Chapter 04: Building E-

commerce System
By: Diwakar Upadhyaya
E-commerce Website/Software
• It is the engine behind the scenes of an online store, making it
possible to easily manage inventory, add or remove products,
calculate taxes, and everything else required to manage a website and
fulfill orders.
• Ecommerce software simplifies complex processes in a friendly user
interface that enables people non-technical backgrounds to oversee
an entire e-commerce operation.
• Despite the ease of use that ecommerce software brings to an online
business, it is a multifaceted and complex machine.
Ecommerce software comes in two basic
flavors
On-Premise: Installed and managed on-site by developers who facilitate manual
updates, fix problems and do general troubleshooting.
• Traditionally, merchants went with on-premise solutions due to the increased
flexibility from hosted solutions.

SaaS: Software as a Service (or "hosted") solutions are much more hands-off from a
technical standpoint.
• The only development requirements are for additional design and custom
features.
• All updates, patches, and newly-released features are done automatically or with
one-click integrations.
• Hosted ecommerce software has evolved to the point where the customization
and flexibility, previously exclusive to on-premise, is robust, making it more than
sufficient for most online retailers.
Ecommerce software helps in following things:

• Simplifies marketing
• Automates shipping and taxes
• Manage products
• Customer & order management
• Enhance overall user experience
Building Catalogs
• Building catalogs is the strategic process of managing our eCommerce
product catalog to ensure the quality of our product data across all
sales channels.
• It includes how merchants organize, standardize, and publish their
product data to each sales channel.
• Whether our product data is created in-house or is from third parties
like suppliers, we need to need manage its accuracy.
We need Catalogs for following reasons:
• Create rich and consistent product information
• Building an omnichannel experience
• Improving customer experience
• Replacement for supplier data
• Expand product assortment
Static vs Dynamic Catalogs
• Dynamic catalogs are more flexible than conventional static web catalogs
• They’re also easier to maintain and more cost-effective than conventional
Web catalogs.
• Moreover, dynamic catalogs allow marketers to add features such as gift
registries, order tracking , and real-time inventory to make shopping more
convenient.
• Dynamic catalog pages are also built on the fly-meaning they are created
when a customer makes a request or performs a certain function, such as
searching or ordering.
• The catalog filters through the site for specific requests and returns
customized information in preset page templates.
• Static catalogs are built using hyper-text markup language (HTML) pages in
which a set of codes links a page to sets of coded links on other pages-as
word-processing files that sit on a server.
• Every catalog Web page from the home page to individual product pages
to the ordering page, is in effect a separate file.
• The number of Web pages can vary from as few as two pages to
thousands for large business-to-business catalogs that use detailed product
information.
• Because a static catalog is a series of separate links, updating product and
pricing information and changing design and navigation require an
employee to change every page-one by one-on which a particular product
appears
• But dynamic catalogs are built from a series of customized text-and-
graphics templates-sets of guides that tell designers how to format
the data-that are integrated into the company’s product database.
• Now the cataloger can add product information or delete outdated
material without reindexing the entire database.
• The dynamic catalog can filter through the entire Website for the
specific request in less time than a static catalog’s software can
respond to a consumer clicking on a series of hypertext links.
• “Dynamic catalogs are a whole new paradigm,”
Building Shopping Cart
• A shopping cart on an online retailer's site is a piece of software that
facilitates the purchase of a product or service.
• It accepts the customer's payment and organizes the distribution of
that information to the merchant, payment processor and other
parties.
• Shopping carts bridge the gap between shopping and buying, so
having the best shopping cart software is extremely important on our
website
A cart typically has three common aspects:

