Measurement of Online Store Performance–The Case of Chinese Agricultural Online Stores on the Tmall Platform

Abstract

Both the largest emerging market and the largest e-retailing market in the world are located in China. China has plenty of experience in using E-commerce to sell agricultural products, Tmall is now the biggest e-commerce platform for selling agricultural products in China. To ensure the success of the online business, it is necessary to understand what are the major dimensions that affect online store performance. This study, therefore, builds a 67-item framework to evaluate the performance of 210 agricultural online stores collected from Tmall platform. We used content analysis to code the items and then computed the online store profiles by using the entropy method. The results show that website design significantly affects the performance of online stores. Meanwhile, traditional marketing strategies that have been borrowed in the e-commerce contents still influence consumers’ final decisions. This framework enriches the theory of evaluating online stores performance, and helps to understand the core features that consumers focus on when purchasing agricultural products on line. Our study conclusions can be used to instruct online store owners in improving the quality of online stores and shed some light on the agricultural e-commerce domain.