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In Internet shopping, there are many different commerce
protocols to process transactions between customers, merchants,
and intermediaries. Each protocol handles different messages and
different flow of transactions. A lot of work will be needed to
implement various commerce protocols. Besides, customers need to
be familiar with various shopping mechanisms supported by
different merchants, and consequently, it is not convenient for
customers to conduct Internet shopping. Therefore, it is a key
issue to develop a unified Internet commerce model that can
adapt various commerce protocols enabling customers to use
various shopping mechanisms conveniently. Moreover, shopping
through intermediary can reduce the shopping risks for
customers. Integrating the intermediary with Internet shopping
mechanism to support various services including search, compare,
order, payment and after-sale services is important for
realizing Internet shopping. In this work, we analyze
various commerce protocols and the roles of intermediary in
order to develop an intermediary-based flexible commerce model.
Our primary goal is to design a flexible Internet commerce model
that integrates primitive transaction functions and flexible
processing of transaction flow to adapt to various commerce
protocols. The proposed model is built on top of the service
systems that provide various payment, search and delivery
mechanisms. With the intermediary, various commerce protocols
covering pre-trade, trade and post-trade phases can be
supported. Finally a prototype system is developed to
demonstrate our work on intermediary-based flexible commerce
model.
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