Assessing Ecommerce Websites: Usability and Accessibility Study

Websites present the digital image of any organization. An effective website attracts more users and results in creating more business opportunities. For this purpose, there is a need to know the user's satisfaction level towards a website. The aim of this study is to evaluate the usability and accessibility of Pakistani ecommerce websites. We selected, 20 popular Pakistani ecommerce sites and analyzed their usability and accessibility. For usability testing, Nielsen's Heuristics approach and System Usability Scale (SUS) was used. Accessibility was evaluated according to the criteria of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. The results show that the majority of ecommerce websites violated the basic usability principles and do not adhere to WCAG guidelines. This paper also includes recommendations for improving the usability and accessibility of these websites.