E-Commerce

Web Based E-Commerce

 Syllabus – Unit 2
Building an e-commerce presence: Planning, System Analysis, Design,
Choosing Software, Hardware, Other Ecommerce site tools: Tools For
Website design, Tools for SEO, Interactivity and active contents (Server
side scripting)

Important Components of E-commerce website: Product Cataloging,

Product Listing Page, Product description Page, Cart building and
Checkout, Third party integrations: Payment systems, Data Layer
Integrations for analytics, Customer support integration, Order tracking,
Shipping, return and cancellation.

New Technologies for E-commerce: Chatbots, Recommendation systems

(Personalisation), Smart Search, Product Comparison, Augmented reality,
Big data, Cloud computing
 E-COMMERCE PRESENCE
• The answers to these questions will drive the
development and implementation of your e-
commerce presence:-

– WHAT’S THE IDEA? (THE VISIONING PROCESS)?

– WHERE’S THE MONEY: BUSINESS AND REVENUE MODEL?
– WHO AND WHERE IS THE TARGET AUDIENCE?
– WHAT IS THE BALLPARK? CHARACTERIZE THE MARKETPLACE.
– WHERE’S THE CONTENT COMING FROM?
 KNOW YOURSELF
• A SWOT analysis is a simple but powerful method for strategizing about
your business and understanding where you should focus your efforts.
Building an e-commerce presence
 PLANNING: THE SYSTEMS
DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE
• Proceed systematically through a series of steps.
• One methodology is the systems development life cycle.
• The systems development life cycle (SDLC) is a methodology for
understanding the business objectives of any system and designing
an appropriate solution.
• The SDLC method also helps in creating documents that
communicate objectives, important milestones, and the uses of
resources to management.
• Five major steps involved in the systems development life cycle for
an e-commerce site:
– Systems analysis/planning
– Systems design
– Building the system
– Testing
– Implementation
 SYSTEMS ANALYSIS/PLANNING
• IDENTIFY BUSINESS OBJECTIVES: Capabilities you want your
site to have.

• SYSTEM FUNCTIONALITY: Types of information systems

capabilities you will need to achieve your business objectives.

