**1. Introduction**

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is not a new concept, but it has had increasing and unpredictable developments [1]. The fact is that the number of small to medium enterprises (SMEs) adopting e-commerce has increased significantly in recent years. It has been proved that

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

successful e-commerce/IS use can create net benefits concerning financial and operational performance for SMEs, even in developing countries [2]. A significant number of SMEs have, however, failed in adopting e-commerce while many businesses are not satisfied with their e-commerce systems. The research stated, therefore, that quantifying the value contribution of e-commerce has become an issue for managers seeking to justify the enormous expenditures involved in new IT investment [3].

Among the research methods, the evaluation has been one of the five top research areas on the adoption of e-commerce along with trust, technology acceptance and technology application, e-commerce task-related application, and e-markets, which resulted from the analysis of a total of 1064 e-commerce-related articles and 33,173 references published in leading e-commerce journals between 2006 and 2010 [4]. Researchers have also enunciated the need for evaluating e-commerce success as avoiding failure again, learning from experience, indicating actual business benefits, the requirement for adoption guidelines, and for further improvement and development [5].

Investigation to date does not clearly show how to evaluate the success of e-commerce systems [6]. In the investigation of e-commerce, many research studies use the IS success model to evaluate e-commerce systems [7]. For example, the original or updated DeLone and McLean model have been widely used for evaluating the degree of IS/e-commerce success [8]. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and its extensions have also been used as reliable and robust models for predicting the user acceptance of e-commerce [9].

IS success approach may not, however, be methodologically and theoretically feasible in e-commerce among SMEs [10]. The literature has noted that the difficulties existed in using such IS models and its extensions [5]. The main difficulty has been highlighted that the determinants of e-commerce might be dissimilar to the concepts in IS success studies [5, 10]. Other difficulties could be focused on the involvement of top management, beyond Internet technology and lack of experiences [5].

In the literature, no strong consensus or well-known comprehensive and integrated theoretical framework currently exists [10–12]. Research frameworks also lack a theoretical approach to defining and evaluating e-commerce success among SMEs [10–12]. Exploring more effective methods to describe and evaluate e-commerce success, thereby, becomes a challenging task [13, 14]. This research seeks to help fill the gap by proposing a new model to evaluate e-commerce success from a business perspective.
