Abstract
Hyperlinks, which connect web pages on the World Wide Web, are rich sources of hidden information. ECommerce Websites, which are created for different purposes from online sales to company promotion, would benefit if they receive more links from other websites as this would lead to increase the traffic to these websites. This paper analyses the structure of e-commerce websites using webometric approach to uncover any hidden information from the hyperlinks. The top 50 retail companies' e-commerce websites each from Asia Pacific and USA are chosen for this study. Our results found a positive relationship between the external inlinks count pointing to a retail company e-commerce website and one of its business measures, sales. But no association has been found between hyperlink metrics and business measure like revenue. However this conclusion does not hold good for all categories of companies. Comparing the web presence, US private retail companies are more visible on the Web than the Asia pacific retailers. Furthermore this study has found that counts of links pointing to a retail websites are positively correlated with the website age. That is older websites in English language received more external inlinks. Such a correlation does not exist for Japan, China and Korean language websites.
Highlights
In this decade the World Wide Web (WWW) has been extensively studied by many researchers in various dimensions
Similar results are seen for US companies (Table 2) where the results found no significant relationship between the business performance measure revenue, the companies’ total number of employees and the hyperlink metrics for retail companies’ e-commerce websites
For Asia Pacific websites the results showed that there is no association exists between the website age and the total number of links to a retail company website
Summary
In this decade the World Wide Web (WWW) has been extensively studied by many researchers in various dimensions. Webometrics, a new emerging field, is a study about investigating the nature and properties of the World Wide Web to get knowledge about the structure of the Web, usage patterns and various Web measures [2], [26]-[27]. The research on the structure of WWW came out with a lot of interesting and potentially useful information about the online organizations, navigation patterns inside the website, and the characteristics of the website owner [17]. The website quality, user friendliness and smooth navigation can all be altered and improved when this dynamic information is available to the website designers and its owners. The virtual player like search engines use the hyperlinks to redirect the customer clicks to the respective company website. If the company is successful in that attempt, it is bound to attract more repeated customers and new online users [9], [21]
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