The EBF Application Foundation: An Approach towards the Design of an E-Commerce Framework for Small and Medium Enterprises

Many e-commerce solutions have been developed to provide suppliers with a virtual storefront. Those e-commerce solutions are most often licensed from a software provider and hosted on a dedicated web server. The cost for licensing, customization and maintenance of the virtual storefront consumes a significant amount of the total revenue that is made with the e-business. Businesses with a solid revenue stream can more easily bring up those investments than businesses that operate upon very small profit margins and volumes. For Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), which are run by only a few individuals, it becomes literally impossible to afford an investment as such. Even though the investment amortized within a very short period of time, those businesses would not be able to gather the necessary funds. Certainly, SME could sidestep to a personal storefront on huge marketplaces, but firstly might such a general purpose marketplace not provide all the functionality that is required and secondly does such a marketplace not integrate with other systems. This book covers an approach towards an e-commerce platform that due to its low TCO is affordable by even the smallest enterprises.