eCT: THE B2C E-COMMERCE TOOLKIT FOR THE

WEBCOMFORT PLATFORM

Frederico de Carvalho Baptista, Jo

ao de Sousa Saraiva and Alberto Rodrigues da Silva

INESC-ID/Instituto Superior T

ecnico, Rua Alves Redol 9, 1000-029, Lisboa, Portugal

Keywords:

e-Commerce, WebComfort, content management systems (CMS), e-commerce extensions for CMS.

Abstract:

Electronic commerce (e-Commerce) involves a complex set of business workﬂows regarding the buying and

selling of products or services by means of electronic systems such as the Internet. e-Commerce applica-

tions can be supported, amongst other alternatives, by content management systems (CMS) through speciﬁc

extensions. This paper presents the eCT extension, an e-Commerce extension developed on the top of the Web-

Comfort CMS platform, whose main goals are: (1) adaptability to different contexts, such as different types of

stores, countries, cultures or tax systems; (2) extensibility, due to the ease of development and addition of new

functionalities; and (3) ease of installation and conﬁguration, to fulﬁll different business requirements. This

paper discusses the major technical details of the eCT, such as: (1) the product facet model; (2) the support to

different e-commerce models; and (3) the support for different payment, shipping and taxing methods.

1 INTRODUCTION

Electronic commerce (e-Commerce) involves busi-

ness processes related to the buying and selling of

products over electronic systems, such as the Internet.

Electronic commerce is expected to continue growing

at a rapid pace, and organizations are using it to reach

a wider audience and create new business opportuni-

ties, through ”electronic shops”, that offer products

from a single ﬁrm, or from multiple individual stores

(electronic shopping malls (Khosrow-Pour, 2006).

On the other hand, in the last years, a number

of web-oriented content management systems (CMS)

(Suh et al., 2003) has appeared, aiming to facilitate

the management and publication of digital contents.

These systems allow the collaboration of the various

users involved in the process of creating and orga-

nizing digital content, and typically provide extension

mechanisms that support the addition of new types of

content as well as new languages and visual themes.

These systems are providing organizations a way to

support their needs for constant evolution and com-

plex business requirements.

This paper is structured in ﬁve sections. Sec-

tion 1 introduces the broad context of e-Commerce

and CMS concepts. Section 2 introduces the eCT

(the B2C e-commerce Toolkit for the WebComfort

platform). Section 3 overviews of the eCT archi-

tecture and its extensibility features. Section 4 dis-

cusses some of the architectural decisions taken dur-

ing the development of this toolkit. Finally, Section 5

presents the conclusions for this project so far, as well

as the future work.

2 THE ECT TOOLKIT

The ”e-Commerce Toolkit” (eCT for short) is an e-

commerce extension for the WebComfort platform

(WebComfort.org, 2008). WebComfort is an Enter-

prise CMS, promoted by SIQuant (SIQuant, 2008),

developed on top of Microsoft ASP.NET technology.

In the WebComfort platform, a Module provides

mechanisms to manage and layout a certain kind of

content (e.g., images, text, links), and a Toolkit is an

integrated collection of modules that provide speciﬁc

functionalities. For example, the WebComfort Stan-

dard Toolkit deﬁnes a set of modules allowing the

management and visualization of typical Web con-

tents (e.g., images, text).

225

de Carvalho Baptista F., Sousa Saraiva J. and Rodrigues da Silva A. (2008).

eCT: THE B2C E-COMMERCE TOOLKIT FOR THE WEBCOMFORT PLATFORM.

In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business, pages 225-228

DOI: 10.5220/0001907302250228

 SciTePress

The eCT is a Toolkit for e-commerce support, more

speciﬁcally for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) busi-

ness model. From a quick perspective, the eCT allows

the conﬁguration of one or more electronic stores,

that allow customers to browse the product catalog,

add products to the shopping cart and proceed to the

check-out. On the other hand, store administrators

can conﬁgure and manage a number of store details

(such as product catalog, inventory, promotions and

orders) whereas eCT administrators manage aspects

that are available to all the stores (such as languages

and localization, currency units, shipping/payment

and taxing methods).