• INFORMATION REQUIREMENTS: Information elements that

the system must produce in order to achieve the business
objectives.
 SYSTEM DESIGN
• System Design Specification description of the main components
in a system and their relationship to one another.
• Logical design describes the flow of information at your e-
commerce site, the processing functions that must be performed,
the databases that will be used, the security and emergency
backup procedures that will be instituted, and the controls that
will be used in the system
• Physical design translates the logical design into physical
components
Logical Design
Physical Design
BUILDING THE SYSTEM
Tools for building
 TESTING THE SYSTEM
• Unit testing involves testing the site’s program modules
one at a time
• Multivariate testing involves identifying specific elements,
creating versions for each element, and then creating a
unique combination of each element and version to test
• System testing involves testing the site as a whole, in a way
the typical user will use the site
• Acceptance testing verifies that the business objectives of
the system as originally conceived are in fact working
• A/B testing (split testing) involves showing two versions of
a web page or website to different users to see which one
performs better
 IMPLEMENTATION & MAINTENANCE
• One of the first tasks of the web team is to listen
to customers’ feedback on the site and respond
to that feedback as necessary.
• A second task is to develop a systematic
monitoring and testing plan to be followed
weekly to ensure all the links are operating,
prices are correct, and pages are updated. A large
business may have thousands of web pages,
many of them linked, that require systematic
monitoring.
 CHOOSING SOFTWARE
• System Architecture: The arrangement of software, machinery, and tasks
in an information system needed to achieve a specific functionality.
• Two-tier architecture e-commerce system architecture: in which a web
server responds to requests for web pages and a database server provides
backend data storage.
• Multi-tier architecture e-commerce system architecture: in which the
web server is linked to a middle tier layer that typically includes a series of
application servers that perform specific tasks as well as a backend layer of
existing corporate systems.
• WEB SERVER SOFTWARE: it includes:-
– Site Management Tools: verify that links on pages are still valid.
– Dynamic Page Generation Tools: The contents of a web page are stored as objects in a
database, rather than being hard-coded in HTML. When the user requests a web page,
the contents for that page are then fetched from the database
Three tier Architecture
BASIC FUNCTIONALITY PROVIDED BY
WEB SERVERS
 APPLICATION SERVERS
• Web application server: software program that provides specific business
functionality required of a website.
• For Linux and Unix environments, many of these capabilities are available
free on the Internet from various sites.
 E-COMMERCE MERCHANT SERVER
SOFTWARE FUNCTIONALITY
• Software that provides the basic functionality needed for
online sales, including an online catalog, order taking via an
online shopping cart, and online credit card processing.
• Online catalog: list of products available on a website.
• Shopping cart: allows shoppers to set aside desired purchases
in preparation for checkout, review what they have selected,
edit their selections as necessary, and then actually make the
purchase by clicking a button.
• Credit Card Processing: A site’s shopping cart typically works
in conjunction with credit card processing software, which
verifies the shopper’s credit card and then puts through the
debit to the card and the credit to the company’s account at
checkout
 MERCHANT SERVER SOFTWARE PACKAGES
(E-COMMERCE SOFTWARE PLATFORMS)
• Offers an integrated environment that provides most or all of the
functionality and capabilities needed to develop a sophisticated,
customer centric site.
• Open source software: Software that is developed by a
community of programmers and designers, and is free to use and
modify
 Choosing an E-commerce Software
Platform
• The following are some of the key factors to
consider:
– Functionality, including availability on an SaaS basis
– Support for different business models, including m-
commerce
– Business process modeling tools
– Visual site management tools and reporting
– Performance and scalability
– Connectivity to existing business systems
– Compliance with standards
– Global and multicultural capability
 CHOOSING HARDWARE
Hardware platform refers to all the underlying
computing equipment that the system uses to achieve
its e-commerce functionality. Points to consider are:--
• I/O intensive requires input/output operations
rather than heavy-duty processing power
• Scalability the ability of a site to increase in size as
demand warrants
• Vertical scaling increasing the processing power of
individual components
• Horizontal scaling employing multiple computers to
share the workload
VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL SCALING
TECHNIQUES
 TOOLS FOR SEARCH ENGINE
OPTIMIZATION
The higher you are on the search engine pages, the more traffic
you will receive. Ideas for SEO:-
• Metatags, titles, page contents
• Identify market niches
• Offer expertise
• Get linked up
• Buy ads
• Local e-commerce
 TOOLS FOR INTERACTIVITY AND
ACTIVE CONTENT
• Common Gateway Interface (CGI): a set of standards for
communication between a browser and a program running on a
server that allows for interaction between the user and the
server.
• Active Server Pages (ASP) a proprietary software development
tool that enables programmers using Microsoft’s IIS package to
build dynamic pages.
• ASP.NET successor to ASP.
• Java a programming language that allows programmers to
create interactivity and active content on the client computer,
thereby saving considerable load on the server.
 TOOLS FOR INTERACTIVITY AND
ACTIVE CONTENT
• Java Server Pages (JSP) like CGI and ASP, a web page coding standard that
allows developers to dynamically generate web pages in response to user
requests.
• JavaScript a programming language invented by Netscape that is used to
control the objects on an HTML page and handle interactions with the
browser.
• ActiveX a programming language created by Microsoft to compete with
Java.
• VBScript a programming language invented by Microsoft to compete with
JavaScript.
• ColdFusion an integrated server-side environment for developing
interactive web applications.
• PHP open source, general purpose scripting language.
• Ruby on Rails (RoR/ Rails) open source web application framework based
on Ruby programming language.
• Django open source web application framework based on Python
programming language
 Other Design Elements
• Widget a small, prebuilt chunk of code that executes
automatically in your HTML web page; capable of
