CIGMA: active inventory service in global e-market for enabling one-stop shopping over Internet shopping sites

A fully connected Internet business environment will introduce a high level of dynamics to the business process. It may result in very frequent changes in business decisions and thus, information for various items may undergo constant change. In addition, there could be a flood of similar shopping sites. In such a highly dynamic environment, ordinary online customers may feel that online shopping is not comfortable. Existing service models or systems cannot effectively reflect such a dynamic environment and support ordinary online customers. We propose a new e-commerce service called CIGMA. CIGMA provides catalog comparison and purchase mediation services over multiple shopping sites for ordinary online customers. The service is based on up-to-date information by reflecting frequent changes in catalog information in real-time. It also matches the desire of online customers for fast response since the service is provided based on data cached in a high performance caching system. An important and challenging issue in realizing the CIGMA service is design of the merchant-side interface. This paper presents CIGMA, focusing on its merchant-side interface including service setup and deployment procedure.