4.

1 Understand the questions you must ask and answer, and the steps you should take, in
developing an e-commerce presence.
• Questions you must ask and answer when developing an e-commerce presence include:
• What is your vision and how do you hope to accomplish it?
• What is your business and revenue model?
• Who and where is the target audience?
• What are the characteristics of the marketplace?
• Where is the content coming from?
• Conduct a SWOT analysis.
• Develop an e-commerce presence map.
• Develop a timeline.
• Develop a detailed budget.

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4.2 Explain the process that should be followed in building an e-commerce presence.
Factors you must consider when building an e-commerce site include hardware, software,
telecommunications capacity, website and mobile platform design, human resources, and
organizational capabilities.
The systems development life cycle (a methodology for understanding the business
objectives of a system and designing an appropriate solution) for building an e-commerce
website involves five major steps:
1. Identify the specific business objectives for the site, and then develop a list of system
functionalities and information requirements.
2. Develop a system design specification (both logical design and physical design).
3. Build the site, either by in-house personnel or by outsourcing all or part of the
responsibility to outside contractors.
4. Test the system (unit testing, system testing, acceptance testing, A/B (split) testing, and
multivariate testing).
5. Implement and maintain the site.
The basic business and system functionalities an e-commerce site should contain include a
digital catalog, a product database, customer tracking, shopping cart/payment system, an on-site
blog, a customer database, an ad server, a site tracking and reporting system, and an inventory
management system.
Advantages of building a site in-house include the ability to change and adapt the site quickly
as the market demands and the ability to build a site that does exactly what the company needs.
Disadvantages of building a site in-house include higher costs, greater risks of failure, a more
time-consuming process, and a longer staff learning curve that delays time to market.
4.3 Identify and understand the major considerations involved in choosing web server and
e-commerce merchant server software.
Early websites used single-tier system architecture and consisted of a single-server computer
that delivered static web pages to users making requests through their browsers. The extended
functionality of today’s websites requires the development of a multi-tiered systems architecture,
which utilizes a variety of specialized web servers, as well as links to pre-existing backend or
legacy corporate databases.
All e-commerce sites require basic web server software to answer requests from customers for
HTML and XML pages. When choosing web server software, companies are also choosing what
operating system the site will run on. Apache, which runs on the Unix system, is the market
leader.
Web servers provide a host of services, including processing user HTML requests, security
services, file transfer, a search engine, data capture, e-mail, and site management tools.

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Dynamic server software allows sites to deliver dynamic content, rather than static, unchanging
information.
Web application server programs enable a wide range of e-commerce functionality, including
creating a customer database, creating an e-mail promotional program, and accepting and
processing orders, as well as many other services.
E-commerce merchant server software is another important software package that provides
catalog displays, information storage and customer tracking, order taking (shopping cart), and
credit card purchase processing.
E-commerce software platforms can save time and money, but customization can significantly
drive up costs.
Factors to consider when choosing an e-commerce software platform include its
functionality, support for different business models, visual site management tools and reporting
systems, performance and scalability, connectivity to existing business systems, compliance with
standards, and global and multicultural capability.

4.4 Understand the issues involved in choosing the most appropriate hardware for an e-
commerce site.
Speed, capacity, and scalability are three of the most important considerations when selecting an
operating system, and therefore the hardware that it runs on.
1. To evaluate how fast the site needs to be, companies need to assess the number of
simultaneous users the site expects to see.
2. In some cases, additional processing power can increase capacity, thereby improving
system speed.
3. Scalability is also an important issue. Increasing processing supply by scaling up to meet
demand can be done through vertical or horizontal scaling or by improving processing
architecture.
4.5 Identify additional tools that can improve website performance.
Commonly used software tools for achieving high levels of website interactivity and customer
personalization include Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts, Active Server Pages (ASP)
and ASP.NET, Java applets, JavaScript, ActiveX and VBScript, Ajax, PHP, Ruby on Rails (RoR
or Rails), and Django.

