Towards a generalized payment model for Internet services

Although at the moment electronic payment via the Internet has no major impact on e-commerce sites, it will be a prerequisite for new business models, such as pay-per-view, and necessary for the success and cost efficiency of future e-commerce applications. Many payment protocols and frameworks for various business domains exist. However, they are incompatible which makes it hard for service designers to “design for change:” Implementations are tightly-coupled with the applied payment mechanisms and cannot be adapted/changed easily. To improve this situation we must factor out expressive, common payment abstractions and come up with a generalized payment model which hides the payment mechanisms used, but offers a common, high-level interface for applications and supports a wide range of business models. On the basis of analyzing the standard payment scenarios and configurations this paper presents a component-oriented payment model, describes the security concerns of various configurations and their solutions, and evaluates the model with a concrete application in our OPELIX project. The contribution of this paper is in the decomposition approach for payment models and a generalized payment model which supports component-orientation, design for change, and assessment of security.