Benchmarking the Social Media Performance of E-Commerce Websites: A Case Study of the UAE E-Commerce Market

This study presents a methodology for benchmarking e-commerce websites in terms of social media performance. The methodology is applied in a case study of the United Arab Emirates e-commerce market with data from the top 10,000 e-commerce websites in the UAE. The extensive dataset acquired for this research allowed the derivation of a multitude of actionable insights, such as considerable gaps with respect to social media presence. Furthermore, a visual analytics-based decision support system (DSS) that enables e-commerce companies to assess their performance in comparison to peers was developed. The DSS, using the “followers per post” metric, suggests how many posts would be needed on average to reach the targeted percentiles in the market. While the developed DSS can be used by existing and pre-market e-commerce firms to enable benchmarking before launching e-commerce platforms and during operations in the UAE, the presented methodology documents how such a system can be created for any country or region of operations.