Pluggable services: a platform architecture for e-commerce

Current architectures for online retail do not provide the right level of flexibility in adopting new services to achieve continuous customer satisfaction and to optimize e-commerce performance. Retailers who rely on pre-packaged or custom-built software are struggling to keep the pace with new trends like cross-border or omni-channel commerce. A promising approach to overcome many software adoption obstacles and to improve pluggability in service-oriented architectures are cloud services. This thesis introduced a novel quality model that allows to assess the pluggability of those services in common platform architectures for e-commerce. Following a design science methodology, a state of the art architectural model is instantiated by means of a platform prototype to which the quality model is applied in order to measure the prototype’s service pluggability and gradually enhance the architectural model. A number of pluggable services for cross-selling, sales forecasting, and trade compliance are presented that reflect the recent trends in online retail. The covered services permit to demonstrate the functionality of the platform prototype and to evaluate the architecture’s capability to improve service pluggability.