Transcript Building an E-Commerce website

Building an
E-Commerce website
Dr. John P. Abraham
Why people shop online?
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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
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Organizational capabilities
Hardware architecture
Software
Telecommunications
Site design
Human resources
Website Systems development
life cycle
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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
Create modules
Modules
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
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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
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List server
Proxy server
Mail server
Catalog display
Shopping cart
Fax server
Auction server
E-Commerce Suites
• Merchant server packages
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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
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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