Enabling Cooperative E-Commerce on the Web

This paper presents a real-life Web-based application for cooperative e-commerce to manage cooperation between a merchant and a group of customers aiming to purchase collectively a product. This form of transaction is a common practice for many companies such as travel agencies, course providers and whole-sale businesses which offer special deals for groups of customers to increase their sales volume. Groups of customers are generally ad-hoc coalitions of individuals and organizations who unite in pursuit of a common goal that is to achieve the business transaction. The system presented in this paper facilitates cooperation between users in order to purchase products, which typically are donations supporting charitable projects that cannot be afforded by single customers. Once a customer donates, he will be able to track the completion status of the project he is involved in. The donor can also invite a tierce person to join a particular project