Scaling for E-Business

2.1. Introduction

Customers of an e-commerce site interact with it through a series of consecutive and related requests made during a single visit, which is called session. Within a session, customers can issue requests of different types, such as Login, Browse, Search, Add to Shopping Cart, or Pay. Different customers may exhibit different patterns of navigation through an e-commerce site and therefore may invoke the different functions provided by the site in different ways and with different frequencies. Some customers may be heavy buyers while others may be occasional buyers who do extensive searching and browsing but very seldom buy from the site. The customer's behavior while interacting with an e-commerce site has impacts on the IT resources ...