Building Ecommerce Applications

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Building Ecommerce Applications Infrastructure
Hessa AL- Subaie, Dina Nassar Aisha AL-Omani,
Bashayer Abdulallah Dalal Al- Qatami
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The Development process

• Developing EC site.
• Components
• Language
• ASP (Application service provider) A company
  that provides business applications to users for
  a small monthly fee.

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Steps of Development process

• Step 1
• Creating an EC Architecture a plan for
  organizing the underlying infrastructure
  applications of site.
• Business Goals
• Business Vision
• Application Modules
• Hardware / software
• Security / reliability required
• HR procedures for implementing the architecture
  

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Steps of Development process

• Step 2
• Selecting a development option
• In-house
• Outsource
• Combination of both

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Steps of Development process

• Step 3
• Installing
• Testing
• Unit testing
• Integration testing
• Usability testing
• Acceptance testing
• Deploying EC applications

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Steps of Development process

• Step 4
• Operation and maintenance
• Site continually updated
• Study usage patterns and performance

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The Major EC Applications their functionalities

• B2C storefronts
• An Electronic storefront need to offer buyers
  the ability
• to-
• Discover, search, evaluate, compare.
• Select, negotiate
• Place an order
• Pay
• Confirm an order
• Track orders

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The Major EC Applications their functionalities

• On the other hand, the merchant needs to-
• Provide access to current catalogs
• Provide E-shopping cart
• Verify customers credit
• Process orders
• Arrange product delivery
• Track shipments
• Provide registrations
• Provide FAQ
• Analyze purchases
• Provide language translation
• Measure analyze traffic at the site

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The Major EC Applications their
functionalities

• The 3 inter-related subsystems
• Catalog, products, prices, promotions, shopping
  cart
• Transaction system
• Payment gateway

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The Major EC Applications their
functionalities

• Supplier Sell-side B2B sites
• Similar to B2C but has additional features-
• Personalized catalogs web-pages
• B2B payment gateway
• Electronic contract negotiation features
• Product configuration by customers
• Affiliate program capabilities
• Business alerts

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The Major EC Applications their
functionalities

• E-Procurement site
• Is an online intermediary that offers businesses
  access to hundreds of parts services provided
  by suppliers.
• Aggregating Catalogs sites
• Some specialized requirements for this type of
  site-
• Search engine
• Comparison engine
• Ordering mechanism
• Budget authorization features
• Usage comparison
• Payment mechanism

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The Major EC Applications their
functionalities

• Reverse Auctions sites
• Sites of this sort provides-
• Catalog of items content management
• Search engine
• Personalized pages
• Reverse auction mechanism
• Ability to bid dynamically
• Automatic vendor approval workflow
• Electronic collaboration with trading partners.

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The Major EC Applications their
functionalities

• Online Exchange sites
• An e-market place tying many buyers to many
  suppliers
• Combines functions of buy-side, e-procurement,
  auction sites, in addition to-
• Collaboration services
• Community services
• Data mining, customer behavior tracking
• Transaction flow managers
• Negotiation mechanism
• Language translation
• Comprehensive links to related resources

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Development Options for EC Applications
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Development Options for EC Applications

• In sourcing
• Outsourcing
• Leasing
• Other Options

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In Sourcing

• Done using Web Scripting Languages
• Benefits
• Better fit organizations strategy
• Differentiate it from competition
• Short comes
• Time consuming
• Costly

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Outsourcing Turnkey Approach

• Offers standard features required by EC
• Involves
• Buying commercial application
• Installing it
• Start it up

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Outsourcing Turnkey Approach (Cont.)

• Benefits
• Many different types available
• Save time/money

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Outsourcing Turnkey Approach (Cont.)

