ECPAS: A Blockchain-based E-Commerce Price Auditing System
Toshiki Takakubo, Ruidong Li, Haihan Nan, Qun Jin, Zhou Su, Huaming Wu · 2024
In recent years, with the widespread of the Internet and further big data, E-Commerce (EC) has emerged as a popular medium for users to engage in online transactions of products and services. Generally, Service Providers (SPs) of EC collect users' personal information and utilize advanced big data technologies to enhance their services. However, the price discrimination problem may also arise based on personalized information, where malicious SPs analyze users' historical orders to provide the same products or services at varying prices depending on their characteristics. In this paper, we propose a price auditing system called E-Commerce Price Auditing System (ECPAS) to resolve this problem. ECPAS consists of four smart contracts: User Registration Contract, Product Registration Contract, Insurance Purchasing Contract, and Price Auditing Contract, which realize EC price auditing and financial compensation for price discrimination based on a private blockchain. Meanwhile, ECPAS utilizes InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to efficiently store product data. Experimental results demonstrate that ECPAS achieves a higher processing speed of 5 million price auditing per day while maintaining low gas and on-chain storage costs based on the IPFS.