The Electronic Payment System as an e-commerce enabler: The Macedonian perspective

The payment system represents a sum of instruments, procedures and infrastructure for money transfer. It is of great importance for all economic agents since it enables fast and efficient payments in the national economy as well as internationally. Electronic payment system functionality is measured through analysis of the transactions committed, structure of the electronic instruments available within a country, and payment instruments used during payment of purchased or ordered products or services. The use of Electronic Payment Instruments in Macedonia is growing steadily, which shows that the EPS system in this country is continually growing and is in some extend well organized, people are friendly to ICT and conduct electronic transactions easily. E-banking activities in Macedonia started, but remain in low levels; which is a fact for e-commerce activities in general.e-commerce, Electronic Payment Systems, Electronic Payment Instruments

The EPS as an e-commerce enabler: The Macedonian perspective

The payment system represents a sum of instruments, procedures and infrastructure for money transfer. It is of great importance for all economic agents since it enables fast and efficient payments in the national economy as well as internationally. Electronic payment system functionality is measured through analysis of the transactions committed, structure of the electronic instruments available within a country, and payment instruments used during payment of purchased or ordered products or services. The use of Electronic Payment Instruments in Macedonia is growing steadily, which shows that the EPS system in this country is continually growing and is in some extend well organized, people are friendly to ICT and conduct electronic transactions easily. E-banking activities in Macedonia started, but remain in low levels; which is a fact for e-commerce activities in general.e-commerce, Electronic Payment Systems, Electronic Payment Instruments

A modularized electronic payment system for agent-based e-commerce

With the explosive growth of the Internet, electronic-commerce (e-commerce) is an increasingly important segment of commercial activities on the web. The Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming (SAFER) architecture was proposed to further facilitate e-commerce using agent technology. In this paper, the electronic payment aspect of SAFER will be explored. The Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol and E-Cash were selected as the bases for the electronic payment system implementation. The various modules of the payment system and how they interface with each other are shown. An extensible implementation done using JavaTM will also be elaborated. This application incorporates agent roaming functionality and the ability to conduct e-commerce transactions and carry out intelligent e-payment procedures

A multi-agent architecture for electronic payment

The Internet has brought about innumerable changes to the way enterprises do business. An essential problem to be solved before the widespread commercial use of the Internet is to provide a trustworthy solution for electronic payment. We propose a multi-agent mediated electronic payment architecture in this paper. It is aimed at providing an agent-based approach to accommodate multiple e-payment schemes. Through a layered design of the payment structure and a well-defined uniform payment interface, the architecture shows good scalability. When a new e-payment scheme or implementation is available, it can be plugged into the framework easily. In addition, we construct a framework allowing multiple agents to work cooperatively to realize automation of electronic payment. A prototype has been built to illustrate the functionality of this design. Finally we discuss the security issues

A Framework for M-Commerce Implementation in Nigeria

The Internet has brought about the concept of grobalilation, which has revolutionized the way business is transacted all over the world. The E-comnterce is of particular interest, though widely used but still has some security challenges in terms of transparency and confidentiality of transactiorts. This papei focuses on M-contnrcrce as an extensiott to E-commerce hnplementatiott with the Bankiltg industry proposed as core implementation consideration in ortler to guarantee high level security. We have reviewed some cqses of onlilrc frauds and eliscussed tlte emerging critical issues afficting software development of M-cornmerce applicatiotts. Afranrcworkfor M-commerce implementationis therefore,proposed for countries such as Nigeria, Romania and Indonesia where cases of online scam are alanning

A Factory-based Approach to Support E-commerce Agent Fabrication

With the development of Internet computing and software agent technologies, agent-based e-commerce is emerging. How to create agents for e-commerce applications has become an important issue along the way to success. We propose a factory-based approach to support agent fabrication in e-commerce and elaborate a design based on the SAFER (Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming) framework. The details of agent fabrication, modular agent structure, agent life cycle, as well as advantages of agent fabrication are presented. Product-brokering agent is employed as a practical agent type to demonstrate our design and Java-based implementation

Agent fabrication and its implementation for agent-based electronic commerce

In the last decade, agent-based e-commerce has emerged as a potential role for the next generation of e-commerce. How to create agents for e-commerce applications has become a serious consideration in this field. This paper proposes a new scheme named agent fabrication and elaborates its implementation in multi-agent systems based on the SAFER (Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming) architecture. First, a conceptual structure is proposed for software agents carrying out e-commerce activities. Furthermore, agent module suitcase is defined to facilitate agent fabrication. With these definitions and facilities in the SAFER architecture, the formalities of agent fabrication are elaborated. In order to enhance the security of agent-based e-commerce, an infrastructure of agent authorization and authentication is integrated in agent fabrication. Our implementation and prototype applications show that the proposed agent fabrication scheme brings forth a potential solution for creating agents in agent-based e-commerce applications

Crowd-sourcing with uncertain quality - an auction approach

This article addresses two important issues in crowd-sourcing: ex ante uncertainty about the quality and cost of different workers and strategic behaviour. We present a novel multi-dimensional auction that incentivises the workers to make partial enquiry into the task and to honestly report quality-cost estimates based on which the crowd-sourcer can choose the worker that offers the best value for money. The mechanism extends second score auction design to settings where the quality is uncertain and it provides incentives to both collect information and deliver desired qualities

Fairs for e-commerce: the benefits of aggregating buyers and sellers

In recent years, many new and interesting models of successful online business have been developed. Many of these are based on the competition between users, such as online auctions, where the product price is not fixed and tends to rise. Other models, including group-buying, are based on cooperation between users, characterized by a dynamic price of the product that tends to go down. There is not yet a business model in which both sellers and buyers are grouped in order to negotiate on a specific product or service. The present study investigates a new extension of the group-buying model, called fair, which allows aggregation of demand and supply for price optimization, in a cooperative manner. Additionally, our system also aggregates products and destinations for shipping optimization. We introduced the following new relevant input parameters in order to implement a double-side aggregation: (a) price-quantity curves provided by the seller; (b) waiting time, that is, the longer buyers wait, the greater discount they get; (c) payment time, which determines if the buyer pays before, during or after receiving the product; (d) the distance between the place where products are available and the place of shipment, provided in advance by the buyer or dynamically suggested by the system. To analyze the proposed model we implemented a system prototype and a simulator that allow to study effects of changing some input parameters. We analyzed the dynamic price model in fairs having one single seller and a combination of selected sellers. The results are very encouraging and motivate further investigation on this topic