Classification and analysis of commercial Extremaduran websites

Abstract

The aim of this work is the classification and analysis of websites of Extremaduran companies dealing with the electronic commerce, as well as their evolution. For this, searches have been carried out in Internet by means of search engines (Google, Altavista), using the keywords empresas extremeñas, empresas extremeñas en red, Extremadura en red, Extremadura on line, web extremeñas en red. The result was, among others, a series of web pages of Extremaduran companies. and some of them were directories of companies of this region in Internet. The results show what commercial Extremaduran sectors are established in the Web. Having observed the evolution across the time, we can see what sectors are consolidated, which ones are expanding, which ones are decreasing and which ones disappear. The analysis applied to every website is not only useful for determining what commercial sector that site belongs to, but also for establishing the kind of sale carried out through it: this way, direct and indirect sale websites are differenciated and classified. At first, they were arranged in our work according to a classification set in one of the websites we consulted, but, as we thought that this classification had some mistakes, we suggested following the UDC, which is suited to the features of the websites; this is why we suggested it as classification system, not only for Extremadura but for the whole Web. The electronic commerce is, according to what we see everyday and is confirmed by our study, a new way of business where the aims are the same that those of the traditional trade: sales and profitability. The difference is the flexibility and capacity to react of the companies in this new environment. We can see that there is a great difference between the amount of indirect sale websites and those of direct sale, which are rising thanks, above all, to some sectors in which the major increase is taking place. The impact of the electronic commerce in Extremadura has some features that show the importance of studying the Web locally: in general, we can emphasize that sectors as automotive, hotels and tourism, communication and computer science, and some others achieve the national growth forecasts; nevertheless, unlike what it happens in the rest of autonomous regions, food is one of the more usually found sectors in the Web, whereas the financial and insurance sectors, which are among the ones with most possibilities of growth in the country, are hardly ever found in Extremadura