A Web-Based E-commerce Facilitator Intermediary for Small and Medium Enterprises: A B2B/B2C Hybrid Proposal

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1 A Web-Based E-commerce Facilitator Intermediary for Small and Medium Enterprises: A B2B/B2C Hybrid Proposal F.J. García, A.B. Gil, N. Moreno, and B. Curto Departamento de Informática y Automática Facultad de Ciencias University of Salamanca {fgarcia, abg, mmg}@usal.es, bcurto@abedul.usal.es Abstract. The importance of intermediaries in electronic commerce and also in electronic marketplaces has long been recognised in specialised literature. In this paper, we propose a web-based intermediary for e-commerce, whose main goal is to facilitate the entry of small and medium enterprises into the virtual business arena, by allowing the formation of enterprise coalitions based on the role of this intermediary, which acts as a shopping-window for their products. The main characteristics of this intermediary for e-commerce are as follows. First of all, it offers a trading area, based on product catalogues (multi-vendor e- catalogues). Secondly, SMEs are represented by a software catalogue-designer tool that leaves the definition, publication and update of catalogues of products in the hands of these enterprises. From this point of view, the intermediary represents a B2B/B2C hybrid proposal instead of the typical B2B variety of these commerce intermediaries. Keywords. Web-based intermediary; Electronic marketplace; B2B/B2C hybrid model; Multi-vendor catalogue; Catalogue-designer tool. 1 Introduction The rapid growth of the Internet is stimulating an ever-increasing number of businesses that have found their development field in this Network. Electronic commerce and electronic marketplaces represent a new world of business that is full of potential benefits [13], but not free of barriers and problems [12]. The impediments are more important in small organizations or businesses, usually known as Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), where the amount of investment in technology solutions cannot be very large. The entry of a SME into the virtual commerce scene is a winding road with not always a successful end, because this enterprise is usually an unknown one, faraway from its influence market context, and also it usually lacks the right technical and advertising methods to get known in Internet. However, we think when several joined SMEs can make up a critical mass that makes them attractive for end-users. The most effective way to do this is through an e-commerce intermediary [6] that can serve as shopping-window for their [14]. K. Bauknecht, A M. Tjoa, G. Quirchmayr (Eds.): EC-Web 2002, LNCS 2455, pp , Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002

2 48 F.J. García et al. An intermediary, also called a middleman or broker in the research literature in various fields, implies the entry of a new company into the value chain that connects buyers and suppliers, either as a provider of new and innovative services [3, 18], or as a competitor to existing intermediaries [8]. Electronic marketplaces require price setting, transaction processing and coordination, inventory management, immediacy, quality guarantees and monitoring [17]. With the appropriate motivation and profit opportunities, any industrial player, such as a buyer, a supplier or an IT vendor, can become a provider of an online market [4]. Bailey and Bakos [2] emphasize the need for intermediation in electronic marketplaces. They report that IT-mediated markets still need aggregator for one-stop shopping window, trust providers, information exchange facilitators and information filtering brokers. However, the majority of the intermediaries appear in the B2B dimension of the electronic commerce. For this reason, we propose a web-based intermediary site to facilitate SMEs entrance in the virtual business area, but also to near them to the endusers. According to this, there are two dimensions in the proposed business model supported by the intermediary. The first one is a B2B (Business to Business) dimension, related to the communication between the SME and the intermediary. On the other hand, we have a B2C (Business to Client) dimension that succeeds in putting the end-users into contact with the products of the SME through the intermediary. The result is a B2B/B2C hybrid model [9] whose main objective is to provide the SMEs with a uniform platform that implements the services needed for an e- commerce strategy development. This model is implemented now in an e-commerce architecture proposal, so-called e-cousal [10]. This paper is devoted to describe this web-based e-commerce intermediary for SMEs. Thus, the remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 overviews the proposed e-commerce architecture. Section 3 examines the intermediary architecture. Section 4 defines the communicator element between the SMEs and the intermediary site: the catalogue of products. Section 5 describes the catalogue creation process supported by an authoring tool. Finally, Section 6 concludes the work. 2 An Overview of e-cousal E-commerce Architecture e-cousal architecture is devoted to facilitate the entry of a business organisation, typically a SME, into the virtual commerce area. The main commercial policy is based on electronic catalogue (e-catalogue) shopping supported by two main agents, a web-base e-commerce intermediary and a visual catalogue-designer tool. However, the overall architecture introduces more agents and more relationships among them. In Figure 1, the most representative entities, with the main communication flows, are shown. As can be seen, there is a central element, the intermediary, which interconnects the different parts involved in a typical commerce environment, but with more dynamism compared to the traditional business forms.