• Short comes
• May not fully fit companys needs
• Difficult to modify
• Loss of control over new versions
• Difficult to be integrated with existing systems
• Vendors my drop products/quit business

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Leasing
2 ways to do it

• Lease application from outsourcer and install it
• Lease it from ASP that hosts the applications at
  its datacenter

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Benefits Risks of Using ASP
Business
Technical
Economic
Benefits

• Reduce need to IT Professionals
• Concentrate on strategic use of IT

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Benefits Risks of Using ASP
Business
Risks

• Loss of Control Dependence on Vendor

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Benefits Risks of Using ASP
Business
Technical
Economic
Benefits

• Fast Easy Application Deployment
• Simplified Maintenance Training

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Benefits Risks of Using ASP
Technical
Risks

• Insufficient customization legacy Applications
  Integration
• Low capability to deal with Security Issues

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Benefits Risks of Using ASP
Business
Technical
Economic
Benefits

• Low total cost of ownership
• Improved cost control (Predictable Cost)

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Benefits Risks of Using ASP
Economic
Risks

• Price change of updating by vendor

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Other Development Options

• E-marketplaces, Exchanges, E-Auctions
• Joint Venture Consortia
• E-Malls
• ISPs
• Telecommunication Companies

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Which Approach?

• Criteria to select development approach

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Criteria for Selecting a Development Approach
Selecting

• Flexibility
• User Friendliness
• Reliability
• Security

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Criteria for Selecting a Development Approach
Selecting (Cont.)

• Maintenance Services
• Vendor Quality Track Record
• Estimating Costs
• Hardware software resources

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Third-Party EC components and suites
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2 types of EC Applications Available

• Electronics catalogs
• EC Suites.

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Electronic Catalogs

• Virtual version of traditional product catalogs
• Contains
• Product description, Photos, Promotions, Payment
  methods, Discounts, Delivery channels.

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Architecture of Electronic Catalogs
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Electronics catalogs features

• Template for creating a storefront pages.
• Electronic shopping cart.
• Provide secure purchase process using encryption
  methods.
• Database for maintaining the product descriptions
  and customers orders.
• Integration with third party software for
  calculating Taxes and shipping costs.

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Third-Party EC components and suites

• EC Suites contains different
• databases
• Customer database
• Order database
• Catalog database
• Payment database

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Components of an EC Suite
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Third-Party EC components and suites

• Two major companies provide EC SUITES
• InterWorlds Commerce Suites (interwor.com).
• IBMs WebSphere Commerce Suite (ibm.com).

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Connecting To Databases and OtherEnterprises
System
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Multi- Tiered Application Architecture

• EC Arciticture
• Consists of 4 tiers
• Web Browser
• Web Server
• Applications Server
• Database Servers

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Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

• Class of software that integrates large systems.
• Examples
• Vitria Technology (vitria.com),
• TIBCO (tibco.com),
• WebMethods (webmethods.com)

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VENDOR AND SOFTWARE SELECTION

• 6 Steps Process
• Identify Potential Vendors Packages
• Determine Evaluation Criteria
• Evaluate
• Choose
• Negotiate
• Establish Service Level Agreement

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Usage Analysis Site Management

• Monitor what customers do in your web site

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Log Files

• Record kept by Web Server
• Shows when what transaction occurred
• High Volumes Hard to Analyze
• Free Software provided

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Access Logs

• text files
• Easy to analyze
• Easy to compare
• Variety of statistics
• Improve marketing and advertising strategies

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Valuable statistics

• Page views by time slot
• Page views by customers logging in status
• Page views by referrers
• Page views by visitors hardware platform,
  operating system and browser
• Page views by visitors host

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Managing The Web Site

• Must know the performance of a web site
• Time consuming
• Tedious administrative task

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Web Management Tools

• Patrol for e-business management
• Main views for e-business management
• Service assurance center for e-business

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Questions

• Describe the basic elements of a multitiered
  application architecture.
• List the ways in which an EC application can be
  connected to back-end databases and other
  transaction processing systems.
• List the major steps in selecting an EC
  application vendor and package.