An Evaluation of the Quality of the B2C Sites in Saudi Arabia

Over the past decade, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has taken number of steps towards developing its Information Technology sector. Both Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and the Business-to-Business (B2B) ecommerce initiatives were introduced throughout the country. However, no much attention was given to the quality of these developed systems. Our previous work proposed a Quality Evaluation Model (QEM) that can help developers design and produce e-commerce systems of high quality targeted at Saudi end users. In this paper, we present the results of a comprehensive assessment and evaluation of the characteristics and attributes of the top ten B2C Saudi sites using the developed QEM. The main goal of this work is to show how far Saudi B2C e-commerce sites meet the quality characteristic like functionality, usability, reliability, efficiency from the user point of view. Results show that most Saudi companies use e-commerce to present their products or branding through the web. A significant work still needs to be undertaken in order to meet the international best practices of B2C sites. The evaluation identifies the key quality areas that can be adopted by Saudi B2C site designers to lead to the situation improving significantly. Key-Words: E-commerce; B2C; Quality Evaluation; Evaluation Model; Quality Engineering; Saudi Arabia.