Quality and Process Standards for Electronic Commerce

Most traditional businesses operate in a local or national environment, and therefore, changes in transnational parameters do not affect them in a direct way. Being inherently global in nature, electronic commerce (ecommerce) needs quality and process standards from broader and multiple perspectives. As an effort to expand the utility of ecommerce systems to both businesses and consumers, we provide a conceptual framework of the different categories of criteria that should be considered in evaluating ecommerce sites. We then turn our attention to identifying current ecommerce standards practices. These exemplary situations may help set the foundation for future ecommerce practice, standards, and evaluation. The timeliness of such an issue is another concern. Traditional businesses took to the quality revolution only in the 1980’s, after decades of development. It is certainly not preferable to wait for this long (in terms of the business life-cycle) before a consensus is evolved in respect of ecommerce standards. On the other hand, being a nascent and evolving part of businesses, it can be argued that standardization may be too premature, especially when there is disagreement among nations on how to conduct ecommerce.