Applications and Architectures of Electronic Commerce Management Systems (ECMS): A Domain-Oriented Approach

To support open and spontaneous electronic commerce, more interoperable electronic commerce systems are needed. This requires more standardized software development methodologies and tools in place of proprietary programming as currently done in most corporations. Towards this end, we advocate the conception of electronic commerce management systems (ECMS). In this paper, we elucidate the characteristics of electronic commerce applications, analyze the technological foundation of electronic commerce systems, and investigate potential ECMS architectures. We argue that the functional requirements of electronic commerce applications vary significantly by business domains, user types, and transaction characteristics and it is more cost effective to develop a variety of ECMS, each of which targets a particular type of business domain. Therefore, we propose a domain-oriented approach for ECMS development and installation, which is based on a generic ECMS and a collection of more specialized ECMS to support unique electronic commerce requirements in different business domains.