A study of comparing the usability of Amazon and Flipkart e-commerce websites using Nielsen’s usability heuristics

Abstract: E-commerce has been a popular topic for the past few years. E-commerce means the act of purchasing and selling the goods over the internet. Many e-commerce websites strive to create a loyal customer base. There are several factors that influence the success of e-commerce websites, especially usability, or the ease of use of website, has been proved to be a critical element in online business success. This study attempts to compare the usability of Amazon and Flipkart e-commerce websites by survey evaluation based on Nielsen’s usability heuristics. This study further finds the better efficient e-commerce website to perform the operations in less time.   Background: Amazon and Flipkart are both e-commerce websites where the first one is an American based company and the second one is an Indian based company. The importance of analysing the usability of e-commerce websites is well recognized and this field got a lot of study attention in the last decade. Objectives: The main objectives of the thesis are to measure the usability of the Amazon and Flipkart e-commerce websites by using survey evaluation, compare the usability using Nielson’s usability heuristics to find better usable e-commerce website among Amazon and Flipkart and to find the better efficient website among Amazon and Flipkart to perform the operations in lesser time.   Method: A survey evaluation is conducted to know the usability of the Amazon and Flipkart e-commerce websites and responses were obtained from the survey to compare the usability of e-commerce website. A set of six tasks (for example, signing up and ordering a product from both e-commerce websites) were given to the users and time taken to perform those tasks were recorded. Average time taken to perform each task on both the websites will be compared to find the efficient e-commerce website to perform operations in lesser time. Results: The results are obtained after getting the responses from the survey. A comparison between the Amazon and Flipkart e-commerce websites is done according to the survey responses and found the better usable e-commerce website among Amazon and Flipkart. These results are not universal, they can be considered as observational results from survey evaluation. The results are obtained after calculating average time taken by the user to perform tasks in both the e-commerce websites to know which website provides efficient features to reach the goal of the task. Conclusions: The finding of the analysis shows that Amazon is better usable than Flipkart according to survey evaluation and Amazon provides better efficiency to do the operations in lesser time than Flipkart. Keywords: Amazon, Flipkart, E-commerce, Usability heuristics, Survey evaluation.