eCT: The B2c e-Commerce toolkit for the WebComfort platform

Electronic commerce (e-Commerce) involves a complex set of business workflows regarding the buying and selling of products or services by means of electronic systems such as the Internet. e-Commerce applications can be supported, amongst other alternatives, by content management systems (CMS) through specific extensions. This paper presents the eCT extension, an e-Commerce extension developed on the top of the Web-Comfort CMS platform, whose main goals are: (1) adaptability to different contexts, such as different types of stores, countries, cultures or tax systems; (2) extensibility, due to the ease of development and addition of new functionalities; and (3) ease of installation and configuration, to fulfill different business requirements. This paper discusses the major technical details of the eCT, such as: (1) the product facet model; (2) the support to different e-commerce models; and (3) the support for different payment, shipping and taxing methods.