3 A Web-Based E-commerce Facilitator Intermediary 49 shopping SME commerce management e-catalogue design payment system End-users Web-base d interme diar y publication Bank Visual catalogue-designer tool Fig. 1. General structure of the e-cousal architecture One of the most pursued premises is that the SME will become the main actor of its own virtual business proposal. In this approach it will be the responsible for the inclusion and the management of its own contents in the server, which allows the enterprise entrance into the e-commerce environment. The use of a specialised software-authoring tool to design its own catalogue of products permits the SME to be an active element within the commercial process. The author tool allows the definition, publication and update of a product catalogue, and also the setting up of the intermediary architecture that allows endusers to have access to these products. However, for an efficient communication between the tool and the intermediary, and also for an automatic intermediary set up, the e-commerce intermediary has to arrange the restrictions for the e-catalogues to which the software tool is conformed. This is a different perspective because it is not necessary delegating these tasks to other service providers. As far as the SME is concerned, the proposed model includes the facilities of shopping-window of its products in the server side, i.e., maintenance of statistics and other kinds of business information, a budget of the costs derived from the use of this environment, alerts and maintenance of historic information about its orders, and organisation of exhibitions, in order to show the features of the latest products available from the firm and so on. The relationships between a SME and the e-commerce intermediary, through the catalogue-designer tool and also through the intermediary management services, represent the B2B dimension of this e-commerce model. Moreover, the server has to provide the end-users with every typical service needed for navigating through the catalogue of products and for purchasing them, such as searching for a product in any published catalogue, shopping cart management, selling certificates, navigation help, and so on, and all these through a uniform and intuitive interface. These server s functionalities define the B2C dimension of this model. The data interchange between the SME and the server, and their later automatic publication for final client s accessibility, is based on an XML (extensible Markup Language) [7] storage format that defines the structure of their catalogue ontologies.

4 50 F.J. García et al. 3 The Intermediary Site Architecture The intermediary is implemented using a Multi- System (MAS) for e-commerce area. These agents are shown in Figure 2. We present the agent-based architecture in coarse granularity and high abstraction levels, because we are defining the architectural layer of the system. In other works thinner grained agents are presented [1, 21]. These approaches are not incompatible with ours. Web-based e-commerce intermediary System-level Broker Negotiation Planning General Business Activity s Personalization Personal Authentication Web server Fig. 2. -based architecture for the e-cousal In the Figure 2 ovals represent agents and arrows represent communication between them or between external entities, as end-users. The broker agent is in charge of receiving the e-catalogues from the SME, expressed in XML format, validating them, and storing the information in the proper internal database. The tool through the system-level agent sends these catalogues. This agent should attend to every enterprise that belongs to the e-commerce site to publish and manage its e-catalogues. This broker entity implements the communication protocol for data interchange between the enterprise and the e-commerce server, allowing the whole system to be built over a self-maintained platform, capable of configuring itself when changes are incorporated by the organisation, with a minimum interaction of the web master [10]. The negotiation agent receives the business components of each SME in the same way that the broker agent receives the e-catalogues. This property will allow not only that the SMEs are presented in the intermediary, but also they could personalize their business policies (discount, payments and so on) through these components. To support this facility the designer-tool should be improved to support this kind of business components. The general business activity agents form a set of agents that manage the services of a typical e-commerce site: shopping-cart management, selling certificates and so on. The authentication agent is a security agent type that is in charge of identifying the end-user to allow adapting its interfaces and shopping goods. Another type of security

