Distributed Virtual Malls on the World Wide Web

Virtual malls allow consumers to shop and purchase products on the World Wide Web from multiple stores. This paper presents a virtual mall in which stores may be distributed across multiple Web sites. Stores participate in the virtual mall by communicating with a mall coordinator. The virtual mall allows shoppers to perform actions across multiple stores simultaneously such as viewing product availability. Multiple purchases across diierent stores can be coordinated using multi-phase commits. The mall coordinator can authenticate clients on all stores participating in the virtual mall while only requiring clients to provide au-thentication information once. State information is preserved using dynamic argument embedding which is compatible with all browsers and servers supporting HTTP and is less obtrusive than cookies. The distributed virtual mall concept and infrastructure can be applied to other distributed electronic commerce applications on the Web.