Evaluation of virtual shopping malls using the analytic hierarchy process

A virtual shopping mall is like a real-world mall, supports electronic shopping by selling products or services through Internet. Although increasing numbers of products are being marketed on the Web, little effort has been spent on evaluating what mall is more suitable for marketing electronically and for protecting consumers. Evaluation of virtual shopping malls is regarded as a major task in business-to-consumer electronic commerce. This paper considers the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method in the evaluation of virtual shopping malls and provides its applications. The AHP is a systematic procedure for representing the elements of any problem, hierarchically. A series of pairwise comparison judgments is performed to express the relative strength or intensity of impact of the elements in the hierarchy. The AHP model hierarchy consists of the four following levels: decision maker, main criteria, sub-criteria, and virtual shopping malls. The main criteria include the state of physical firms, representation of information on the virtual shopping malls, product or service, convenience for shopping, consumer protection, and consumer service. The total number of sub-criteria in the third level is twenty-nine. All decision makers selected belong to virtual shopping mail enterprises, or universities. As a case study, we show the synthesized priority of the five virtual shopping malls that have acquired an E-Trust mark. Finally a sensitivity analysis shows how well each virtual shopping mall performs on each criterion by increasing or decreasing the importance of the main criteria.