In the Age of Information a growing number of customers consider online shopping an important part of everyday life. For this reason dealers increasingly focus on offering goods through online stores.

The advantages of shopping online are painfully obvious: at home customers may conveniently browse through a big range of goods, shop around and easily place orders in just one click without having to put up with the usual shopping stress.

This relatively new buying behaviour makes high demands on a majority of dealers, for the market is highly competitive and cost pressure is rising. The complex background processes accompanied by customer orders like product purchase, shipping and accounting pose a big challenge for online dealers.

The processes required to guarantee a smooth order processing are often poorly coordinated and rarely effective or efficiently realisable.

Integrating new service providers into existing systems of online dealers is cost- intensive and time-consuming due to differing interfaces used by e. g. suppliers and distributors.

Customer orders are often processed and transferred manually, goods must be obtained in advance, pre-financed and stored in warehouses.
Online dealers have to bear commodity risks and storage costs and therefore are forced to raise article prices.

Information regarding order states is not centrally provided to all order handling parties and a manual processing requires changes in medium and therefore increases error-proneness. Customers have to put up with unneccessary waiting time and quality customer support can not be accomplished.

Until now online dealers didn’t have the option to efficiently and comprehensively map the process flows related to customer orders.

A solution could not be found on the market, where a consistently electronic processing of orders was possible without having to bear commodity risks, connecting all involved service providers like distributors, payment service providers, content suppliers and customer support via interfaces.