Key Factors for Developing a Successful E-commerce Website

The most experienced and successful E-commerce companies are beginning to realize that key determinants of success or failure are not merely a web presence or low price but delivering on a high quality website. To attain the desired quality of website software, it is necessary to produce a framework and model that enables evaluation of a website’s quality. This paper defines and categorizes the quality factors for measuring an E-commerce website. The software is an essential part of the E-commerce website. The ISO 9126-1 standard for software engineering product quality states that the main purpose of software quality evaluation is to supply referential quantitative results for software products that are reliable, understandable and acceptable. According to Larsson (2004), quality factors are primarily attributes of the software that are often labeled as “non-functional requirements.” The key challenge of these attributes is the lack of a formal specification of a means of measurement. This paper provides a framework to establish quality factors in terms of attributes, in addition to their level of importance based on the opinion of highly-skilled professionals. The primary goals are identifying, qualifying, categorizing and ranking these factors.