An Introduction to E-commerce & Online Shopping

The ways of doing business are transforming. We are living through a massive change in how businesses connect with other businesses, and consumers now have a worldwide marketplace to choose from. The catalyst of this change is Electronic Commerce.
A typical definition used for Electronic Commerce (e-commerce) is as follows:

"E-commerce - The buying and selling of products and services by businesses and consumers over the Internet."

About RUM - Rhodes University Memorabilia

The aim of RUM (Rhodes University Memorabilia) is to deliver an online store for the sale of Rhodes University memorabilia. An investigation of this project could lead to the production of a medium scale e-commerce application for use by anyone intending to purchase memorabilia from the university, through the Internet. RUM will aim to provide full information and facilitate in the sales of products by offering an online website with the following features pertaining to the products available:

• Pictures,
• Descriptions of Products,
• Prices,
• Stocks Available,
• Various Sizes,
• Various Colour Ranges,
• Online help to aid customer transactions

Through the use of RUM, customers would be able to order the products they are interested in purchasing. The investigation would highlight design and implementation concerns pertinent to many systems functioning outside the arena of well-known large-scale e-commerce endeavours.

Design Considerations and Implementation Decisions of the Project



The proposed system will require a thorough analysis of the following aspects:

• A discussion of whether to implement a two tier or three tier client-server application.
• Java Server Pages (JSP) technology that allows web developers and designers to rapidly develop and easily maintain, information-rich, dynamic web pages. HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) for the front-end web interface.
• The database management system best suited for the web shop, possibly Microsoft Access.
• Investigate middleware, particularly Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), which is an interface for connecting Java programs with SQL-based databases, and how it will interact with the database.
• The Tomcat Server application – This is a commercial quality server solution based on the Java Platform that supports the Servlet and JSP specifications.
• Exploration of the various security protocols used to transmit sensitive information, such as credit card details, over the Internet.
• User friendly interactions.
• Maintenance features.
• Creating a user profile - Users have the possibility to generate an individual profile so they can reuse them later and do not have to reenter their ordering data.

The system will run under the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system, which is already installed and configured.

The Expected Output

The expected deliverables are:

• Documentation,
• Presentations,
• The development of a pilot of the proposed system.

Possible Extensions

The project involves e-commerce, hence there could be a myriad of extensions to this project. Possible extensions that we have investigated include:

• A search engine for the content of the site
• The use of 3D round-view interactive pictures when exploited in a sensitive way can give the impression of space and different views of the products being sold,
• A backend component to the project – will handle the banking transactions and update the balances of both the business and the consumer.

Division of Work

Uma:

• Development of RUM web page using HTML and JSP
• Data Validation
• Online Help
• Documentation for the above mentioned tasks of the project

Farisai:

• Database setup and validation
• Linking RUM to database using JDBC and Tomcat
• Implementation of security features into RUM
• Implementation of a few of the possible extensions listed above
• Documentation for the above mentioned tasks of the project

Literature Survey

All the information gathered at present has been obtained from the Internet. The list of sources is included below:

• http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/ (The Tomcat server program was downloaded from here)
• https://godzilla.liquidweb.com/~maguires/myshop/shop.shtml
• http://www.usability.at/e/wwweb/e-commerce/web-shop.shtml
• http://java.sun.com/products/jsp

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