Towards The Identification Of Human, Social, Cultural And Organizational Requirements For Successful E-Commerce Systems Development

E-commerce systems' poor and incomplete design fail to meet users expectations and businesses goals. A major factor of failure of these systems is ignoring important requirements that result from human, cultural, social and organizational factors. The present work introduces a new Web engineering methodology for performing requirements elicitation through a model called SpiderWeb. This is a cross-relational structure comprised of three main axons: Country Characteristics, User Requirements and Application Domain. The purpose of this model is to provide a simple way for analysts to identify these hidden requirements which otherwise could be missed or given little attention. Factors gathering is performed based on a certain form of ethnography analysis, which is conducted in a short-scale and time-preserving manner, taking into consideration the importance of immediacy in deploying e-commerce applications. Two e-commerce systems were developed and evaluated. The first was based on the proposed SpiderWeb methodology and the second on the WebE process. Finally, a survey of purchase preference was conducted demonstrating and validating the applicability and effectiveness of the SpiderWeb methodology.