A Sustainable Service-Oriented B2C Framework for Small Businesses

Electronic commerce is fast expanding all over the world. Currently most B2C (business to customer) electronic commerce focuses on retailing and other online services, such as online banking. Compared with large-scale enterprises and organizations, small businesses find it difficult to involve in electronic commerce because the cost is too high to be affordable. The cost for electronic commerce not only includes establishing cost but also drumbeating cost and maintenance cost. This paper exploits modern service oriented architecture to develop and evaluate a novel low cost B2C framework particularly suitable for small and micro businesses. The framework enjoys the features such as easy to set up, low cost and high business agility, which are highly needed by small businesses. To reduce the cost and promote the business, the framework congregates similar services supplied by traditional small businesses into a common Web interface; consumers can get the services via the common Web interface and then communicate directly with the service providers. The framework has been implemented and evaluated in a domain of real life small businesses.