5 A Web-Based E-commerce Facilitator Intermediary 51 agent is the authorization agent that controls the access to sensitive information once identity has been verified. The personal agent is responsible for customising the interaction with the user and the presentation and navigation of e-catalogues. It is implemented as an adaptive agent. This agent dialogs with the web server module to interact with the user and dynamically generates the hypertextual pages that represent the e-catalogues. The intermediary offers to its end-users efficient access and shopping management for the different products that are published in the server. From an end-user perspective, the intermediary presents the specialised supermarket metaphor, where any client can find several related products from different suppliers. Also, for an end-user the intermediary should be like another commercial site in Internet (it should present the same facilities and an easy and familiar interface), and the variety of the sources of the products has to be transparent for the end-user. For this reason, the personalizing capabilities of the site are very important. The hypermedia pages that represent the e-catalogues are dynamically generating on the fly, getting the contents from the e-catalogues that were sent by the enterprises. However, to take out the information from the e-catalogues and introducing the data in the server database, there must be an ontology or meta-knowledge for e-catalogue definition that is shared between the server and the catalogue-designer tool. A further work in the customisation area is the implementation of a personalization agent that will be in charge of acquiring and maintaining the end-users profiles, which represent the system s hypotheses on the users needs and can be used to tailor the layout of the hypermedia pages to each specific end-user. So this agent should learn from the visitors of the e-commerce site to infer the end-users interests. From the visitor s viewpoint, the agent should help the user make sure that useful information is not overlooked. On the other hand, a personalized profile should be used to make the proper recommendations to the users [15], thus reducing their need to browse through pages. Finally, the planning agent is due to the presence of heterogeneous problems to be faced and the fact that many tasks could be carried out at the same time suggest the design of the multi-agent architecture outlined above. This is a planner agent that controls the main data flows in the system, initialises and updates the user models during the interaction. In a few words, its responsibilities includes manage the e- catalogues database, accepting the orders of the e-commerce service agents, and in cooperation with the personalization agent giving to the personal agent the proper data to generate customised information pages handling the products and user databases. 4 The E-catalogue Format Definition As we stated above, the e-catalogue is the chosen element by which the end-user views and interacts with the seller s information. The decision of e-catalogues usage is based on the widely acceptance of these in web-based business. Also, while other applications can provide similar services, e- catalogues provide a range and effectiveness of service that exceeds the capability of any competing application, as physical or CD catalogues for example. The interactive possibilities of e-catalogues eliminate physical storage and makes continuous

