A Multidimensional Evaluation of Integrative E-commerce Architectures

The proliferation of goods and services offered online, as well as the growing number of e-consumers are catalysts for the ongoing burgeoning of e-commerce among Internet activities. Numerous industries have adopted e-commerce technologies to optimize and automate business processes. In this paper, we are mainly concerned on the synergic relationship between three fundamental components of e-commerce—negotiation, contracts, and business workflow. We conduct a survey on e-commerce technologies and evaluate this body of work through a multidimensional framework. On one dimension, our framework assesses the extent to which negotiation, contracts, and business workflow are integrated and interoperate within e-commerce architectures. On the other dimensions, we assess if and how desirable system properties such as decentralization, dynamic adaptation, automation, and security are supported within each of these e-commerce phases. Our findings show that despite the existence of studies approaching these concerns, full exploitation of co-dependent e-commerce components—negotiation, contracts, and workflow—is elusive. In addition, there is insufficient support for dynamic adaptation, automation, security, accountability, and bidirectional relationship among e-commerce components.