e-Commerce website performance and user-perceived web quality: a bi-dimensional and multi-methodological framework

online retailers make significant efforts to manage functionalities that can, on one hand, attract visitors and convert them to purchasers (Ayanso and Yoogalingam, 2009); on the other hand, web retailers must also cut costs, providing an accessible business model, considering that e-commerce is a strategy for rapid growth, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (Grandon et al., 2011). This thesis aims to provide an original contribution using a bilateral and multimethodological framework for the e-commerce phenomenon: it gathers the research activities performed during the three years of a PhD program and represents a point of contact between qualitative and quantitative methods. Indeed, the novelty of the framework proposed here is that it is able to capture both commerce website performance from the sellers’ point of view and the user-perceived web quality (UPWQ), using respectively quantitative and qualitative approaches. The rationale is that, on one hand, online retailers are interested in maximizing their e-commerce conversion rate; on the other hand, website users expected a certain qualitative standard. If the determinants of the conversion rates converge with the factors that determine the quality perceived by users, a virtuous circle for both parties could arise. The aim of this research is to shed light on such a win–win strategy (Nowak, 2006), both for online retailers and for purchasers, by identifying features that increase the user-perceived web quality and boost the conversion rate. In this way, the proposed framework is bilateral, as it considers both the perspective of the sellers and of the purchasers; it is also multi methodological: indeed, e-commerce phenomena will be analysed using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies so as to provide a better understanding of the conversion rate (from the sellers’ point of view) and website quality (from the purchasers’ point of view).