E-commerce Ecosystem Research Articles

A pluggable service platform architecture for e-commerce

In the beginning of the e-commerce era, retailers mostly adopted vertically integrated solutions to control the entire e-commerce value chain. However, they began to realize that to achieve agility, a better approach would be to focus on certain core capabilities and then create a partner ecosystem around them. From a technical point of view, this means it is advised to have a lightweight platform architecture with small core e-commerce functionality which can be extended by additional services from third party providers. In a typical e-commerce ecosystem with diverse information systems of network partners, integration and interoperability become critical factors to enable seamless coordination among the partners. Furthermore an increasing adoption of cloud computing technology could be observed resulting in more challenging integration scenarios involving cloud services. Thus, an e-commerce platform is required that suites the advanced needs for flexible and agile service integration. Therefore, this paper aims to present a reference architecture of a novel pluggable service platform for e-commerce. We investigate on currently available online shop platform solutions and integration platforms in the market. Based on the findings and motivated by literature on service-oriented design, we develop an architecture of a service-based pluggable platform for online retailers. This design is then instantiated by means of a prototype for an e-commerce returns handling scenario to demonstrate the feasibility of our architecture design.

Analysis on Complexity and Evolution of E-Commerce Ecosystem

In this paper, we analyze the complexity of e-commerce ecosystem. The concept of e-commerce ecosystem is application the theory and research of natural ecosystem, business ecosystem and complexity science in the field of electronic commerce and those concepts provide system science methods and ecology methods to e-commerce ecosystem research. A population conceptual framework which is based on ecosystem and complexity network is proposed. Then, the complexity is examined from two aspects—the systematic and ecological ones. Finally, evolution process of e-commerce ecosystem is explained by a graph.