performing a wide variety of tasks.
THE INFORMATION POLICY SET:
• Privacy policy a set of public statements declaring to
your customers how you treat their personal
information that you gather on the site
• Accessibility rules a set of design objectives that
ensure disabled users can effectively access your site
 Important components of E-commerce
Website
Product Catalogue: An e-commerce website contains the product
name, price, description, the hierarchy of products, supplier
information, product availability, and much more product-related
information.
Product Cataloging: It is a dynamic process, in which products are
categorized or organized in one specific way to ensure that customers
get high-quality product data across all channels. With Product catalog
management, your brand can deliver high-quality product data to
customers in their desired format.
Product listing page (PLP): shows a list of products that relate to what
a customer has searched for, either on an ecommerce website’s search
engine or by clicking the link for a product category.
Important components of E-commerce
Website
Product Detail Page (PDP): is an online webpage that tells the consumer
all the specific information about a product that they’d want to know
before making a purchase, such as ingredients, materials and sizes. You’ll
want to provide as much information as possible about the product for
your consumers.
Shopping cart : An ecommerce shopping cart is a software that lets
customers select, store, and manage items before buying them. It
reflects the concept of shopping in a store. You can add items to the cart
that you want to buy, change the quantity, and get a total cost before
finishing the transaction. Its two main types are:
1. Hosted/self-hosted shopping cart.
2. Licensed shopping cart
Checkout: Keep things basic and value your customer's time. The
shopper should feel confident shopping on your website.
Important components of E-commerce
Website
Third party integrations: Payment systems
• It implies that the customer must be able to pay in a
timely and secure manner.
• The website should provide a secure payment
mechanism.
• To connect it, you’ll need to use third-party software.
• The customer is referred to this system when the order
information is passed to the specified payment service.
• The buyer can choose how he wants to pay here:
– Using electronic money
– Bank cards
– And other payment methods
Important components of E-commerce
Website
Data layer integration for analytics:
• It documents every step a user takes, from looking at product
details to making a purchase. This level of detail helps businesses
track the customer journey through the sales funnel accurately,
offering insights into:
• Product Interactions: Tracks which products are viewed, added to
or removed from carts, including specifics like ID, name, brand,
category, and price.
• Transaction Details: Captures completed transactions, including
IDs, total value, tax, shipping costs, and payment methods.
• User Behaviour: Sheds light on how users navigate your site, what
drives their buying decisions, and identifies potential stumbling
blocks in the purchasing process
 Important components of E-commerce
Website
Customer Support Integration: Some sort of customer support needs to be
available in case of any problems or questions.
• There are several different types of customer support, such as toll free
numbers, email support, and online chat.
• Decide which is the best choice for your budget and type of business.
• Keep in mind to always be friendly and respond in a timely manner to resolve
any issues to keep your customers happy.
Order tracking: Order tracking is a process whereby eCommerce merchants can
keep track of the progress of an order that they have placed with a supplier.
Order tracking can help identify any potential problems with the fulfillment
process.
Shipping and returns: Shipping is supplementary and complementary to
warehouse operations. Fast and safe returns is also very important for e-
commerce vendors.
Cancellation: A cancellation occurs when a consumer returns an item purchased
on an e-commerce website.
New Technologies for E-commerce
Chatbots: Chatbots make use of advanced algorithms and data analysis to
offer customers personalized product recommendations. They make
these recommendations based on a customer's browsing history and
purchasing behavior.
Every customer’s journey is different, and personalization
means “curating individual customer journeys by leveraging data and
insights, to deliver content that is relevant to the customer.”
Recommendation systems(Personalisation): Recommender systems usually
make use of either or both collaborative filtering and content-based filtering
(also known as the personality-based approach), as well as other systems
such as knowledge-based systems.
Collaborative filtering approaches build a model from a user's past behavior
(items previously purchased or selected and/or numerical ratings given to
those items) as well as similar decisions made by other users.
Content-based filtering approaches utilize a series of discrete,
pre-tagged characteristics of an item in order to recommend additional items
with similar properties.
New Technologies for E-commerce
Smart Search: A “smart search” is a feature that allows customers to dive
into specific product categories or search for specific items. The smart search
typically includes several key features like:-
• Auto-Suggest
• Spell correction
• Personalized search results
• Autocomplete Search Query
• Voice Search in eCommerce

Product Comparison:
product comparison is a feature that enables customers to compare 2
or more products at a time. It is a type of product representation
where customers are provided with a detailed view of product
features and functionalities. Different businesses use different
comparison methods where some start with the similarities and then
move to the differences while many give a simple comparison of side-
by-side features.
 New Technologies for E-commerce
Augmented Reality: This technology solves the issue of product
experience before buying it, by creating 3D artificial environments
that users can explore and interact with. Customers can virtually try
out products, arrange furniture in their homes, and more.
Big data: As data continues to expand and proliferate, new big data
tools are emerging to help companies collect, process, and analyze
data at the speed needed to gain the most value from it.
Cloud computing: Cloud hosting allows you to build your e-
commerce presence as quickly as your business grows. Cloud E-
commerce, a cloud computing application, manages and grows data
storage, hosting, and digital commerce applications like virtual
payments, inventory management, and product information
management using cloud-based technology.