A Framework for Integrating Shopping Cart Software in Mobile Applications (FISCSiMA)

Abstract: Today an increasing share of shopping is happening online. The purchases are often made on online stores that are in turn often managed by software called shopping cart software. Simultaneously a new shift is underway in the e-commerce market where more and more purchases are made from mobile phones. In order to take advantage of this shift companies are eager to integrate their shopping cart software into mobile applications that take full advantage of the mobile phone’s capabilities and give the mobile shopper a better experience. Depending on the shopping cart software used, the software vendor might not provide any best practices for doing the mobile integration. Without any help from the software vendor, the businesses are facing a difficult problem with many possible integration architectures to choose from. The problem is therefore, that selecting the optimal integration architecture for integrating shopping cart software into a mobile application can be challenging and complex. In this thesis we explore the domain of shopping cart software with the purpose of developing a framework for integrating shopping cart software into a mobile application. We suggest an integration architecture selection framework, which we call A Framework for Integrating Shopping Cart Software in Mobile Applications (FISCiMA). Our goal is twofold: (1) guide entities in choosing an integration architecture for shopping cart software and (2) to provide a basis for further research in the domain of integration architecture selection models. Conducted research is of qualitative type, research method is applied research and research approach is inductive reasoning. We work in five research phases: (1) Literature study, (2) Interview of our client, (3) Design of framework, (4) Evaluation and (5) Fine-tuning. Following these phases, we collect basic knowledge of shopping cart software and their mobile integration from the two first phases to design a framework in the third phase. The designed framework is then evaluated in the fourth phase and finally improved according to the feedback received from the evaluation in the fifth phase. The evaluation of FISCSiMA framework is done using a questionnaire, which is answered to by our involved body. The results of the evaluation suggest that the framework is intuitive, straightforward and flexible and simplifies the integration of shopping cart software into mobile applications. The authors suggest further work should be done to evaluate the merits of the FISCSiMA framework and research if the FISCSiMA framework could be applicable to other types of software.