BUILDING AN E- COMEMERCE WEB SITE
4.1. Building an E-commerce web site : a Systematica Approach
Building a succesful e-commerce site is a complex endeavor that requires a keen understanding of business, technology, and social issues, as well as a systematic approach. In many firms today, e-commerce is just too important to be left totally to technolgists and programmers.
The two most important management challenges in buiding a successful e-commerce site are :
a. Developing a clear understanding of your business objectives and
b. Knowing how to choose the right technology to achieve those objectives
Pieces of the site-building puzzle
First, you must be aware of the main areas where you will need to mak decisions. You will also need to make decisions about your site’s hardware, software, and telecomunications infrastructure. While you will have technical advisors help ou make these decisions, ultimately the operation of the site is your customers should drive your choices of technology. Your customers will want technology that enables them to find what they want easily, view the product, purchase the product, and then receive the prodct from your warehouse quickly. You will also have to carefully consider your site’s design. Once you have identified the key decision areas, you will need to think about plan for the project.
Planning : The System Development Life Cycle
Your second step in building an e-commerce site will be creating a plan document.
The system development life cycle (SDLC) is a methodology for understanding the business obective of any system and designing an approprite solution. The SDLC method also helps in creating documents that communicate to senior management the objective of the site, important milestones, and the uses of resources. The five major steps involved in the system development life cycle for an e-commerce site are :
1. System analysis / planning
2. System design
3. Building the system
4. Testing
5. Implementation
1. System Analysis / Planning
The system analysis / planning step of the SDLC tries to answers the question, “What do we want the e-commerce site to do?”. One way to start is to identify the specific business objectives for your site, and then develop a list of system functionalities and information rquirements. Business objectives are simply a list capabilities you want your site to have. System functionalities are a list of the types of information systems capabilities you will need to achieve your business objectives. The information requirements for a system are the information elements that the system must produce in order to achieve the business objectives.
2. System Design : Hardware and software platforms
You can begin to cosider just how all this functionality will be delivered. You must come up with a system design specification-a dscription of the main components in a system and their relationship to one another. The system design itself can be broken down into two components : a logical design and a phisical design :
- A logical design includes a data flow diagram that describes the flow of information at your e-commerce site, the product essing function that must be performed, and the database that will be used.
- A phisical design translates the logical design into phisical design.
3. Building the system : in house versus outsourcing
There are many choice in here. They range from outsourcing everything (including the actual systems analysis and design) to building everything in-house. Outsourcing means that you will hire an outside vendor to provide the services involved in building the site that you can not perform with in house personnel.
If you elect to build your own site, you will need a multi skilled staff of programmers, graphic artists, web designers, and managers. You will also have to select and purchase hardware and software tools.
4. Testing the system
Once the system has been built and programmed, you will have to angage in a testing process. Testing is required whether the system is outsourced or built in house. A complex e-commerce site can have thousands of pathways through the site, each of which must be documented and then tested. Unit testing involves testing the site as a whole, in the same way a typical user would when using the site. Because there is no truly “typical” user, system testing requires that every conceivable path be tested. Final acceptance testing requires that the firm’s key personnel and managers in marketing, production, sales and general management actually use the system as installed on a test internet or intranet server.
5. Implementation and maintenance
Most people unfamiliar with systems erroneusly think that once information system is installed, the process is over. In fact, while the beginning of the process is over, the operational life of a system is just beginning. System break down for a variety of reasons-most of them unpredictable. Therefore, they need continual checking, testing, and repair. Systems maintenance is vital, but sometimes not budgeted for.
Other important tasks of the web team include benchmarking (a speed, quality of layout, and design) and keeping the site current on pricing and promotions. The web is a cmpetitive environment where you can very rapidly frustrate and lose customers with a dysfuntional site (see insight on technology : buying some thing you can’t see).
4.2. Choosing Server Software
What are able to do at an e-commerce site is largely a function of the software. As a business manager in charge of building the site, you will need to know some basic information about e-commerce software. In this section, we will describe the software needed to operate a contemporary e-commerce site.
Simple versus multi-tiered web site architecture
Web site software was appropriately quite simple-it consisted of a server computer running basic web server software. We might call this arrangement a single-tier system architecture. System architecture referss to the arrangement of software, machinery, and task in an information system needed to the achieve a specific functionality.
Two-tier architecture is e-commerce system architecture in which a web server respond to request for web pages and a database server provides backend data storage. Multi-tier architecture is 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 to backend layer of existing corporate systems.
Web server software
Basic functionality provided by web servers :
| Functionality | Description |
| Processing of HTTP requests | Receive and respond to client requests for HTML pages |
| Security service | Verity usename and password; process certificates and private/public key information required for credit card processing and other secure information |
| File transfe protocol | Permits transfer of very large files from server t server |
| Search engine | Indexing of site content; keyword serch capaility |
| Data capture | Log file of all visits, time, duration, and referral source |
| E-mail | Ability to send, receive, and store e-mail messages |
| Site management tools | Calculate and display key site statistics, such as unique visitors, page requests, and origin of requests; check links on pages |
Dynamic page generation tools
Once the most important innovations in web site operation has been the development of dynamic page generation tools. Dynamics page genaration is the coctents 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.
