Beyond Standard and Legal Criteria: Gaps in Publicly Visible Support for Older Users in Korean E-Commerce

Technical accessibility does not ensure usable accessibility. Without testing causes, we examine whether Korean e-commerce services publicly show support conditions that research on older users (55 and older) identifies beyond standard/legal criteria. The preliminary Age-Friendly Provision Signal Index (APSI; 19 standard/legal and 7 additional support items) was applied to web interfaces, product pages, and help pages of 39 services. Among nine help page items, with three of the five standard/legal ones being legally required notices, standard/legal items exceeded additional support items in detected availability by 46.8 percentage points (95% interval 39.2 to 54.7) and across all items by 11.9 percentage points (95% interval 6.1 to 17.6). The standard/legal rate was higher in all 38 compared services on the help page items and in 29 of 38 across the 26 items; alternative measurement choices yielded gaps of 6.6 to 46.8 percentage points. Additional support conditions were undetected in 53.0% of cells; age-specific adaptation, coded for six items, appeared in 1 of 228. Services with and without physical stores differed by 6.7 percentage points (95% interval −3.0 to 17.0) on common support items, inconclusive regarding the study-defined 16.67-percentage-point threshold. These findings inform assessment reviews without demonstrating standards failure or unmet needs among older users.