A framework for designing the enterprise-wide e-commerce portal for evolving organizations

The number of organizations offering e-commerce solutions is growing exponentially each year. Without a doubt, e-commerce will no longer be a choice for organizations rather it will be a competitive necessity to ensure business prosperity. Integral to the success of e-commerce is having good e-commerce software that can enable organizations to offer online products and services as well as integrate their business processes and supply chains within and with their collaborators or partners in a perfect, seamless manner. One of the main obstacles for adoption of e-commerce faced by many organizations; however, has been the lack of such proper integrated e-commerce software. There have been few ready-made software solutions offered by vendors, which can be customized for organizations' business models and processes, and these solutions are based on "piece meal" approaches and thus lack much of the enterprise capabilities organizations need to adopt. In this paper, we suggest a framework for developing an enterprise-wide integrated e-commerce portal for evolving organizations. Such a framework will help any organization to design a distributed, extensible, cross-platform, collaborative and integrated e-commerce portal.