Application servers
Web application servers are software programs that provide the specific business functionality required of a web site. The basic idea of application servers is to isolate the business application from the details of displaying web page to users on the front end and the details of connecting to database on the back end.
Application servers and their function :
| Application server | Functionality |
| Catalog display | Provides a database for product descriptions and prices accepts order and clears payment |
| Transaction processing | Accepts order and clears payment |
| List server | Creates and server mailing lists and anages e-mail marketing campaigns |
| Proxy server | Monitors and contents acess to main web server implements firewall protection |
| Mail server | Manages internet e-mail |
| Audio/video server | Stores and delivers streaming media content |
| Chat server | Creates an enviroments for on line real time text and audio interactions with customers |
| News server | Provides connectivity and display internet news feeds |
| Fax server | Provides fax receiption and sending using a web server |
| Groupware server | Creates workgroup enfiroments for on-line collaboration |
| Database server | Store customer, product and price information |
E-commerce merchant server software functionality
E-commerce merchant server software provides the basic functionalty needed for online sales, including an online catalog, order taking via online shopping cart, and online credit card proccesing.
Merchant server software packages (e-commerce suites)
Merchant server software package offers an integrated environment that provides most or all of the functionality and capabilities needed to develop a sophisticated, customer-centric site.
Choosing an e-commerce suite
The following are some of the key factors to choosing an e-commerce suite :
- Functionality
- Support for different
- business models
- Business process mdelin tool
- Visual site management tools and reporting
- Performance and scalability
- Connectivity to existing business systems
- Compliance with standards
- Global and multicultural capability
- Local sales tax and shipping rules
4.3. Choosing the Hardware for An E-Commerce Site
Hardware platform refers to all the underlying computing equipment that the system users to achieve e-commerce functionality. Objective to have enough platform capacity to meet peak demand but not so much that you are wasting money. Important to understand the different factors that affect speed, capacity and scalability of a site.
Right-Sizing Your Hardware Platform: The Demand Side
Demand that customers put on a site the most important factor affecting the speed of a site. Factors involved in demand include:
- Number of simultaneous users in peak periods
- Nature of customer requests (user profile)
- Type of content (dynamic versus static Web pages)
- Required security
- Number of items in inventory
- Number of page requests
- Speed of legacy applications
Right-Sizing Your Hardware Platform: 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
- Horizontally: employ multiple computers to share the workloal
- Improve processing architecture : is a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling, combined with artiful design decisions.
Improving the processing architecture of your site :
| Architecture improvement | Description |
| Separate static content from dynamic content | Use speciallized servers for each type of workload |
| Cache static content | Increase RAM to the gigabyte range and store static concent in RAM |
| Cache database lookup tables | Cache tables used to look up database records |
| Consolidate business logic on dedicated servers | Put shopping cart, credit card processing and other CPU-intensive activity on dedicated servers. |
| Optimize ASP code | Examine your code to unsure it is operating efficiently |
| Optimize the database schema | Examine your database search times and take steps to reduce access times |
4.4. Other E-commerce site tools
Now that you understand the key factors that affect the speed, caability, and scalability of your site, we can consider some other imprortant requirements for your web site.You will need a coherent web site design effort that makes business sense-not necessarily a site to wow visitors or excite them, but to sell the something.
Web Site Design: Basic Business Considerations
To achieve basic business functionality of a Web site, need to be aware of design guidelines and software tools that can build active content and functionality.Poorly designed Web sites drive customers away.
The eight most important factors in successful e-commerce site design :
| Factor | Description |
| Functionality | Pages that work, load quickly, and point the customer toward your product offerings |
| Informational | Links that customers can easily fnd to discover more about you and your product |
| Ease of use | Simple fool proof navigation |
| Redundant navigation | Alternative Navigation to the same content |
| Ease of purchase | One or two clikcs to purchase |
| Multi browser functionality | Site works with the most popular browsers |
| Simple graphics | Avoids distracting,obnoxious graphics and sound that the user cannot control |
| Legible text | Avoids backgrounds that distort text or make it illegible |
Tools for Interactivity and Active Content
v CGI (Common Gateway Interface): 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
v ASP (Active Server Pages): Enables programmers using Microsoft’s IIS package to build dynamic pages
v Java: Allows programmers to create interactivity and active content on the client computer
v JSP (Java Server Pages): Similar to CGI and ASP; allows developers to use a combination of HTML, JSP scripts and Java to dynamically generate Web pages in response to user requests
v JavaScript: Programming language invented by Netscape that is used to control objects on a Web page and handle interactions with browser
v ActiveX: Programming language invented by Microsoft to compete with Java
v VBScript: Programming language invented by Microsoft to compete with JavaScript
v ColdFusion: An integrated server-side environment for developing interactive Web applications f
Personalization Tools
Personalization is Ability to treat people based on their personal qualities and prior history with your site. Customization is Ability to change the product to better fit the needs of the customer. Cookies the primary method for achieving personalization and customization.
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.
