Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
customer group
e-commerce system
5
enter
e-commerce
system
fill
shopping
cart
choose
payment
method
generation potential
customer
interact
1
2
3
4
- available payment methods
- favorite payment methods
- utility of payment methods
- global male/female ratio
- number of potential consumers
- entry propability distribution
- time interval
- distribution of cart values
Fig. 1. Overview of the simulation components
system. The e-commerce system has also a specific behavior and is also described
by abstract properties. The system behavior is defined by a process consisting
of different activities. Each activity represents a point of interaction between
the customers and the e-commerce system. Thus, each interaction point can be
realized by an encapsulated simulation. This encapsulation enables the reuse or
replace of individual simulations.
The complete simulation chain consists of five parts. (1) The first part gener-
ates the set of potential customers with a specific gender (female or male). Input
parameters are the share ratio of gender and the number of customers who can
participate in online business. (2) The second part simulates the shop entry of
customers. Since from the potential customers, only a small number visits the
shop. The entrance mainly depends on the gender and the time of entrance. Thus,
we can define as input parameter the probability in dependency of the gender
and time. This time differentiation enables the simulation of typical seasons such
as Christmas or Easter. (3) The third part simulates the filling of the cart with
a customer-specific cart value. The distribution of the cart values serves as in-
put for the simulation and differentiates between male and female consumers.
The cart values can be used to calculate economic key data according to the
offered payment types. Moreover, it is possible to model a dependency between
the cart value and the available payment methods. (4) The fourth part simu-
lates the payment behavior of the customers. Input parameters are the preferred
payment method of the customers, the available payment types, and the utility
of the available payment methods. We provide a more detailed presentation of
this simulation in the next section. (5) The fifth part of the simulation is the
e-commerce system that serves as container for the aforementioned simulations
two, three and four.
2.2 Simulation of the Payment Behavior
The objective of this simulation is to reproduce the payment behavior of cus-
tomers in an online store in order to find the optimal payment configuration.
The input of this simulation is a set of customers with a gender and a cart value.
The output is customers with a certain payment method or a cancel of buying.
The assumed behavior of a typical customer is shown in Figure 2 as an
UML activity diagram. A customer prefers to pay with her/his favored pay-
ment method and checks for the availability of this method. If the method is
 
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