Access to electronic commerce sites on the World Wide Web: an analysis of the effectiveness of six Internet search engines

The success of electronic commerce (e-commerce) sites that cater to online shopping is dependent upon a number of factors, such as the quality, variety and price of their products, their guarantees, return policies, etc. The success of these sites is predicated upon the more basic assumption that consumers can actually find the sites on the World Wide Web. A major advantage of online shopping is that it enables consumers to engage in comparison shopping with an ease that cannot be replicated easily in the physical world. This paper examines the ways in which six Internet search engines facilitate access to online shopping sites via their hierarchical subject directories. Specifically, the paper examines the internal structure, consistency and orientation of the six subject directories. The findings indicate that the search directories (i) use ambiguous and sometimes misleading categories to organize e-commerce sites, (ii) are only moderately consistent in the way they organize e-commerce sites and (iii) provide relatively few opportunities for comparison shopping.