Web-Based Brokerage System Development

Electronic Commerce (ecommerce) depends on the emergence of capabilities that empower buyers to obtain the product data they need to make informed purchase decisions, quickly and easily. Traditional physical markets are often brokered by intermediaries that facilitate market transitions by providing brokerage services. In the global Internet Electronic Brokers provide a central marketplace, and provide many essential third party services. Electronic Brokerages are regarded as the core functionality in overcoming many current limitation of Internet Commerce. Also, search costs, lack of privacy, incomplete information, contracting risk, and pricing are better managed with Electronic Brokers. However, Brokers are currently facing the problem of combining all the information within a single coherent structure through which buyers can navigate readily. This is due to the lack of interoperability standards between ecommerce applications, which leads to high costs for the brokers. The research is to design a framework for building a web-based brokerage system. The system plays a central role in allowing service providers to publish and advertise their offer and at the same time helping the consumer to access easily and in a moderate manner the offered services and information and try to solve the problem of interoperability. Consumer Buying Behavior model which consists of six stages that defines the decision process and acts of people involved in buying and using products had been applied in the design of the system. In addition to offering many essential third party services, the system offers some tasks, which simplify the functionality of brokers, which override the limitations of Internet e-commerce. Client-server communication that uses 3-tier architecture had been used to override the 2-tier limitations and enhance the security features of the system. To achieve the requirements of such as online e-commerce application Java servlets with JDBC on the server side, HTML and JavaScript on the client side are used. Unified Modeling Language (UML) had been applied in order to determine system structure and system behavior from user/system requirements. The study shows that online brokerage can replace traditional brokers with additional functionality. By designing reusable components and using certain tools will try to solve Interoperability problem between ecommerce applications. Java servlets shown as a powerful tool to be used on server side in this type of application which can help to override some limitations of Internet e-commerce

The display of electronic commerce within virtual environments

In today’s competitive business environment, the majority of companies are expected to be represented on the Internet in the form of an electronic commerce site. In an effort to keep up with current business trends, certain aspects of interface design such as those related to navigation and perception may be overlooked. For instance, the manner in which a visitor to the site might perceive the information displayed or the ease with which they navigate through the site may not be taken into consideration. This paper reports on the evaluation of the electronic commerce sites of three different companies, focusing specifically on the human factors issues such as perception and navigation. Heuristic evaluation, the most popular method for investigating user interface design, is the technique employed to assess each of these sites. In light of the results from the analysis of the evaluation data, virtual environments are suggested as a way of improving the navigation and perception display constraints

The CPTPP and Digital Trade: Embracing E-Commerce Opportunities for SMEs in Japan and Canada

One of the most innovative features of the CPTPP is its material on digital trade, especially its chapter on e-commerce which contains a number of provisions aimed at enhancing this vital sector of the economy by eliminating distortive trade barriers such as restrictions on data transfer and data localization requirements. Such provisions should be important to the CPTPP’s two largest parties: Canada and Japan, both of which are highly advanced economies seeking to enhance their digital trade capacity across the Pacific Rim. This paper explores the main features of the CPTPP concerning digital trade from the perspective of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Canada and Japan. Such businesses have a poor track record of e-commerce uptake and may be disadvantaged relative to their larger competitors which enjoy dominance in the online marketplace. Whether or not the CPTPP will assist these businesses while striking the right balance between an open internet and safeguarding of issues such as privacy is a matter of some debate

Ontology acquisition and exchange of evolutionary product-brokering agents

Agent-based electronic commerce (e-commerce) has been booming with the development of the Internet and agent technologies. However, little effort has been devoted to exploring the learning and evolving capabilities of software agents. This paper addresses issues of evolving software agents in e-commerce applications. An agent structure with evolution features is proposed with a focus on internal hierarchical knowledge. We argue that knowledge base of agents should be the cornerstone for their evolution capabilities, and agents can enhance their knowledge bases by exchanging knowledge with other agents. In this paper, product ontology is chosen as an instance of knowledge base. We propose a new approach to facilitate ontology exchange among e-commerce agents. The ontology exchange model and its formalities are elaborated. Product-brokering agents have been designed and implemented, which accomplish the ontology exchange process from request to integration

Culture and e-commerce: An exploration of the perceptions and attitudes of Egyptian internet users

This paper examines the perceptions and attitudes that Egyptian users hold towards electronic shopping sites. Internet sites are globally available, opening up huge potential markets for online retailers. However, it remains unclear whether sites designed for the US or European markets will be acceptable in other cultures. This paper describes an exploratory card sorting study conducted with Egyptian consumers. The study was designed to examine the e-commerce interface features that are most salient to this user group and to explore how these relate to user intentions to engage in internet shopping. The results support the role of site familiarity in predicting purchase intentions within this cultural setting