Analysis of Electronic Commerce in Portugal: Business Practice or Commercial Fiction?

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the performance of midsize and large Portuguese enterprises on the internet. Special attention is given to the e-commerce oriented to the end-user. An assessment tool was specially developed for this evaluation. This assessment tool is based on legal regulations, codes of conduct and/or seals of quality, as well as a variety of other information sources related with the Internet, web sites and e-commerce. The company’s web sites, were selected for this assessment through a random sampling technique, and were evaluated on 119 items.