Abstract
The performance of network and communication software is a major concern for making the electronic commerce applications in a distributed environment a success. The quality of service in electronic commerce can generically be measured by convenience, privacy/security, response time, throughput, reliability, timeliness, accuracy, and precision. We present the quality of service parameters, software architecture used in e-commerce, experimental data about transaction processing in the internet, characteristics of digital library databases used in e-commerce and communication measurements for such data. We present a summary of e-commerce companies and their status and give an example of electronic trading as an application.