Figure 1: A WebComfortPortal with the eCT toolkit.

3 ECT EXTENSIBILITY

FEATURES/AREAS

The eCT is an extension to the WebComfort platform,

aiming to support electronic stores that can be based

anywhere on the world and available to a global audi-

ence. Due to the variability of possible contexts, the

eCT must provide solutions for the different aspects

that can vary (e.g., languages, payment systems, ship-

ping systems, taxation, currencies, types of products

to sell). So, the main principles that guide the design

of the eCT are:

1. Adaptability to different contexts (such as differ-

ent countries and cultures, types of stores);

2. Extensibility, namely by the ease of development

and integration of new features;

3. Ease of installation and conﬁguration, allowing a

quick setup of eCT according to stores’ different

business requirements.

This section discusses how these principles were

taken into consideration during the eCT design.

3.1 Overview

The eCT aggregates a set of WebComfort modules

that implement B2C e-commerce functionalities. The

eCT has a multi-tier (three-tier) architecture, with the

typical presentation, logic and data layers, with a We-

bComfort module being transversal to this tiers (see

Figure 2). The presentation tier of a module con-

tains the UI elements (Web User Controls and Web

Forms) that present information to the user and inter-

pret/respond to their actions.

The logic tier contains the module’s business

logic. This level can interact with the WebCom-

fort API, that provides a set of infrastructural fea-

tures available to the WebComfort modules, like au-

thentication or multi-language support. In a similar

way, infrastructural features of the eCT are provided

by the eCT API, that cover areas like: eCT conﬁg-

uration, store conﬁguration, store operation manage-

ment, catalog, inventory and promotions. The eCT

conﬁguration involves the conﬁguration of global op-

tions shared by all stores; the store conﬁguration in-

volves the conﬁguration of each store options (e.g.,

accepted shipping/payment/taxing methods, currency

units); the store operation management involves the

management of orders, customers and statistics; the

catalog refers to the storing and management of prod-

uct data; the inventory corresponds to the information

of the physical storing of products; and promotions

corresponds to the features that allow the promotion

of certain products. At the eCT level, there are a num-

ber of possible extensions, namely: Product facets;

Shipping; Payment; Taxing; Logging; Statistics and

Reporting; and Currency Units.

The Data tier isolates the persistence aspects of the

module. The eCT toolkit uses two data repositories,

for the eCT data and statistics/logging data.

Now we present in more detail some of the more

relevant aspects/features of the presented architecture.

3.2 Product Facet Model

One main requirement identiﬁed was the support for

different types of products (e.g., books, digital ﬁles),

which may differ in the way they are presented to the

end-user, as well as in internal behavior. The eCT

supports the notion of a ”base product”, which can be

specialized or extended by applying facets according

to the context. These facets can be perceived as ex-

tensions to a product, that can add a certain behavior

and/or data. For instance, in a ﬁne arts portal we can

allow the sale of ﬁne arts originals by deﬁning a facet

”Fine arts original”, that allows the association of this

information (author, materials, dimensions, etc) to the

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226

Figure 2: Overview of the eCT’s architectural features.

product. This model allows the association of various

facets to a product, allowing the composition of facets

to enrich it.

In addition of the physical products (books,

clothes, etc.) supported by these extensions, the eCT

supports also the providing of services, that differ

from physical products in the sense that providing a

service does not result in ownership, but results in

some beneﬁt to the customer. Examples of this can be

found at tourism, entertainment, or cultural services.

