Object-Oriented Design of an E-Commerce System for Retailing Business

Abstract

Business issues for E-commerce cross the entire range of business activities from attracting customers to fulfilling their orders, and from sales to customer service. Architectures for commerce systems may look different, but they all have to address the same issues and provide answers for a common set of questions. In particular, there are four core business issues namely Attract, Interact, Act and React that are identified to be common across a range of E-Commerce systems. In this paper, we present an object-oriented architectural design for an Internet-based retail business. The design is layout according to the four core business activities. It captures the fundamental functions that make a successful online retail. The technique used is Unified Modeling Language (UML) [1] which is acclaimed to be appropriate for modeling complex software systems. Our model can serve as a high-level system design framework for online retail, and it can be modified to suit other E-commerce domains such as Business-to-Business commerce.