Enhancing E-Commerce Processes with Alerts for Credit Card Payment

With keen competition and the continuous quest for service improvement, e-commerce processes are becoming increasingly complex. Recent adoption of the Service-Oriented Architecture has further facilitated cross-organizational process enactment and enabled e-commerce enhancement. Despite a customer interacting with one website, multiple parties are actually involved at the backend such as logistics, services, and payment. As the payment process is indispensable for transactions, the authors choose this as the case study. To enhance the security of the payment process, credit card providers have already been using secure processing services to encrypt the credit card information. But if an unauthorized person knows the credit card information, they can still perform any payment illegally. To address this problem, the authors design a Notified Credit Card Payment System (NCCPS) to handle the notification and confirmation process enhancement. Through an Alert Management system component, the NCCPS systematically integrates the communication between merchants, banks or credit card service providers, and mobile service providers by the means of Web services and SMS technologies. The NCCPS also integrates with the customer service call center for the cancellation processes and exception handling. The authors demonstrate the effectiveness of the use of Web services and alerts in e-Commerce and process integration.