Shopping cart and order management

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Shopping cart and order management

• Seminar 11

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Shopping cart

• The collection of items to be purchased
• Web shopping carts, purchase orders and sales
  orders all contain
• Header data
• Line-item data

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Server side shopping carts

• Cart is kept in a database or a file at the
  commerce server.
• A user might have single cart or multiple cart
• A session cart containing items selected
  anonymously
• A user cart containing items selected during a
  period when the user was authenticated

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Other types of shopping cart systems

• Client-side shopping cart
• Java applet, active X or other helper application
• Protocol-based shopping cart
• Use cookies or HTML hidden fields to send the
  cart back and forth

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Managing shopping carts

• Item selection
• Clicking a web link
• Quick order form
• Industry catalogs
• Catalogue system
• Sell a bundle of items with a single click
• Configurators
• Develop a valid combination of subassemblies
• Cross-merchant hand-off
• Saved shopping cart
• Saving the cart for an extended period of time
  while the customer considers the purchase
• Saving some items for late purchase
• Standard sets of items
• Approvals
• Wish lists and gift registries

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Purchase order information flow

• B2C commerce
• Plan pipeline
• Responsible for validating the shopping cart and
  for calculating all charges
• Purchase pipeline
• Responsible for payment and order placement
• Purchase check stage
• Payment stage
• Accept stage

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Order processing subsystems

• Order validation
• Checksum test on credit card numbers
• Address validity
• Denied parties list
• Ship-to
• Taxes
• Third party tax software
• Shipping
• Flat rate
• Shipping models
• API and web services
• Backing system

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Order processing subsystems (cont)

• Inventory
• No standard APIs
• Many e-commerce systems provide no or limited
  inventory support
• Large sellers integrate the e-commerce system
  with the corporate inventory management system
• Catalogue integration
• Transaction system integration
• SME virtual warehouse

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Business-to-Business commerce

• Backing ERP system
• Interaction of the e-commerce system with ERP
  system usually occurs in 2 parts
• Order negotiation
• Order creation
• E-commerce system is responsible for the customer
  interface

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Business-to-Business Commerce

• Open buying on the Internet (OBI)
• Standardize an open, vendor-neutral mechanism for
  b2b ecommerce with a focus on high-volume,
  low-dollar transactions
• Requisitioners in the buying organization do the
  shopping
• Selling organizations operate online catalogs
• Orders are composed at the seller catalog system
  but routed to the buying organization for
  approval
• The approved order is routed to the seller for
  fulfillment
• Payments are processed by a third party skilled
  in such matters

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Shopping cart presentation

• The presentation should be consistent with the
  rest of the site
• Performance is critical
• Shopping cart should provide additional
  opportunities to offer products and services to
  customers
• The shopping cart page is a good place to offer
  information to the customer

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Abandoned shopping cart

• Common practice of web site to count the
  percentage of completed orders and get very
  concerned if too many shopping carts are used
  without completing a purchase
• Sites average abandonment rates of 30 or higher.
  (BizRate.com)
• Top reasons for shopping cart abandonment (Global
  Millennia Marketing, 2002)
• Cost of shipping too high and not shown until
  checkout (69)
• Changed mind and discarded cart contents (61)
• Comparison shopping or browsing (57)
• Total cost of items is too high (49)
• Saving items for later purchase (47)
• Checkout process is too long (44)
• Out of stock products at checkout time (39)
• Checkout requires too much personal information
  (35)
• Poor site navigation and long download times
  (31)
• Lack of sufficient product or contact information
  (31)
• Checkout process is confusing (27)
• Site requires registration before purchase (23)
• Site unclear on delivery times (17)
• No order tracking options (16)
• No gift certificates (11)

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Transaction processing

• One transaction includes many activities
• Debit buyers account
• Credit sellers account
• Record event for business records
• Transmit order to fulfillment center
• Issue receipt to buyer
• Essential characteristics of transaction
  processing (ACID)
• Atomicity
• Consistency
• Isolation
• Durability

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Two phase commit

• When a transaction involves multiple resources
• Prepare phase
• Coordinator requests all participants will
  promise to commit or rollback the transaction
• Commit phase
• When all participants are ready, coordinator ask
  all nodes to commit the transaction, otherwise
  ask all nodes to roll back the transaction.

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Transaction processing in ecommerce

• Sample scenario
• Buyer select one or several items from a
  web-based catalog
• The buyer securely enters credit card and
  shipping information
• Product, tax and shipping charges are computed
• The buyer accepts the resulting total amount
• A credit card authorization is obtained
• An advice of order message is sent to a
  fulfillment center
• The buyer receives a receipt.

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Transaction processing in ecommerce (cont)

• Possible reasons of failure
• The sellers computer crashes
• The buyers computer crashes
• The credit card authorization fails
• The line to the credit card network fails
• Integrating external systems with transactions
• Idempotent or testable

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Implementing transaction processing systems

• Files
• Logs
• Read-only data
• Databases
• Database support transactions
• Database store structured information
• Database are self-describing
• Database permit rapid information retrieval
• TP monitors
• Transaction management
• Application management

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Keeping business record

• Core business records
• Orders
• Invoices
• Payment (receipts)
• Collateral business record
• Customer database
• Advertising and tracking
• Government records

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Keeping business records (cont)

• Record life cycle
• Create
• Store
• Process
• Access
• Report
• Archive
• Retrieve
• Design implication of record keeping
• Mutable and Immutable records
• Failure and transaction semantics
• Access patterns
• Online records, offline records, messages

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Keeping business records (cont)

• Logging
• Error reporting
• Security events
• Audit records
• Performance measurement
• User activity reporting
• Application debugging