3. Empirical results and discuss
3.1 Website quality and profitability conversion efficiency evaluation
Without considering the internal intermediate conflicts, ecommerce efficiency in each stage is respectively
counted by the standard CCR model and BCC model. The results show the conversion efficiency in website
quality is lower than that in profitability. Kao and Hwang (2008) [18] model reveals the same results. It means
ecommerce websites do not fully take advantage of the characteristics of attracting users and marketing online,
and thus there is still much room for website quality improvement.
To be specific, 3 DMUs achieve full efficiency in the first stage. Namely, only 12% websites in this sample present the optimal resource allocation in website quality, they are respectively 300295.SZ
(www.house365.com), 4965.TWO (www.pcstore.com.tw) and 002095.SZ (corp.netsun.com). However, these
efficient DMUs in website quality do not achieve full efficiency in profitability. On the contrary, they have
lower or poor efficiency scores in the second stage (profitability). It implicitly shows for these DMUs, it is
profitability to cause technical inefficiency in the whole stage.
When it comes to profitability, 5 DMUs achieve full technical efficiency in the second stage (profitability),
which is account for 20% of the sample. However, none of them is efficient in website quality. Please see
table2. For these DMUs, website quality plays a critical role in causing technical inefficiency of the whole
stage.
Taken into account internal operation and linking activities, the results of KH model indicate that the
whole and sub-production stage efficiency in ecommerce are very low, which implicitly suggests that
ecommerce efficient operation need consider the internal business process, organization structure and external
market competitive environment. Namely, though e-business tools contribute to cost reduction and time saving,
if there is no smooth production process, strong information technology supports and matched logistics and
services, virtual operation in ecommerce firms will get failure. The mean of overall efficiency scores in
standard DEA model (CCR and BCC) is far higher than that in KH model, which also identities the weak
coordination among business processes.