The architecture of a one-stop web-window shop

Abstract

With the advent of e-commerce, web shops - where a potential buyer can make a purchase transaction on the web - are becoming commonplace. In everyday life, as buyers we face a typical need for matching or coordinating a host of articles/services before taking the purchase decision. Very often the articles/services (items) which we seek to buy are marketed by completely different shops/agencies, necessitating visits to different shops. The same situation translated to the web, means that the shopper has to make visits to several different web-sites and evaluate articles before taking the purchase decision. Just as in real life, as a first step the right web-shops have to be identified. Although, a search engine can do this, it would take a smart choice of search words to hit upon the "right" shops. "Right" in terms of the items they trade in and the geographical proximity to the shopper. Next comes the aspect of coordinating the chosen items. Clearly, this is very inconvenient because the various items cannot be compared simultaneously. To facilitate this requirement, what is needed is a Mediator, which provides a functional integration of the Web Shops of interest. Further, given the ubiquity of the requirement, a mediation mechanism, which is not only easy-to-use but also easy-to-create, easy-to-deploy and easy-to-maintain, is required. A novel yet simple mediator architecture is described here for mediating e-commerce sites founded on relational databases. The mechanism has been conceptualized to facilitate transactions in the B2C realm of E-Commerce.