3.3 e-Commerce Models

An important aspect of the eCT is its support for

different business models, so that it can be applied

to different domains and business contexts, namely

(1) Store; (2) Shopping Mall; and (3) Shopping

Mall with integrated shopping cart. According the

”Store” model, the WebComfort portal should sup-

port only one store; according the ”Shopping mall”

model, the portal should support a set of independent

stores, that manage their own speciﬁcities (catalog,

orders and payments management); and according

the ”Shopping Mall with integrated shopping cart”

model, stores are not totally independent, and should

share the orders and payment management features

(see Figure 3).

3.4 Payment, Shipping and Taxing

Methods

The adaptation to different contexts mainly concerns

the support of different payment, shipping and tax-

ing methods. This is essential, because it is important

to supply methods that fulﬁll the needs of different

stores. To achieve this, it is important to allow the

Figure 3: e-Commerce Models Comparison.

deﬁnition of new methods and the easy integration of

these methods into the eCT. (Due to space restrictions

other issues are not discussed here and the reader can

consult (Baptista, 2008))

4 DISCUSSION

The majority of the aspects presented above are re-

sponsible for allowing the eCT to be a ﬂexible exten-

sion for the WebComfort platform. Even maintaining

the WebComfort approach of trying to keep as few de-

pendencies between components as possible, namely

dependencies between the eCT and the WebComfort

platform and between the different components of the

extension.

To support the identiﬁed requirements – adaptabil-

ity to different contexts; extensibility; and ease of in-

stallation and conﬁguration – a set of inter-related fea-

tures were deﬁned: the product facet model; the sup-

port to different e-commerce models; and the adapta-

tion to different contexts in terms of payment, ship-

ping and taxing methods.

To implement the product facet model we adopted the

Decorator design pattern, that allows to add respon-

eCT: THE B2C E-COMMERCE TOOLKIT FOR THE WEBCOMFORT PLATFORM

227

sibilities to individual objects dynamically and trans-

parently (Gamma et al., 1995). This way, instead of

trying to support from scratch all the expected prod-

uct features in a complex class, it is now possible to

deﬁne a relatively simple class and add features in-

crementally with decorators, being the ﬁnal product

the sum of all these facets. Consequently, this pattern

allows the deﬁnition of a vast number of extensions

(facets), that materialize speciﬁc product semantics.

Regarding the behavior that allows the adapta-

tion to different contexts in terms of payment, ship-

ping and taxing methods options we opted for the

Provider Model (Rob Howard, 2004), that is a mix

of the Abstract Factory, Strategy and Singleton pat-

terns (Gamma et al., 1995). In the eCT, this allowed

the deﬁnition of an API that exposes the operations

relative to the payment, shipping and taxing areas (as

illustrated in Figure 4). For instance, the Payment API

can have a method responsible for processing a pay-

ment, that contains no business logic; instead it sim-

ply forwards this call to the conﬁgured provider. The

providers implement different payment methods, con-

taining whatever business logic they require. Thus,

custom providers for each of these services can be

easily and independently developed and conﬁgured.

Figure 4: Overview of the provider model for payment,

shipping and taxing.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Nowadays organizations and enterprises are using

electronic channels to manage and publish digital

contents as well as sell their products or services.

In the context of our research, the e-Commerce

Toolkit (eCT) was implemented, to support differ-

ent kinds of electronic shops, either offering products

from a single entity or from multiple individual stores

(electronic shopping mall).

This paper presented and discussed some of the main

features of the eCT, namely: the product facet model;

the supported B2C e-commerce models; and the

adaptation to different contexts in terms of payment,

shipping and taxing methods.

For future work we plan to improve this toolkit,

mainly in the areas of promotions and inventory, that

do not yet have all the expected features, and to de-

velop more Product Facets and more providers so that

we can support a greater number of different con-

texts.

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Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., and Vlissides, J.

(1995). Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable

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Khosrow-Pour, M. (2006). Encyclopedia of E-

Commerce, E-Government, and Mobile Com-

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Rob Howard (2004). Provider model design pat-

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from http://www.siquant.pt.

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