CIGMA: aCtive Inventory service in Global e-MArket for enabling one-stop shopping over Internet shopping sites

Abstract

A fully connected Internet business environment will introduce a high level of dynamics to the business process. It may result in very frequent changes in business decision, and thus, information of various items may undergo constant changes. In addition, there could be a flood of similar shopping sites. In such a highly dynamic environment, ordinary online customers may feel that online shopping is not comfortable. Existing service models or systems cannot effectively reflect such a dynamic environment and support ordinary online customers. We propose a new E-commerce service called the CIGMA. The CIGMA provides catalog comparison and purchase mediation services over multiple shopping sites for ordinary online customers. The service is based on up-to-date information by reflecting the frequent changes in catalog information in real-time. It also matches the desire of the online customers for fast response since the service is provided based on the data cached in a high performance caching system. An important and challenging issue in realizing the CIGMA service is the design of merchant-side interface. This paper presents the CIGMA along with its merchant-side interface including service setup and deployment procedure.