Existing electronic commerce solutions for the Internet developed so far mainly allow users to shop in some electronic shop, shopping mall etc and suppliers to buy an electronic commerce platform and establish their electronic shop with it. These systems, however, do not necessarily allow users online offer placement and maintainance or online business negotiations. Especially small companies in rural and remote regions are put at a disadvantage here as they may not be able to establish, run and maintain an own electronic shop or particiate in an EDI-network. They need an electronic commerce system that overcomes differences in time of business, location, language between suppliers and customers, supports the entire process of trading but at the same time is easy to establish, to access, and to handle. In this paper, we propose a DBMS based electronic commerce architecture for business-to-business commerce that allows customers and suppliers to trade products on an international electronic market place. We aim to support the entire business transaction within the electronic market. The market provides services like buying and selling as well as value-added market services like offer placement, negotiation, payment, contract handling, and logistics, available on a single dedicated integrated electronic market place using existing Internet and WWW infrastructure and Java. We also present the prototypical implementation of the market place. The modeling and management of all market data in a DBMS gives the system a solid basis for reliable, consistent, and secure trading on the market. Relational DBMS query technology is exploited to offer users fast and sophisticated search on the market data. The generic and modular system architecture can be applied to arbitrary application domains. An electronic market place system can consist of one solitary supplier but also a community of many suppliers and the respective customers. Multiple physically distributed markets can be interconnected transparently to the users and form one virtually central market place. The possibility to replicate and distribute services and data and herewith to distribute data, system, and network load makes the system scalable and able to cope with an increasing number of single markets, participants, and market data.

Top