An E-Business Model Facilitating Service Provider Selection in B2C E-Comme rce

The advent and expansion of the Internet and its applications, among them e-commerce, has provided new opportunities for emergence of novel e-business models. A portion of these models are in the form of performing a mediatory role – so called, third party – to provide some services for customers or businesses and facilitating transactions between them. In B2C e-commerce, often a service consumer can supply his service demand from multifarious providers and when he doesn't have any transaction with many of them, making an accurate decision becomes challenging. Therefore he would need to interact with others to acquire relevant information. Current approaches are generally rating-based with poor performance. Recently a new promising approach with considerably better performance is proposed by Şensoy et al (2007). This paper reviews this approach along with its weaknesses and problems and proposes a new model to eliminate these problems, in which a third party contributes to the consumers to choose their desired service providers.

Keywords:

service provider selection , E-business Model , Third Party , B2C E-commerce