Worldwide TLC markets by region

Plan of the talk

Introduction to e-commerce and ecommerce applications

Issues in developing e-commerce
applications
Architecture of e-commerce applications
Bookstore example
References

References (1/4)

Introduction to e-commerce and the

development of e-commerce applications:
Professional Java E-Commerce, M.Kerzner et al.,
Wrox Press, 2001

EU definition for e-commerce:

A European Initiative in Electronic Commerce
Communication to the European Parliament, the
Council, the Economic and Social Committee and
the Committee of the Regions (COM(97)/157)

References (2/4)

Electronic Data Interchange:

Intodruction to EDI, vv.aa. ,DevEdge online

Cyberphobia and trends in e-commerce:

http://www.webmergers.com

Application Servers:
Introduction to iPlanet Application Server
Architecture, Robert Schulteis, Sun Microsystems,
2002
http://www.sun.com/developers/evangcentral

References (3/4)

Platforms for e-commerce:

Building Applications in the Net Economy,
Netscape Communications Corporation White
paper, 1997

Architectures for e-commerce:

Architetture, tecnologie e modelli funzionali nellecommerce, Castrogiovanni, Magliano, Sciarappa,
Notiziario tecnico Telecom Italia, December 2001

Statement of Bill Gates

The White House Conference on the New
Economy April 5, 2000

References (4/4)

E-procurement and e-marketplaces:

E-procurement white paper, Digital Union 2001 (
http://www.digitalunion.com)

European Information Technology

Observatory (EITO):
http://www.eito.com

The Bookstore example:

UML for E-Commerce, Doug Rosenberg
http://www.iconixsw.com

The End

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

Electronic exchange of
Business documents
Business data

In a standard format (ANSI X12,EDIFACT)

Established between 1968 and 1975 in the
transportation industries (U.S.)
Application-to-application communication
without human intervention

Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT)

The banking equivalent of EDI

Denotes the transfer of :
Electronic checks
Customer accounts
Payment informations

in automated way

Order conversion rates

Defined as:
# of orders / # of contacts
By month or year, four-month periods, etc.

Measure the capability of a certain B2C

application to convert an user into a buyer
A survey carried out in August 2000 showed
that order conversion rates in USA were of
1.9% (Boston Consulting Group and
Shop.org)

E-procurement applications (1/3)

Automate enterprise purchasing processes,

i.e. perform all of the activities related to
generating an order on the buyers side
Purchased goods can be :
Direct goods (critical items in the supply chain)
Indirect goods (MRO Maintenance Repair and
Operations - such as office items)

E-procurement applications (2/3)

Automating procurement of indirect goods

can dramatically reduce costs since:
Lessens maverick buying
Reduces supplier response time

E-procurement applications(3/3)
3. Order approvation
compliant to company
standards and procedures
2. Purchase request is
performed by employees
via a Web interface

Indirect goods e-procurement

4. Purchase order is
electronically placed

5. Order is fulfilled by
the supplier

1. Product selection
from available
catalogues

6. Product delivery
8. Payment request
electronically forwarded

7. Product receipt

E-marketplace

An environment that brings buyers and

sellers together in a virtual space for ecommerce, enabling them to reach new
customers and reduce transaction costs
E-marketplaces are becoming more
fashionable

Cybermalls

Include more virtual shops

Appear as web portals with links to single
e-shops grouped by different product
categories (e.g. music or books)
Advantages for smaller businesses:
Reduced initial investment
Easily traceability through the malls brand

Presentation Layer

Its purpose is to provide a user interface to

the end user of the application
Controls the look-and-feel of the application
and responds to user events
Serves actually as the front-end of the
application

Business Logic Layer

The heart of the application itself

Contains the business rules and /or
processes
Its components link between presentation
and data/legacy layers

Data & Legacy access Layer

Its purpose is to give to the business logic

components access to backend data
sources such as:
Databases
ERP systems
Other custom systems

Horizontal services

Services provided by the application server

by means of an underlying technology
(CORBA, EJB, COM,etc.)
Typical services:

Transactions
Security
Session Management
Resource pooling
Load balancing and fail over

Session Management

Mantains the correlation among requests

generated by the same user

Resource Pooling

Caching the instances of used resources

(e.g. database connections) improves
performances

Load Balancing and

Fail Over

Make possible to distribute incoming

requests
Handle clients reconnection in the case of
system crash

Cyberphobia and the .com crash

Cyberphobia is the markets irrational fear of the
Internet due to the several bankruptcies occured in
the past years
B2C represent 75% of bankruptcies
Internet shutdowns

2000
Jan-Apr

2001
220

Source:Webmergers.com

2002
66