6 52 F.J. García et al. updating effective and efficient [5]. An e-catalogue can be defined as electronic representations of information about the products and/or services of an organisation [16]. Concretely, in the context of this work, we use the notion of multi-vendor electronic catalogues. These e-catalogues are an essential part of electronic procurement solutions. They integrate supplier information by merging data and performing some degree of semantic reconciliation. The data is then presented to endusers as a centralised access point to the products and services that can be purchased electronically. The web-server intermediary represents this centralisation in this research. To the SMEs, the multi-vendor catalogue represents a way to infiltrate a wide variety of markets and exploit possible synergies with other selling parties. In addition, a catalogue integrator (the intermediary plays this role) bundles the offering with other features to make the aggregated catalogue more attractive (for example, the adaptive properties discussed in Section 3). Ginsburg et al. [11] stand out three basic e-catalogue models. These models represent the most common ways that organisations choose today to use emerging technologies for e-commerce procurement. These models are: Do-It-Yourself; Third- Party Integrator; and Real-Time Knowledge Discovery. The Third-Party Integrator approach is a typical B2B model, where the intermediary only manages the e-catalogue, and then rents access to parts of it. In this approach the buyers are not directly linked with the suppliers. In the Real-Time Knowledge Discovery model the intermediary is the buyer firm too, but it relies on advanced software techniques to make a fine-combed search over Internet and locale suitable products and suppliers. The e-catalogues are created dynamically and subsequently allow access to supplier data in real time. In our approach, the multi-vendor catalogue is based on the Do-It-Yourself approach, because in this model the intermediary takes the initiative to set up a catalogue, which comprises products from a controlled set of qualified SMEs. Besides, the communication between the intermediary and the SMEs is fixed, and it is made through an authoring tool, then this communication is not real-time as the model before. XML is the basis to establish a communication protocol between the SME and the intermediary, allowing the whole system to be built over a self-maintained platform, capable of configuring itself when changes are incorporated by the SME, with a minimum interaction of the web master. The intermediary stores the e-catalogues supplied by the SME, but it is the SME that determines what products will be shown, how these products will be organised and the visual format they will take. Also, in this approach, the SME always has the responsibility for managing the e-catalogue and its contents. The intermediary self-maintenance capability is possible because the XML file with the catalogue data is a semantic entity (both the tool and the intermediary share the same format definition expressed in an XML definition file or schema; see Figure 3) that the intermediary can automatically validate and integrate it into its own database. After the information is stored in the intermediary side, the searching processes from the e-commerce site functionality could find the products of the e- catalogue, and show them in the dynamically generated web pages.

7 A Web-Based E-commerce Facilitator Intermediary 53 <!ELEMENT catalogue (products, sheets, resources)> <!ATTRLIST catalogue name CDATA #REQUIRED> <!-- list of the products in the e-catalogue --> <!ELEMENT products product+> <!ELEMENT product field+> <!ATTRLIST product id CDATA #REQUIRED transaction (add modify delete) #REQUIRED> <!ELEMENT field value> <!ATTRLIS field code CDATA #REQUIRED name PCDATA #REQUIRED <!ELEMENT value #PCDATA> <!-- set of sheets in the enterprise e-catalogue --> <!ELEMENT sheets sheet+> <!ELEMENT sheet included_product*> <!ATTRLIST sheet file CDATA #REQUIRED> <!ELEMENT included_product EMPTY> <!ATTRLIST included_product code CDATA #REQUIRED> <!-- list of the attached resources --> <!ELEMENT resources resource+> <!ELEMENT resource EMPTY> <!ATTRLIST resource id CDATA #REQUIRED transaction (load delete) #REQUIRED> Fig. 3. Catalogue.dtd In the next section we explain the process to create an e-catalogue with the visual catalogue-designer tool. 5 The E-catalogue Creation Process Perhaps, one of the most innovative parts of this business model is the cataloguedesigner tool that allows both e-catalogue creation and publication activities. This authoring tool is distributed to the every SME that belongs to the e-commerce platform. The intermediary has to facilitate to the SMEs the contents creation, the update and the management of their products, and also a universal means for the supported e- catalogues. Then the majority of the transactions between the SMEs and the intermediary are made through this tool. The SME develops the contents of the e-catalogue with the authoring tool, saving the catalogues in an XML-format file; the Figure 3 shows the DTD for the e- catalogues. The designer of the e-catalogue will be the person in charge of e- catalogue maintenance, which is done on local computers, and the resulting catalogue is subsequently sent to the intermediary server. The designer and the enterprise need not be worried about e-catalogue integration, because this is an automatic task on the intermediary side. Using a tool such as a SME/intermediary interface facilitates the e-catalogue creation and publication processes, because the designer of them does not have to be a computer expert; he/she only needs to be familiar with basic office automation concepts, because all the knowledge concerning the saving format of the catalogues

