Chapter Three

E-Commerce Software Building Blocks

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 Planning and Designing E-Commerce Website

Building an e-commerce site requires understanding of:

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Cont’d…
Organizational and human resource: bring together a team of
individuals who posses the skill sets needed to build and
manage a successful e- commerce site.
 The team makes key technology, site design and social
and informational policies applied to the site.
Hardware, software and telecommunications infrastructure:
Customers demand should drive our choice of
technology.
Technical advisors may help in deciding to choose
technologies.

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Cont’d…
Once the required technology, business and social issues are
understood, then the next step will be creating a plan document.
In order to tackle a complex problem such as building an e-commerce
site, we will have to proceed systematically through a series of steps.
One methodology for developing an e-commerce site plan is the
systems development life cycle.

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 Why SDLC?
It helps to understand the business objectives of the system and designing
an appropriate solution.
It helps to create documents that communicate to senior management the
objectives of the site, important milestones, and the uses of resources.
1. Systems Analysis / Planning : answers the question “What do we want
the e-commerce site to do for our business?”
This is aimed to let the business decisions drive the technology, not
the reverse.
 This will ensure that our technology platform is aligned with your
business.
First start to identify business objectives and then develop a list of
system functionalities.
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Example

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 Cont’d…
2. Systems Design: answers the question “how all the system functionality
will be delivered?”
 This allows to come up with a system design specification which is a
description of the main components in the system and their relationship to
one another.
 Can be broken into logical design and physical design.
 A logical design includes a data flow diagram that describes the flow of
information at our e-commerce site, the processing functions that must be
performed, and the databases that will be used.
 A physical design translates the logical design into physical
components. Eg: specific model of the server, the software to be used, the
size of telecommunications link, the way the system will be backed up and
protected from outsiders, and so on.
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 Cont’d…
3. Building the System: answers the question “how we actually build the site?”.
There are many choices here and much depends on how much money we are willing to
spend.
Choices range from outsourcing everything (including the actual systems analysis and
design) to building everything self (in-house).

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 Cont’d…
Build Our Own versus Outsourcing
Companies who want to build e-commerce sites by themselves can use the
following tools.

Others who are not ready to take risks such as complexity of features such as shopping
carts, credit card authentication and processing, inventory management, and order
processing, doing poor jobs can outsource building their systems to other vendors.
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 Cont’d…
Host Your Own versus Outsourcing
Companies can host their systems by their own or outsource the hosting to other
companies though most of them chooses outsourcing.
Outsourcing can be done in the form of hosting or co-location.
Outsource hosting: the hosting company is responsible for ensuring the site is “live,” or
accessible, twenty-four hours a day by agreeing to a monthly fee.
Co-location: firms purchase or lease a Web server (and has total control over their
operation) but locate the server in a vendor’s physical facility. The vendor maintains the
facility, communications lines, and the machinery.
The following table shows list of hosting/co-location providers.

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 Cont’d…
4. Testing the System: checking whether the system built can do the tasks it
was aimed to do.
Unit testing: involves testing the site’s program modules one at a time.
System testing: involves testing the site as a whole, in the same way a typical
user would when using the site.
 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: making an e-commerce site into use and
continuously check, test and repair.

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 Choosing the right software and hardware for e-
commerce sites
Much of what we are able to do at an e-commerce site is a function of the
software.
An e-commerce software is described through a system architecture.
A system architecture is the arrangement of software, machinery, and
tasks in an information system needed to achieve a specific functionality.
An e-commerce system needs web application servers and multi-tired
system architecture to handle processing loads.
Web application servers are specialized software programs that perform a
wide variety of transaction processing required by e-commerce.
An e-commerce system architecture can be two-tire or multi-tired.
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 Two-tire and Multi-tire Architectures
In two tire, a Web server responds to requests for Web pages and a database server
provides backend data storage.
In a multi-tier architecture, in contrast, 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 a backend layer of existing corporate systems containing product, customer,
and pricing information to share workloads.

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 Web Server Software
All e-commerce sites require basic Web server software to answer requests
from customers for HTML and XML pages.

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 Cont’d…
The following table shows list of functionalities provided by a web server.
Functionality Description

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 Choosing the right Hardware
The hardware platform refers to all the underlying computing equipment
that the system uses to achieve its e-commerce functionality.
The following are the various factors that include in the selection of right
hardware :
Number of simultaneous users in peak periods
Nature of customer requests and customer behavior (user profile)
Type of content (dynamic versus static web pages)
Scalability (horizontal and vertical scaling)
Required security
Number of unique items in inventory
Number of page requests
Speed of legacy applications

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Current Structure of the Internet
Exchange of packets among backbones

The Internet backbone

Smaller Bandwidth Providers

Where
NAP: Network Access Points
MAE: Metropolitan Area Exchanges
NSP: Network Service Providers
ISP: Internet Service Providers
Both NAPs and MAEs are referred to as Internet Exchange Points or IXs

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Supporting Environments for E-Commerce
World Wide Web: a collection of files stored at locations throughout the
world.
Written using a language known as HTML which contain text which forms the information
content of the file, together with instructions which define how the text is to be displayed.
The user employs a program known as a browser when he wishes to read a file on the World
Wide Web and the browser will fetch the file.
The browser will examine the contents of the page and will determine from the HTML in the
file how it is to be displayed.
A file which is downloaded into a browser is known as a web page.
Each page that is downloaded into a browser will have references to other pages expressed as
hyperlinks.
The computer that holds web pages is known as a web server.
The collection of pages which are linked by some theme – for example, they may be pages
which all belong to the same retail company – is known as a website.

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 Cont’d…
File Transfer Protocol: It provides the facility whereby files can be downloaded into a
computer from another computer in the internet.
E-Mail: It is used as the transport medium for mailing lists, for enabling customers to
communicate with a company, for sending documents and data to customers and for
keeping customers up to date about current products and services.
 You use a program called mailer when you write an email.
 When the email is completed it is sent via a number of computers known as email servers.
 Mailers are sometimes known as mail user agents while mail servers are sometimes
known as mail transfer agents.
 Newsgroups: collection of internet users who are interested in a particular topic.
 Members of a newsgroup send messages associated with a particular issue.
 Each message –known as a posting – will contain the user's thoughts on the topic.
 The collection of responses to a posting and the original posting is known as a thread.
 Newsgroups are accessed by using a special purpose software utility known as a
newsreader.
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 Cont’d…
Mailing Lists: are groups of users who have some interest in common.
They may have special configurable rules to govern the members.
Use multiple mailboxes so that messages can be filtered into different mailboxes and stored or
processed rather than simply forwarded.
Individuals can subscribe to these lists and drop out from them using special software such as
SendBlaster.

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