Patterns for Internet shops
Eduardo B. Fernández, Yi Liu, Rouyi Pan · 2001
Abstract Shopping on the Internet has become common and any web site must provide convenientuser interfaces for this purpose. An appropriate infrastructure is needed to support avariety of navigational views. We present two patterns that are part of the infrastructureof web shops: the Catalog pattern and the Shopping Process pattern. The Catalog patterndescribes how to organize the information about products for a web shop, the ShoppingProcess pattern describes the steps required to buy something in the Internet. We alsoshow the combination of these patterns in a web shop. Introduction Web shops have become a common activity because they bring many opportunities forshop owners and customers. There are many patterns that can be discovered in this typeof applications. We can divide them into three types:• Patterns for navigational views.• Patterns for building interfaces.• Patterns for infrastructure.A variety of patterns of the first two types have been presented [Lya98, Lya99, Pal,Ros00]. Good infrastructure can improve the response of the server and also providesextensibility and flexibility for building good navigational views and interfaces. This typeof patterns should be clear, flexible, efficient, extensible, and independent of the othertwo types.We present in this paper two patterns for the infrastructure needed to build a web shop:the Catalog pattern and the Shopping Process pattern. The Catalog pattern organizesinformation about products in an efficient and flexible way. It also provides mechanismsto help customers make decisions. The goal of the Shopping Process pattern is to simplifythe shopping process and to improve the efficiency and convenience of the buyingprocess.