Understanding Electronic Commerce Modeling Language (ECML) and its Associated Privacy Considerations

Jiayi Zhou (Joy)

Have you ever been bothered by the tedious process of filling out online payments and shipping details before you complete an order? Does this unpleasant experience discourage you from  buying products online? If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, you might be amazed as I did when I first read about and understand what electronic commerce language does. 

Electronic commerce modeling language (ECML) can sound very technical at the first glance. The “e-commerce” component of this phrase might be a familiar concept, but a majority of people might be a little confused when they see ECML in general. Electronic commerce modeling language is a set of data structures that simplifies the process of manually entering your personal details to complete an online order.1 For instance,  when an e-commerce website adopts to ECML, it enables the customers to directly transfer their credit card number, billing information, and shipping address from a digital wallet to the payment form.2 By offering a smooth data transfer service, ECML can minimize errors that can arise if customers manually enter their information. It can also clear any confusion caused by different web payment designs.

The invention of the electronic commerce modeling language not only improves a customer’s online shopping experience, but also benefits the e-commerce merchants by decreasing the occurrence of a phenomenon known as  shopping cart abandonment. To me, this is one of the major reasons why I view ECML as a significant process in the e-commerce industry. According to the journal article “Motivational and Affective Factors Underlying Consumer Dropout and Transactional Success in eCommerce,” customers give up over 50% of online transactions at the last minute.3 The lengthy and complex forms required to be filled out are  one of the major factors that causes customer irritation, driving them to cancel their payments before their orders are complete. This study has proposed “minimal checkout procedures” as a solution to increase transaction success rate. ECML, as mentioned earlier, can offer a “one click” service by building a channel between wallet softwares and e-commerce websites of different designs. This improvement on shopping experience can potentially bring higher revenue to the online business. 

To complete an order on any e-commerce website, customers are required to provide extremely sensitive information such as billing and shipping addresses. The journal article “Information Sensitivity Typology: Mapping the Degree and Type of Risk Consumers Perceive in Personal Data Sharing” has categorized an information type called secure identifier, which includes the most critical individual information such as medical history, DNA profile, and social security numbers etc.4 The home address, as one of the secure identifiers, is also perceived as the greatest risk by a customer. Furthermore, another empirical study titled “Breaking the Privacy Paradox: The Value of Privacy and Associated Duty of Firms'' has leaned towards the “privacy as a core value” argument – customers would maintain their expectations of privacy protection even after they have disclosed personal information in exchange for convenient services.5 Both of these academic papers have underlined e-commerce merchant responsibilities of protecting a user’s private information. Therefore, the firms that use electronic commerce modeling language should follow the regulations suggested by ECML’s developers. These guidelines include the implementation of passwords when the users access the stored data each time, granting users the control over when and what information could be released. Disabling ECML to directly memorize the stored data is another way to protect the information in the digital wallet.

After reading about electronic commerce modeling language, I hope it would make you feel at ease when you think about online shopping. Next time if you have the needs of ordering things online, I would suggest you not be discouraged by the tidemous payment forms at first hand, and trust the magic of ECML. 

Reference:

  1. Eastlake, D.. 2005. “Electronic Commerce Modeling Language (ECML) Version 2 Specification.” RFC 4112: 1-34.

  2. Eastlake, D. and T. Goldstein. 2001. “ECML v1.1: Field Specifications for E-Commerce.” RFC 3106: 1- 20.

  3. Bell, Lynne, R. McCloy, Laurie Butler and J. Vogt. 2020. “Motivational and Affective Factors Underlying Consumer Dropout and Transactional Success in eCommerce: An Overview.” Frontiers in Psychology 11: n. Pag.

  4. Milne, George R., George Pettinico, Fatima M. Hajjat, and Ereni Markos. 2017. “Information Sensitivity Typology: Mapping the Degree and Type of Risk Consumers Perceive in Personal Data Sharing.” Journal of Consumer Affairs 51, no. 1: 133.

  5. Martin, Kirsten. 2020. “Breaking the Privacy Paradox: The Value of Privacy and Associated Duty of Firms.” Business Ethics Quarterly 30 (1): 65–96.