An exploratory analysis of 200 Malaysian Enterprise Websites based on Web Presence Measurement Model (WPMM)

Abstract

E-Commerce has been the idiom of many enterprises since the last few decades. The efforts to provide commercial contents via the Web are revolutionizing, triggered by the increase of opportunity to grasp more customer in the cyber world. According to the Computer Industry Almanac as quoted in Clickz.com1 website, currently there are 934 million online populations and Malaysia solely contributes to a 10.04 million potential online shoppers. With this promising number of prospects, it is vital to measure the fitness of enterprises in the Web. As most online customers seem to be more hugely demanding, it is often a “click� either closer or further away from retaining them in the cyber space. Web Presence Measurement Model (WPMM) was employed by the United Nations for the Global E-Government Survey 2003 as a purpose of measuring the generic aptitude of governments to employ e-government. However, this paper will manipulate WPMM in order to analyze Malaysian Enterprise websites based on its 5 stages of presence; Emerging, Enhanced, Interactive, Transactional and Networked. A sum of 21 parameters will be covered as the indicators for all the stages. The selected websites were the top 200 returned results generated by Google search engine using “E-Commerce� as the query and was intentionally made only for pages in Malaysia. The findings of the analysis are found to be indispensable and should be taken into account as it provides practical information regarding the abilities of Malaysian Enterprise websites in order to thrive in this unpredictably digital world.