Designing Business Processes in E-commerce Applications

Business processes play an important role in E-commerce Web applications as they form an important part of the B2C domain and dominate the B2B domain. However, E-commerce application modeling and design techniques have eluded the special characteristics of business processes by treating them just as a special case of navigation. As a consequence, the resulting E-commerce applications have design and usability problems as well as erroneous results from business process execution. We propose a solution to E-commerce Web application design where business processes are considered first class citizens. In this paper we first demonstrate why modeling business processes is important. After a brief introduction, we extend the Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Method (OOHDM) with business processes. We show that our approach to E-commerce Web application design involving both hypermedia navigation and business processes is easy and clear and does not cause the listed problems.