05-09-2014, 12:29 PM
THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN E-COMMERCE
SITE FOR ONLINE BOOK SALES
THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION.pdf (Size: 1.34 MB / Downloads: 30)
Abstract
The business-to-consumer aspect of electronic commerce (e-commerce) is the
most visible business use of the World Wide Web. The primary goal of an e-commerce
site is to sell goods and services online.
This project deals with developing an e-commerce website for Online Book Sale.
It provides the user with a catalog of different books available for purchase in the store.
In order to facilitate online purchase a shopping cart is provided to the user. The system
is implemented using a 3-tier approach, with a backend database, a middle tier of
Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and ASP.NET, and a web browser as the
front end client.
In order to develop an e-commerce website, a number of Technologies must be
studied and understood. These include multi-tiered architecture, server and client side
scripting techniques, implementation technologies such as ASP.NET, programming
language (such as C#, VB.NET), relational databases (such as MySQL, Access).
This is a project with the objective to develop a basic website where a consumer
is provided with a shopping cart application and also to know about the technologies used
to develop such an application.
This document will discuss each of the underlying technologies to create and
implement an e-commerce website
1. Introduction
E-commerce is fast gaining ground as an accepted and used business paradigm.
More and more business houses are implementing web sites providing functionality for
performing commercial transactions over the web. It is reasonable to say that the process
of shopping on the web is becoming commonplace.
The objective of this project is to develop a general purpose e-commerce store
where any product (such as books, CDs, computers, mobile phones, electronic items, and
home appliances) can be bought from the comfort of home through the Internet.
However, for implementation purposes, this paper will deal with an online book store.
An online store is a virtual store on the Internet where customers can browse the
catalog and select products of interest. The selected items may be collected in a shopping
cart. At checkout time, the items in the shopping cart will be presented as an order. At
that time, more information will be needed to complete the transaction. Usually, the
customer will be asked to fill or select a billing address, a shipping address, a shipping
option, and payment information such as credit card number. An e-mail notification is
sent to the customer as soon as the order is placed.
3. Project Design
In order to design a web site, the relational database must be designed first.
Conceptual design can be divided into two parts: The data model and the process
model. The data model focuses on what data should be stored in the database while the
process model deals with how the data is processed. To put this in the context of the
relational database, the data model is used to design the relational tables. The process
model is used to design the queries that will access and perform operations on those
tables.
Conclusion
The Internet has become a major resource in modern business, thus electronic
shopping has gained significance not only from the entrepreneur’s but also from the
customer’s point of view. For the entrepreneur, electronic shopping generates new
business opportunities and for the customer, it makes comparative shopping possible. As
per a survey, most consumers of online stores are impulsive and usually make a decision
to stay on a site within the first few seconds. “Website design is like a shop interior. If the
shop looks poor or like hundreds of other shops the customer is most likely to skip to the
other site”[16]. Hence we have designed the project to provide the user with easy
navigation, retrieval of data and necessary feedback as much as possible.
In this project, the user is provided with an e-commerce web site that can be used
to buy books online. To implement this as a web application we used ASP.NET as the
Technology. ASP.NET has several advantages such as enhanced performance,66
scalability, built-in security and simplicity. To build any web application using
ASP.NET
we need a programming language such as C#, VB.NET, J# and so on. C# was the
language used to build this application. For the client browser to connect to the ASP.NET
engine we used Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) as the Web Server.
ASP.NET uses ADO.NET to interact with the database as it provides in-memory caching
that eliminates the need to contact the database server frequently and it can easily deploy
and maintain an ASP.NET application. MySQL was used as back-end database since it is
one of the most popular open source databases, and it provides fast data access, easy
installation and simplicity.
A good shopping cart design must be accompanied with user-friendly shopping
cart application logic. It should be convenient for the customer to view the contents of
their cart and to be able to remove or add items to their cart. The shopping cart
application described in this project provides a number of features that are designed to
make the customer more comfortable