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.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In completing this graduate project I have been fortunate to have help,

support
and encouragement from many people. I would like to acknowledge them for
their
cooperation.
Contents
 Introduction
Electronic Commerce or e-commerce is business transactions that take place
by communication networks. It is a process of buying and selling products,
services, and information over computer network. E-commerce is a set of
dynamic technologies, applications and business process that link
organizations, customers, suppliers and communities through electronic
transactions and the electronic exchange of information products and
services
Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses and consumers,
on the other hand, is referred to as business-to-consumer or B2C. This is the
type of electronic commerce conducted by companies such as Amazon.com.
Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce where the buyer is
directly online to the seller's computer usually via the internet. There is no
intermediary service. The sale and purchase transaction is completed
electronically and interactively in real-time such as Amazon.com for new
books. If an intermediary is present, then the sale and purchase transaction is
called electronic commerce such as eBay.com.
History of e-shopping
Originally, electronic commerce meant the facilitation of commercial
transactions electronically, using technology such as Electronic Data
Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). These were both
introduced in the late 1970s, allowing businesses to send commercial
documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically.
Online shopping, a form of electronic commerce, In 1979 Michael Aldrich,
an English inventor, connected a modified 26" color domestic television to a
real-time transaction processing computer via a domestic telephone line and
invented online shopping. The first recorded B2B was Thomson Holidays
1981 the first recorded B2C was Gateshead SIS/Tesco in 1984. The world's
first recorded online home shopper was Mrs. Jane Snowball, 72, of
Gateshead, England in May 1984. During the 1980s Aldrich sold many
systems mainly in the UK including Ford, Peugeot, General Motors and
Nissan. The Nissan system of 1984/5 was revolutionary. It enabled a car
buyer on a dealer's lot to both buy and finance the car, including credit
check, online. Aldrich invented both the online shopping system and the
business rationale for using it. His 1980s systems were as fast as 2010
internet shopping systems. They used dial-up and leased telephone lines as
broadband was not available
From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include
enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data
warehousing.
An early example of many-to-many electronic commerce in physical goods
was the Boston Computer Exchange, a marketplace for used computers
launched in 1982. An early online information marketplace, including online
consulting, was the American Information Exchange, another pre-Internet
online system introduced in 1991.
The Internet became popular worldwide around 1994 when the first internet
online shopping started; it took about five years to introduce security
protocols and DSL allowing continual connection to the Internet. By the end
of 2000, many European and American business companies offered their
services through the World Wide Web. Since then people began to associate
a word "ecommerce" with the ability of purchasing various goods through
the Internet using secure protocols and electronic payment services.
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.
 Literature Review
Electronic Commerce (e-commerce) applications support the interaction
between
different parties participating in a commerce transaction via the network, as
well as the
management of the data involved in the process [2].
The increasing importance of e-commerce is apparent in the study conducted
by
researches at the GVU (Graphics, Visualization, and Usability) Center at the
Georgia
Institute of Technology. In their summary of the findings from the eighth
survey, the
researchers report that “e-commerce is taking off both in terms of the
number of users
shopping as well as the total amount people are spending via Internet based
transactions”.Over three quarters of the 10,000 respondents report having
purchased items online. The
most cited reason for using the web for personal shopping was convenience
(65%),
followed by availability of vendor information (60%), no pressure form sales
person
(55%) and saving time (53%).
Although the issue of security remains the primary reason why more people
do
not purchase items online, the GVA survey also indicates that faith in the
security of e-
commerce is increasing. As more people gain confidence in current
encryption
technologies, more and more users can be expected to frequently purchase
items online
[11].
A good e-commerce site should present the following factors to the
customers for
better usability [11]:
• Knowing when an item was saved or not saved in the shopping cart.
• Returning to different parts of the site after adding an item to the shopping
cart.
• Easy scanning and selecting items in a list.
• Effective categorical organization of products.
• Simple navigation from home page to information and order links for
specific
products.
• Obvious shopping links or buttons.
• Minimal and effective security notifications or messages.
• Consistent layout of product information.
Another important factor in the design of an e-commerce site is feedback [4].
The
interactive cycle between a user and a web site is not complete until the web
site responds
to a command entered by the user. According to Norman [5], "feedback--
sending back to
the user information about what action has actually been done, what result
has been
accomplished--is a well known concept in the science of control and
information theory.
Imagine trying to talk to someone when you cannot even hear your own
voice, or trying
to draw a picture with a pencil that leaves no mark: there would be no
feedback".Web site feedback often consists of a change in the visual or
verbal information
presented to the user. Simple examples include highlighting a selection made
by the user
or filling a field on a form based on a user's selection from a pull down list.
Another
example is using the sound of a cash register to confirm that a product has
been added to
an electronic shopping cart.
Completed orders should be acknowledged quickly. This may be done with
an
acknowledgment or fulfillment page. The amount of time it takes to generate
and
download this page, however, is a source of irritation for many e-commerce
users. Users
are quick to attribute meaning to events. A blank page, or what a user
perceives to be "a
long time" to receive an acknowledgment, may be interpreted as "there must
be
something wrong with the order." If generating an acknowledgment may
take longer than
what may be reasonably expected by the user, then the design should include
intermediate feedback to the user indicating the progress being made toward
acknowledgment or fulfillment.
Finally, feedback should not distract the user. Actions and reactions made by
the
web site should be meaningful. Feedback should not draw the user's
attention away from
the important tasks of gathering information, selecting products, and placing
orders.
 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