Hyperlink Analysis of E-commerce Websites for Business Intelligence: Exploring Websites of Top Retail Companies of Asia Pacific and USA

Hyperlinks, which connect web pages on the World Wide Web, are rich sources of hidden information. ECommerce Websites, which are created for different purposes from online sales to company promotion, would benefit if they receive more links from other websites as this would lead to increase the traffic to these websites. This paper analyses the structure of e-commerce websites using webometric approach to uncover any hidden information from the hyperlinks. The top 50 retail companies’ e-commerce websites each from Asia Pacific and USA are chosen for this study. Our results found a positive relationship between the external inlinks count pointing to a retail company e-commerce website and one of its business measures, sales. But no association has been found between hyperlink metrics and business measure like revenue. However this conclusion does not hold good for all categories of companies. Comparing the web presence, US private retail companies are more visible on the Web than the Asia pacific retailers. Furthermore this study has found that counts of links pointing to a retail websites are positively correlated with the website age. That is older websites in English language received more external inlinks. Such a correlation does not exist for Japan, China and Korean language websites.