Building an E-Commerce website Dr John P Abraham

Building an E-Commerce website Dr. John P. Abraham

Why people shop online? • • • Price Convenience variety Hard to find Timid to buy from a store in the presence of people Why people do not purchase on web security, lack of privacy and quality

Management challenges • Developing a clear understanding of the business objectives • Knowing how to choose the right technology to achieve those objectives.

Consider • • • Organizational capabilities Hardware architecture Software Telecommunications Site design Human resources

Website Systems development life cycle • • • System analysis/planning System design System building Testing Implementation of service

System analysis/planning • What do we want the e-commerce site to do? • Start identifying objectives for the site • Then list system functionalities – A list of the types of information systems capabilities you will need to achieve your objectives. • Now develop information requirements

Example • Objective: Display goods • System functionality: Digital catalog • Information requirements: Dynamic text and graphics catalog. • ------ • Objective: Personalize product • System functionality: customer-onsite tracking • Information requirements: site log for every customer visit; datamining

Create modules Modules

System design • Logical design – Data flow diagrams that describes the flow of information at your e-commerce site – Processing functions that must be performed – Databases that will be used • Physical design – Server specifications – Software to be developed or purchased – Type of connection front/back end Draw pictures on the board.

Testing Unit testing Testing program modules Done by technical personnel System testing Testing the site as a whole Done my management and marketing dpt Acceptance testing Test to see if business objectives have been satisfied

Some help I found Create a list of content that you can include on your website that will help accomplish the essential goals you have identified. Create a Cohesive theme that creates strong corporate branding and that ties all of these elements together. Use consistent easy to identify navigational elements throughout the site.

More help • • Make your site personal, engaging and appealing. Let your customers know who you are. Respect Your Customers’ Privacy Make Sure to Clearly Indicate That thier Orders are Secure • Give Your Customers Real Value from Your Website • Give Your Customers a Clear Reason to Order From You Rather Than Your Competition

Implementation & Maintenance E-Commerce systems are always evolving

Optimization of web performance • Page content – Optimize html and images • Reduce comments and white spaces • Page generation – Server response time. Multiple servers. – Device based accelerators • Page delivery – Edge caching (Akamai) – Bandwidth

Architecture • Simple vs. multi-tiered architecture • Simple – Static web page serving • Tiered – Product sales • Dynamic web serving • Data serving

Two-Tier • Request for page web server Dynamic content database – A web server responds to requests for web pages and a database server provides backend data storage.

Multi-tier architecture • Requests web server(s) Middle Tier (application servers, database servers, ad servers, mail servers, etc. ) Backend server (corporate applications, finance, production, enterprise systems, HR systems, etc. ) • A web server is linked to a middle-tier layer as well as to backend corporate systems.

Web server software • Apache 63% - Unix choice • Microsoft 27% • Others – 10% (Zeus, Sun. ONE, etc).

Site Management tools • Identify invalid links, dead links and orphan files • Webtrends. com

Dynamic page generation tools • Contents of web pages are stored as objects and converted to html upon request. • The objects are retrieved from databases using CGI (common gateway interface), ASP (Active Server pages), JSP (Java Server pages) or other server-side programs. • ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) is the standard access method.

Application Servers • Middleware software – List server – Proxy server – Mail server – Catalog display – Shopping cart – Fax server – Auction server

E-Commerce Suites • Merchant server packages – Bizland, Hypermart, Yahoo stores – IBM’s Web. Sphere Commerce – Microsoft’s Commerce Server 2002 – Broadvision one-to-one commerce – Interworld’s commerce exchange 6. 0

Web-site Design • • • CGI ASP JSP, JAVA, Java. Script Active. X and VBScript Cold. Fusion

development skills Load balancing – clustering – failure recovery – client/server - database server Distributed transactions – concurrency control – security HTTP, browsers, HTML, push and pull, page layout, forms, frames, images, css, scripting, cookies, active. X, plug-ins, sessions, CGI, XML, XSL, ADO. NET SQL, Queries, Joins and unions, cursors, views, stored procedures, query optimizer, triggers DHCP, DNS, IP Addressing, routing, WINS, IP-sec

Add technologies – Chat program – Order management • Keeping in touch with client on the progress (quick shipping) – Automated RMAs – Connecting to different online payment methods – Advertising on the web – Big data and datamining

Social media Direct purchase Demonstrate usage Chatbots (automated helper) Biometric integration Mobile apps Intelligent customization for each client based on usage datamining