What Are Transaction Servers?

OBI (Open Buying on the Internet) is a proposed standard for business-to-business exchanges on the Internet, especially for high-volume, low-cost transactions.

Internet public trading

Right!

OBI (Open Buying on the Internet) is a proposed standard for business-to-business exchanges on the Internet, especially for high-volume, low-cost transactions.

Chinese name

Internet public trading

Foreign name

Open Buying on the Internet

Foreign short name

OBI

OBI (Open Buying on the Internet) is a proposed standard for business-to-business exchanges on the Internet, especially for high-volume, low-cost transactions. OBI uses a lot of security technologies, such as digital certificates, to ensure the security of the ordering and filling process. On average, 80% of companies buy things not for production, but for things like office supplies, cleaning products and computer equipment. Just placing and completing an order can cost up to $ 150 per agency and up to $ 50 for sellers. In the fall of 1996, at the Internet Trading Roundtable, a group of Fortune 500 companies and their suppliers sat together to develop an open standard for the electronic economy of trade to trade. The resulting product-OBI-is used to reduce redundant operations in trading, minimize errors, and save labor and transaction costs.

There are four entities in an OBI transaction: applicant, purchaser, seller, and payment agency. The applicant is the person who placed the order and needs a digital certificate for authentication. The buying organization should have an OBI server that can receive and approve OBI order requests. At the same time, the purchasing agency negotiates with the selling agency to reach a contract. The selling agency's role is to provide a catalog tailored for each department of each company, maintain products and prices according to the contract with the purchasing agency, and give the appropriate payment agency the right to pay.

Users do not need to have special knowledge of the OBI process to complete an OBI transaction. With OBI, buyers only need a computer, an Internet connection, a web browser, and an OBI application. The following is a typical OBI scenario:

• A customer needs to buy some cleaning supplies. Using the computer in the storage room, the client connected to the unit's transaction server through a web browser.

• The customer selected a retailer from the list on the homepage of the Purchasing Department and was certified by the retailer's server.

• The customer browsed through the catalogue tailored to the company's needs and selected the desired cleaning supplies. The customer clicks a button to submit the order, and the order will be formatted in Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) format. The order is then encapsulated into an OBI object.

• The customer's order is sent to the company's purchasing agency for approval via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). The purchase agency decodes the OBI object and approves the order.

• The order is sent to the retailer and the order is completed.

• The retailer submits the payment to the payment agency.

• The payment agency sends the billing data to the company's invoice department.

OBI architecture, technical specifications, guidelines, flexibility and implementation information can be found on the OBI Alliance website. Future OBI releases will include international technical support and use Extensible Markup Language (XML) data formats. ^[1]