Space-Based General-Purpose E-Commerce Platforms: The World's First Proposed Framework for Deploying Complete Online Shopping Infrastructure on Earth-Orbital Computing Platforms

Contemporary e-commerce platforms have become essential components of the global digital economy. Platforms such as Amazon and Alibaba rely on extensive terrestrial computing infrastructure to support product discovery, merchant management, shopping carts, order processing, payment coordination, inventory management, personalized recommendations, customer services, and other commercial operations. Although satellite networks increasingly provide communication connectivity and orbital computing is emerging as a potential extension of terrestrial cloud infrastructure, the core operational systems of general-purpose online shopping platforms have predominantly been designed around terrestrial deployment. This paper proposes Orbital E-Commerce Infrastructure (OECI), a conceptual framework for deploying complete general-purpose e-commerce platform infrastructure within Earth-orbital computing environments. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to explicitly formulate a framework dedicated to the deployment of complete general-purpose consumer e-commerce platform infrastructure as an operational service on orbital computing platforms, rather than treating satellites merely as communication relays, content delivery nodes, or supplementary computing resources for terrestrial shopping services. The proposed framework encompasses the principal operational capabilities of a modern online shopping ecosystem, including customer account management, merchant registration, product catalog management, product search and discovery, shopping carts, order management, transaction coordination, payment service integration, inventory management, recommendation systems, promotional campaigns, customer support, fraud detection, and commercial analytics. These services are organized as distributed orbital application components supported by orbital computing, storage, networking, and orchestration infrastructure. The proposed architecture also introduces ground–orbit commercial coordination, allowing orbital e-commerce services to interact with terrestrial payment providers, warehouses, manufacturers, merchants, transportation networks, and delivery systems. Consequently, the framework does not assume that physical goods, warehouses, or logistics operations must be relocated into space. Instead, it distinguishes the computational infrastructure responsible for operating an e-commerce platform from the physical infrastructure responsible for fulfilling commercial orders. The paper further examines distributed transaction processing, inventory consistency, payment security, data synchronization, service availability, cybersecurity, communication latency, orbital resource allocation, and economic feasibility. It presents deployment models, operational scenarios, and research questions for future investigation. No experimental results or demonstrated performance advantages are claimed. The purpose of this study is to establish a distinct architectural research direction for the operation of complete general-purpose online shopping platforms within orbital computing environments.