BUILDING AN E-COMMERCE WEBSITE, MOBILE SITE AND APPS

Systematic approach to build an E-Commerce: Planning, System Analysis, System Design, Building the system, Testing the system, Implementation and Maintenance, Optimize Web Performance ñ Choosing hardware and software ñ Other E-Commerce Site tools ñ Developing a Mobile Website and Mobile App.

Systematic approach to build an E-Commerce

Building an E-commerce Site:

A Systematic Approach the two most important management challenges in building a successful e-commerce site are

1. Develop a clear understanding of your business objectives

2. Choosing the right technologies to achieve those objectives Thus, effective plan and knowledge base of the above factors will help in making sound management decisions.

Building an E-commerce web site : a Systematic Approach

Building a successful 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 technologists and programmers.

The two most important management challenges in building 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 make decisions. You will also need to make decisions about your site’s hardware, software, and telecommunications infrastructure. While you will have technical advisors help out 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 engage 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 erroneously 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 breaks 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 competitive environment where you can very rapidly frustrate and lose customers with a dysfunctional site (see insight on technology: buying something you can’t see).

Optimize Web Performance

Guidelines to speed up your website

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) ...

Move your website to a better host. ...

Optimize the size of images on your website. ...

Reduce the number of plugins. ...

Minimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files. ...

Use website caching. ...

Implement Gzip Compression. ...

Database optimization in CMS.

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 modeling 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

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 workload

Improve processing architecture: is a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling, combined with artful 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

The Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) The SDLC is a methodology for understanding the business objectives of any system and designing an appropriate solution. It helps in creating documents that communicate to senior management the objectives of the site, important milestones, and the uses of resources.

The five major steps involved are:

a) System Analysis/Planning

b) Systems Design

c) Building the System

d) Testing e)Implementation

Building A System: In-house versus Outsourcing In-house is developing and building a website on your own. Outsourcing is hiring an outside vendor to provide the service which cannot be performed with in-house Personnel Build versus outsourcing In-house building includes:

High number of risks.

High skilled set required

Use of pre-built template (optional)

High cost Host your own versus outsourcing

The hosting company ensures that website is accessible 24/7

Co-location: A firm has control over the operations of its web server but is placed in at the vendors’ physical facility.

Building a System Source: Pearson Education, Inc.

Factors in Web Site Optimization Source: Pearson Education, Inc

Components of a Web Site Budget Source: Pearson Education, Inc.

System Architecture System architecture: refers to the arrangement of software, machinery, and tasks in an information system needed to achieve a specific functionality

Types of system architecture:

1.Two-Tier Architecture: Web server responds to requests for Web pages and a database server provides backend data storage

2.Multi-Tier Architecture: 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 a backend layer of existing corporate systems

Web Server Software All e-commerce sites require basic Web server software to answer requests from customers for HTML and XML pages. It thus answers HTTP requests from customers. The choice of Web server software depends on the operating system. Apache, the leading Web server software; only works with UNIX operating system. Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) is the second major Web server software.

Dynamic Page Generation Tools It is one of the most important innovations in Web site operation. Dynamic page generation: contents of Web page are stored as objects in a database rather than being hard-coded in HTML, and are fetched when needed from database.

Tools used for retrieving the objects :

1. CGI (Common Gateway Interface)

2. ASP (Active Server Pages)

3. JSP (Java Server Pages)

Application Servers Web application servers are software programs that provide specific business functionality required for a Web site. Servers which provides software applications with services such as security, data services, transaction support, load balancing, and management of large distributed systems. They are an example of middleware software.

E-commerce Merchant Server Software Functionality Online catalog : List of products available on web site. Shopping cart : allows shoppers to set aside desired purchases, to review what they have selected, edit their selections as necessary and then actually make the purchase.

Choosing the Hardware for an E- commerce Site

Hardware Requirement for E-commerce - Pentium II/III based Intel server running Linux can serve hundreds of unique customers each day. Low traffic sites can be easily served from a single machine depending on the needs of the business. High traffic sites require a backup of servers which automatically takes over operations in case of failure of primary ones.

Software Requirements for E-commerce – Several software are available free on the internet that can be used to build e-commerce exchanges. Ex:- Linux OS, mySQL database ,Apache web server etc.,

The Hardware platform used to achieve e- commerce functionality by referring to all the underlying computing equipments. Its objective is to ▫meet demands without wasting much money.

▫understand the different factors that affect speed, capacity and scalability of a site.

Speed of legacy applications

§ Number of page requests

§ Number of items in inventory

§ Security.

§ Type of content matters a lot.

§ Nature of customer requests (user profile)

§ Number of simultaneous users in peak periods which can increase traffic and thus speed.

§Right Sizing the Hardware Platform -The Demand Side The most important factor that affects the speed is the ‘demand’ put up by the customers. Factors involved in demand include:

Improve processing architecture

§ Horizontally: employ multiple computers to share the workload, as required. May be a demand needs more power which is not been able to get generated with the existing ones.

§ Vertically: increase the processing power of individual components i.e. grow without investing much on buying new equipments.

§-The Supply Side Scalability: refers to the ability of a site to increase in size as demand warrants Ways to scale hardware:

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

The Eight Most Important Factors in Successful E-commerce Site Design Source: Pearson Education, Inc.