8 54 F.J. García et al. and the communication for catalogue publication aspects are encapsulated inside the tool functionality. One of the major constraints in the design of this tool was to succeed in using it for a widely number of users. Related to this constraint we work in two directions: the portability of the tool, we use Java as implementation language, and its language independence, the tool is designed to allow multiple-language support. The working process with the catalogue-designer tool is structured around the work-view concept. The idea is that the information could be shown by different angles, one for each defined work-view. This perspective is justified by two main reasons: first, we want to reduce the amount of information that is shown to the user of the tool, thus avoiding an unnecessary information overload. On the other hand, we want the users of the tool to centre their efforts on the specific task in the overall process of the e-catalogue design. The main work-views defined in the presented visual design tool are: the template definition view, the product view, and the catalogue organisation view. These three work-views represent the functional process used to create or design an e-catalogue. They are chosen after a deeper task analysis of the e-catalogue creation process, and they can be found in the user interface of the tool in separate tabs, thus making it easier to switch. The template definition view is something like a data type definition mechanism that can be applied to describe the fields of the products. Inside this view two different elements are considered: the data template and the product template. The data template could be defined as the mechanism that allows us: first, to define the data format of one field for product description, and second, to help to the user to define the contents in a more effective way. Furthermore, a product template serves as a model for the later definition of the concrete products of the e-catalogues. A product template defines a set of fields that describes those products that will be defined using the product template, also this kind of template can be organised in a hierarchical way, inheriting field descriptions from its ascendants. The objective pursued is to group common characteristics to a set of products, reducing the efforts to define them. The product view gathers all the functionality for concrete products. While the templates make the work easier, the products are the conceptual definition of each element that compounds the e-catalogue. This work-view is like a product-description repository that makes it possible to create new products, maintains existing ones, and so on. The products could be presented in this view in different ways: classified by product categories, classified by product templates or ordered by name. The catalogue organisation view presents the grouping of the products in e- catalogues for their later publication in the server, and also their maintenance. The functionality associated with this view allows the inclusion of personalised security constraints to control what persons or what entities have access to the e-catalogue. When an e-catalogue is defined there is a separation between its conceptual definition and its visualization in the intermediary. This characteristic directs the e-catalogue composition process as can be seen in figures 4 and 5. An e-catalogue is organised by sections and subsections. Each section has sheets (Figure 4) where the products are located in a visual way (Figure 5).

9 A Web-Based E-commerce Facilitator Intermediary 55 Fig. 4. Catalogue layout Fig. 5. Catalogue sheet definition 6 Conclusions In this paper a business model for e-commerce has been presented. The model is intended to facilitate the entry of small and medium enterprises into electronic commerce opportunities and into electronic marketplaces. According to this, an intermediary appears as central element in the commerce architecture. The intermediary puts in contact this kind of enterprises with the endusers. In order to do that, the intermediary takes the initiative to set up a multi-vendor catalogue that comprises the products of the enterprises. Besides, the intermediary implements all the e-services for product purchasing. However, each SME is responsible for the creation, publication and maintenance of its e-catalogues. These tasks are performed by means of an authoring tool. The working process to create an e-catalogue is supported by the designer tool through three different functional work-views: the template view, the product view, and the catalogue manager view. Also, a fourth non-functional view is presented, the repository view, which interrelates the other views. The final result of this tool is an e-catalogue definition that is saved in an XML file that can be sent to the intermediary and automatically published in it. The intermediary architecture is implemented by a multi-agent system that consists of a set of collaborative agents, where the adaptive characteristics are very important in interface, behaviour and navigation issues. The overall business model presents a hybrid approximation of the two most widely used e-commerce models or dimensions: a B2B model among the SMEs and the intermediary, and a B2C model between the intermediary and the end-users. As the final conclusion of this paper, we want to underline that one of the most interesting characteristics of the proposed model is the reduction on dependencies for the SMEs from third parties, allowing small enterprises to have a place in the global marketplace on Internet with a moderate investment.

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