A General E-Commerce Data Model For Strategic Advantage: Mapping Site Structure To Site Visit Behavior

Abstract

This paper includes a general data model that supports e-commerce activity. Numerous data models have been presented which support traditional business activities, but none has yet addressed the specific needs of e-commerce systems. An e-commerce system has unique opportunities to capture information about the entire online experience of each customer. Our general e-commerce data model (GEM) captures information such as the length of time a customer spends on a given web page, pictures that are examined or are “clicked on”, and the characteristics of visits which lead to customer purchases. GEM will be extremely useful to many e-commerce personnel including marketing strategists as they will be able to determine which parts of a web page visit lead to successful and unsuccessful visits. Additionally, GEM is designed to facilitate business intelligence (BI), which concerns the area of electronically monitoring competitors’ web presence. GEM can be used to monitor those accessing a given website and understanding their site behavior. GEM is presented using the CASE dialect of the entity-relationship (E/R) modeling paradigm.