Execution guarantees in electronic commerce payments

Abstract

Electronic Commerce over the Internet is one of the most rapidly growing areas in todays business. However, considering the most important phase of Electronic Commerce, the payment, it has to be noted that in most currently exploited approaches support for at least one of the participants is limited. From a general point of view, a couple of requirements for correct payment interactions exist, namely different levels of atomicity in the exchange of money and goods of a single customer with different merchants. Furthermore, as fraudulent behavior of participants in Electronic Commerce has to be considered, the ability to legally prove the processing of a payment transaction is required. In this paper, we identify the different requirements participants demand on Electronic Commerce payment from the point of view of execution guarantees and present how payment interactions can be implemented by transactional processes. Finally, we show how the maximum level of execution guarantees can be provided for payment processes in a natural way by applying transactional process management to an Electronic Commerce Payment Coordinator. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.