building an e-commerce website dr. john p. abraham
TRANSCRIPT
Building an E-Commerce website
Dr. John P. Abraham
Why people shop online?
• 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
• Organizational capabilities
• Hardware architecture
• Software
• Telecommunications
• Site design
• Human resources
Website Systems development life cycle
• 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
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 testingTesting program modules
Done by technical personnel
System testingTesting the site as a whole
Done my management and marketing dpt
Acceptance testingTest 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
• 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– List server– Proxy server– Mail server– Catalog display– Shopping cart– Fax server– Auction server
E-Commerce Suites
• Merchant server packages– 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
• 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