How to Evaluate and Improve E-Commerce Implementation and Administration Success State? a New Approach for Managing Success-Relevant Activities

Achieving e-commerce success is influenced by a variety of interrelated activities. Identifying, analyzing and prioritizing these activities enable decision-makers firstly to evaluate the current success state of Electronic Commerce (EC) businesses more accurately and then to develop an efficient improvement plan to allocate limited resources to achieve a higher level of success. In this research, a Fuzzy Cognitive Maps- analytical hierarchy process (FCM-AHP) approach is used to address this issue by (1) determining interrelationships between influential activities, (2) determining how much these activities influence each other and the overall success, and (3) prioritizing activities to develop a sound improvement plan. In this approach, the FCM technique is used to indicate all possible causal interrelationships between activities and consider all feedback loops between them. Then, the AHP technique is used to determine the contribution weights of activities to the overall success. The obtained management matrices that make it possible to categorize influential activities and the results of improvement scenarios help the decision-makers to develop the most efficient improvement plan and gain the maximum benefit from the allocation of limited resources. An empirical study is implemented to serve as an example to indicate how the approach works.