Give me all I pay for - The Need for Execution Guarantees in Electronic Commerce Payments

Electronic Commerce over the Internet is one of the most rapidly growing areas in todays business. However, considering the most important phase of Electronic Commerce, the payment, it has to be noted that in most currently exploited approaches, support for at least one of the participants is limited. From a general point of view, a couple of requirements for correct payment interactions exist, namely different levels of atomicity in the exchange of money and goods of a single customer with different merchants. In this paper, we identify the different requirements participants demand on Electronic Commerce payments from the point of view of execution guarantees and present how payment interactions can be implemented by transactional processes. Finally, we show how these execution guarantees can be provided for payment processes in a natural way by applying the ideas of transactional process management to an Electronic Commerce Payment Coordinator.