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

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 testingTesting program modules

Done by technical personnel

System testingTesting the site as a whole

Done my management and marketing dpt

Acceptance testingTest 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 you site personal, engaging and appealing. • Let your customers know who you are. • Respect Your Customers Privacy • Make Sure to Clearly Indicate That There 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, SunONE, 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 WebSphere Commerce– Microsoft’s Commerce Server 2002– Broadvision one-to-one commerce– Interworld’s commerce exchange 6.0

Web-site Design

• CGI

• ASP

• JSP, JAVA, JavaScript

• ActiveX and VBScript

• ColdFusion

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, activeX, 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