The proposed E-Commerce model is founded on a new message transmission protocol dubbed the “New Electronic Commerce Protocol” or “NECP”. NECP defines the following characteristics of the E-Commerce model:

• The valid message formats available to merchants for transmitting orders to the acquiring systems using XML DTD definitions;
• The valid message formats available to the acquirer in communicating the status of a specific order back to the merchant;
• The algorithms to be used in constructing the MAC to validate these messages;
• The procedures to be employed in distributing the authentication keys used in constructing the MACs;
• The nature and list of optional parameters for any specific merchant to be stored as message defaults by the acquirer;
• The transmission formats available to the merchant and acquirer in sending messages to each other.