods, it becomes necessary to assign consideration weights of website quality attributes based not only on manager interests but also on consumer feedbacks. In this paper we propose a new approximate weighting approach to aid multi attribute decision analysis to find weight associated to every e-commerce website criterion. Our study takes advantage from consumer opinions considering the fact that consumers may use numeric, nominal and fuzzy values to describe their viewpoints. Hence the proposed approach provides marketing managers with a useful tool to rank websites and to choose the most suited one to publish their products.