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The rapid growth of the Internet has provided tremendous opportunities for service companies to offer quality services. The prime drivers and motivations for offering such services through the Net are to reduce transaction costs and to provide efficient and effective service to customers. But what are the determinants essential for building a successful electronic service (e‐service) operation? This paper addresses this specific issue by isolating the essential determinants from the available literature, and assessing them individually to obtain better insights and understanding. This could help companies to design and develop robust foundations on which to build successful e‐service operations. The boundaries between e‐service, e‐business and e‐commerce are blurred and sometimes confusing. This paper aims to clarify some of these ambiguities.

E‐service operations that attract and influence customers to buy products and/or services from specific sites is a complex process involving service design, marketing, and delivery, and encompass a number of essential determinants. Determinants that integrate all the three service processes form the basic framework on which a survey was conducted involving e‐service companies, and their views were ascertained on those determinants affecting e‐service operations. The aim of this paper is to provide a specific solution that isolates the critical determinants for e‐service operations. This paper demonstrated the usability of optimisation technique in isolating critical determinants based on companies’ responses. It was found that optimisation technique works well and is able to isolate optimum number of key determinants that are critical to e‐service operations. Pareto analysis and statistical significance test were also used to explore the relative importance of the determinants; however, it was found that they failed to identify specific and optimum number of critical determinants. The rationale and limitations of each technique and their applicability were also critically assessed.