Design of a merchant tool for the meta-malls architecture

Abstract

Customized development of online storefronts is very costly and technology intensive. A considerable number of merchant tools have become commercialized by a variety of vendors. Each product has considerable differences in it``s functionality. So the first target of this research is to analyze the functionalities of these tools to identify desirable features of ideal merchant tool. To support one-stop shopping with integrated comparison, we have adopted the meta-malls architecture as an ideal setting of merchants. The current merchant tools in the market did not consider the meta-malls architecture yet. So, we analyze features of merchant tool necessary to support the meta-malls architecture. We come up with a design of merchant tool, named Ideal-Merchant for the meta-malls architecture. Idiosyncratic features of the Ideal-Merchant are integrated customer management and customer``s personalized shopping bag. Integrated customer management implies that customers do not have to input to every mall to visit for comparison. In this paper, we have implemented a prototype of Ideal-Merchant, J-Merchant which can support the integrated customer management.