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 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 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