Towards electronic commerce management systems : concepts and architecture

Presently, Internet-based electronic commerce systems are developed through in-house programming and are plagued with uneven quality, low productivity, and little reusability. Furthermore, low interoperability between those systems is also a major obstacle to the deployment of open and flexible electronic markets. We investigate the concept of electronic commerce management systems (ECMS), which can help consolidate the electronic commerce technology by integrating object-oriented architectures, Web information systems, database systems, and workflow systems. In this paper, we develop the main concepts and propose a high level architecture for ECMS