Achieving differentiated quality of service and high revenue through scheduling on E-commerce systems

As competition among e-commerce websites continue to escalate the need for using appropriate system management strategies that improve the revenue of the website is becoming increasingly important. One way of improving revenue is to encourage heavy buyers by providing them with a higher quality of service in comparison to customers that are less likely to buy an item from the store. This paper focuses on effective scheduling strategies that provide differentiated service to three classes of customers. The main objective of the research is to achieve a high revenue generated by a website and support its business goal, while providing higher responsiveness for the higher priority customer classes. A number of scheduling policies that use varying degrees of knowledge of system and customer characteristics is proposed and their performances are analyzed through a performance prototype. The experimental results lead to a number of insights underlying system performance and the revenue earned for the online stores