MET: Multi-party E-Commerce Transaction Model

Electronic commerce system for media content distribution has been evolved for decades. Throughout the time, various business models such as business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) are proven to be successful. However, most of the models require players to be tightly bound to the supplier, either tied to its designed web interface or limited to its business flow. In this paper, we propose MET, an open, distributed and flexible business model that minimizes the dependency between the buyers and the supplier without compromising trade opportunity. In this model, supplier offers item repository, payment and peripheral services in the form of open interfaces. Agents import items from supplier and sell to consumers using the interfaces. Revenue is shared between the supplier and agent for each sale. Transaction connection is established between the consumer and supplier through the agent´s portal. Furthermore, we analyze the risks of our model and provide a sample use case to illustrate its application. We believe this model could create new type of social networks that are based on e-commerce activities.