1. Chapter-04 Building an Ecommerce Website

2. Building an E-commerce Site: A Systematic Approach The two most important management challenges in building a successful e-commerce site are 1.Develop a clear understanding of your business objectives 2.Choosing the right technologies to achieve those objectives Thus, effective plan and knowledge base of the above factors will help in making sound management decisions.

3. The Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) The SDLC is a methodology for understanding the business objectives of any system and designing an appropriate solution. It helps in creating documents that communicate to senior management the objectives of the site, important milestones, and the uses of resources. The five major steps involved are: a)System Analysis/Planning b)Systems Design c)Building the System d)Testing e)Implementation Source: Pearson Education, Inc.

4. Building A System: In-house versus Outsourcing In-house is developing and building a website on your own. Outsourcing is hiring an outside vendor to provide the services which cannot be performed with in-house personnel Build versus outsourcing In-house building includes: 1.High number of risks. 2.High skilled set required 3.Use of pre-built template (optional) 4.High cost Host your own versus outsourcing 1.The hosting company ensures that website is accessible 24/7 2.Co-location : A firm has control over the operations of its web server but is placed in at the vendors’ physical facility.

5. Building A System Source: Pearson Education, Inc.

6. Factors in Web Site Optimization Source: Pearson Education, Inc

7. Components of a Web Site Budget Source: Pearson Education, Inc.

8. System Architecture System architecture: refers to the arrangement of software, machinery, and tasks in an information system needed to achieve a specific functionality Types of system architecture: 1.Two-Tier Architecture: Web server responds to requests for Web pages and a database server provides backend data storage 2.Multi-Tier Architecture: Web server is linked to a middle-tier layer that typically includes a series of application servers that perform specific tasks, as well as to a backend layer of existing corporate systems

9. Source: Pearson Education, Inc.

10. Web Server Software All e-commerce sites require basic Web server software to answer requests from customers for HTML and XML pages. It thus answers HTTP requests from customers. The choice of Web server software depends on the operating system. Apache, the leading Web server software; only works with UNIX operating system. Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) is the second major Web server software. Source: Pearson Education, Inc.

11. Dynamic Page Generation Tools It is one of the most important innovations in Web site operation. Dynamic page generation: contents of Web page are stored as objects in a database rather than being hard-coded in HTML, and are fetched when needed from database. Tools used for retrieving the objects : 1.CGI (Common Gateway Interface) 2.ASP (Active Server Pages) 3.JSP (Java Server Pages)

12. Application Servers Web application servers are software programs that provide specific business functionality required for a Web site. Servers which provides software applications with services such as security, data services, transaction support, load balancing, and management of large distributed systems. They are an example of middleware software.

13. E-commerce Merchant Server Software Functionality Online catalog : List of products available on web site. Shopping cart : allows shoppers to set aside desired purchases, to review what they have selected, edit their selections as necessary and then actually make the purchase.

14. Choosing the Hardware for an E- commerce Site The Hardware platform used to achieve e- commerce functionality by referring to all the underlying computing equipments. Its objective is to ▫meet demands without wasting much money. ▫understand the different factors that affect speed, capacity and scalability of a site.

15. Right Sizing the Hardware Platform -The Demand Side The most important factor that affects the speed is the ‘demand’ put up by the customers. Factors involved in demand include:  Number of simultaneous users in peak periods which can increase traffic and thus speed.  Nature of customer requests (user profile)  Type of content matters a lot.  Security.  Number of items in inventory  Number of page requests  Speed of legacy applications

16. -The Supply Side Scalability: refers to the ability of a site to increase in size as demand warrants Ways to scale hardware:  Vertically: increase the processing power of individual components i.e. grow without investing much on buying new equipments.  Horizontally: employ multiple computers to share the workload, as required. May be a demand needs more power which is not been able to get generated with the existing ones.  Improve processing architecture

17. The Information Policy Set Privacy policy: Set of public statements declaring how site will treat customers’ personal information that is gathered by site Accessibility rules: Set of design objectives that ensure disabled users can affectively access site

18. The Eight Most Important Factors in Successful E-commerce Site Design Source: Pearson Education, Inc.

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