Accessibility and scalability in collaborative eCommerce environments

The Much advancement has lately occurred in eCommerce systems’ interfaces. Product specifications listings combined with pictures is no longer considered the benchmark for eCommerce interfaces. Albeit commercial websites haven’t ventured in these developments, academic research has tried, through this progression, to mimic the real-life shopping experience. Shopping in real-life is a social experience with other components attached to it: customers consult with experts and shop in groups benefiting from others’ opinions. These aspects, when lacking, can lead to reduction in sales. In this paper, we build on a collaborative eCommerce system. The system adopts concepts from virtual environments, allowing customers to interact with three-dimensional models of the items of interests in the virtual shop, as well as share those items with other customers or ask for expert opinions, in real-time. Our system addresses accessibility, by using Macromedia Shockwave, a widely deployed player, and therefore avoids the need of unusual plug-ins, such as VRML viewers. The system also addresses scalability, by using a peer-to-peer communications architecture to support a number of geographically dispersed users on the Internet simultaneously.