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4.6 Understand the important considerations involved in developing a mobile website and
building mobile applications.
When developing a mobile presence, it is important to understand the difference between a
mobile website, mobile web apps, native apps, and hybrid apps.
• The first step is to identify business objectives, because they help determine which type of
mobile presence is best.
• Design should take into account mobile platform constraints. Recent trends include mobile first
design, responsive web design, and adaptive web design.
• Developing a mobile website is likely to be the least expensive option; mobile web apps require
more effort and cost; native apps are likely to be the most expensive to develop.

Q U E S T I O N S and Answers
Q1) What are the main factors to consider when developing an e-commerce presence?
A1) Factors you must consider when building an e-commerce site include hardware, software,
telecommunications capacity, website and mobile platform design, human resources, and
organizational capabilities.
Q2) Define the systems development life cycle and discuss the various steps involved in
creating an e-commerce site.
A2) The systems development life cycle (a methodology for understanding the business
objectives of a system and designing an appropriate solution) for building an e-commerce
website involves five major steps:
1. Identify the specific business objectives for the site, and then develop a list of system
functionalities and information requirements.
2. Develop a system design specification (both logical design and physical design).
3. Build the site, either by in-house personnel or by outsourcing all or part of the
responsibility to outside contractors.
4. Test the system (unit testing, system testing, acceptance testing, A/B (split) testing, and
multivariate testing).
5. Implement and maintain the site.
Q3) Discuss the differences between a simple logical and simple physical Web site design.
A3) A simple logical design for a Web site describes the flow of information at the site including
the processing functions that must be performed and the databases that will provide information.
A simple physical design: translates the logical design into the physical components that will be
needed such as the servers, software, and size of the telecommunications link, backup servers,
and security system.

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Q4) Why is system testing important? Name the three types of testing and their relation to
one another.
A4) System testing is important because there can be up to thousands of different pathways
within a typical e-commerce Web site and you must make sure that customers can find what they
want easily and quickly.
The three types of testing that must be completed are
1. unit testing, which involves checking each program module.
2. system testing, which includes testing the site as a whole in the way a “typical” user might
navigate and make requests for functionality.
3. acceptance testing, which requires the firm’s key personnel and managers to use the system to
verify that the business objectives as originally conceived are being met.

Q5) Compare the costs for system development and system maintenance. Which is more
expensive, and why?
A5) The costs for system maintenance for an e-commerce Web site, can run anywhere from 50
percent to 100 percent, per year, of the original systems development costs. For small sites the
annual maintenance cost can parallel the development costs, with larger sites achieving some
economies of scale. Maintenance is more expensive because e-commerce sites are always in a
process of change, improvement, and correction. E-commerce sites are in fact, never finished.
They are always in the process of being built and rebuilt.
Q6) What are the main differences between single-tier and multi-tier site architectures?
A6) Single-tier site architecture simply consists of a server machine running the basic Web
server software.
Multi-tier site architecture, on the other hand, provides much more functionality by linking a
Web server layer that can include multiple Web servers to a middle tier that includes many Web
application servers, which provide a wide variety of transaction processing tasks.

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Q7) Name the basic functionalities a Web server should provide.
A7) The basic functionalities a Web server should provide are:
a. processing HTTP requests (requests for HTML pages)
b. providing security services to verify the username and password (Secure Sockets Layer or
SSL)
c. processing FTP requests (transfers of very large files from server to server)
d. providing search engine services
e. capturing data such as logs of visits, time, duration, and referral source
f. providing e-mail services including the ability to send, receive, and store e-mail
g. providing site management tools to calculate and display key site statistics such as unique
visitors, page requests, and the origin of requests, as well as to check the links on the site
Q8) What are the main factors to consider when choosing the best hardware platform for
your website?
A8) Speed, capacity, and scalability are three of the most important considerations when
selecting an operating system, and therefore the hardware that it runs on.
1. To evaluate how fast the site needs to be, companies need to assess the number of
simultaneous users the site expects to see.
2. In some cases, additional processing power can increase capacity, thereby improving
system speed.
3. Scalability is also an important issue. Increasing processing supply by scaling up to meet
demand can be done through vertical or horizontal scaling or by improving processing
architecture.
Q9) What are the eight most important factors impacting Web site design, and how do they
affect a site’s operation?
A9)

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