• It stores product information

• It's a gateway for order, catalog and customer management
• It renders product data, categories and site information for user
display
Building Shopping Cart
• Here is the link for various sites that help us build our shopping cart:
https://fossbytes.com/how-to-build-shopping-cart-website/
Transaction Processing
• Transaction process is a term that refers to the adding, changing,
deleting, or looking up of a record in a data file or database by
entering the data at a terminal or workstation.
• Most transaction processing systems also include a method of
ensuring that all the information entered as a transaction is
simultaneously saved.
• When many transactions are taken and then stored to be dealt with
later, the process is known as batch processing.
• Different examples of transaction processing include automated
teller machines, credit card authorizations, online bill payments, self-
checkout stations at grocery stores, the trading of stocks
over the Internet and various other forms of electronic commerce.
• At the center of most commercial interactions is a transaction so,
every business must deal with its commercial transactions in some
form.
• How a company decides to manage these transactions can be an
important factor in its success.
• A Transaction Processing System is a set of information which
processes the data transaction in database system that
monitors transaction programs.
• The system is useful when something is sold over the internet.
• It allows for a time delay between when an item is being sold to when
it is sold
Types
• Batch processing: Processes several transactions at the same time,
with a time delay.
• Real-time processing: Deals with one transaction at a time and does
not have a time delay.
• A TPS must be able to easily be accessed by authorized employees so
that information in the TPS can be retrieved.
• The information that goes through a TPS must never be deleted so
that there will not be any confusion of what orders have gone
through it.
• It is a good idea to have a backup hard drive so that older information
can still be stored but will not slow down the server which houses the
TPS.
Development of E-
commerce Website/Software
1. Databases
• Databases are integral to the success of an e-business.
• They enable us to store, analyze and manage essential information
about our products, our sales and our customers so we can quickly
and easily respond to changing market conditions.
• We can also share information in the database with suppliers and
logistics partners to improve the efficiency of your e-business
operations.
How does Database help in E-commerce
• Product Information
• Customer Information
• Transactions
• Personalization
• Self Service
How does inventory database help
• Forecasting
• Control
• Automation
• Ordering and Delivery
Application Program Interface
• APIs, or application programming interfaces, enable one application
(such as our ecommerce platform) to expose services (such as catalog
content, order management, pricing information, and customer data)
to other applications.
• Simply speaking, an API helps systems “talk” to each other.
• A well-structured API is the glue that connects data together and
allows authorized applications or machines to easily access it.
• APIs bring a new level of data sharing and connectivity to multiple
applications, regardless of their data structures and technology
platforms.
• APIs have proven to be extremely important to enterprises,
contributing to their agility, efficiency, innovation, and growth—
ultimately affecting their bottom line
API help in following ways:
• Integrate and connect people, places, systems, data, and algorithms.
• Share data and information.
• Enable transactions.
• Leverage third-party algorithms.
• Authenticate people and things.
• Develop new products, services, and business models.
• Create new user experiences.
APIs connect our ecommerce platform with numerous back-
end and front-end systems, including:

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP).

• Product information management (PIM).
• Customer relationship management (CRM).
• Order management system (OMS).
• Warehouse management system (WMS).
• Point-of-sale (POS).
• Content management system (CMS).
• Digital experience platform (DXP).
• APIs are utilized by a customer’s chosen third party vendors to
provide expanded features using ERP data.
• Some examples of these types of API include:
1.Dashboard visualizations in Business Intelligence (BI)
2.Interface for E-commerce ordering and shipping
3.Connectivity to mobile applications
Integration with ERP Systems
• An Application Program Interface (API) defines the way software and
external programs interact.
• In Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), APIs are necessary to ensuring
that the ERP application data is accessible to other programs.
• An API is the middleman between ERP and a program requesting
data.
• The API receives the request and returns the specific data so long as
the request has the appropriate permissions.
• The API also controls what data can be requested and how it is
received.
• Moving data from Word to Excel, signing into apps and websites using
a Facebook ID, storing your game’s progress to the Dropbox cloud,
each of these is an example of an API at work.
• The reason APIs are so common is simple: an API allows a program’s
internal functions to share data without revealing all the source
software’s code which saves time and reduces security risk.
• The aim of an ERP system is to create a single source of truth for an
organization. The benefits of achieving this are huge, including real-
time reporting, increased productivity, reduced operational costs, and
improved business insights
Things to consider while having custom API
• How much does creating a custom API cost?
• Does your ERP vendor have any experience dealing with the company
in question?
• Has the third-party provider already built a successful API to access
your type of ERP software for another company?
• Are they willing to give you references of other customers who use
their API?
Integration with Payment Gateways
• Payment APIs are APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) designed
for managing payments.
• They enable eCommerce sites to process:
-credit cards,
-track orders,
-and maintain customers lists.
In many instances, they can help protect merchants from fraud and
information breaches.
• Payment APIs can integrate multiple payment sources and provide
customers with a means of tracking their payments.
• Many of them permit managing recurring subscriptions.
• They can also be used for maintaining lists of clients.
Benefits Of A Payment Gateway API
• Business can interact with customers in more than one place
• Business will have real-time purchasing data to inform smarter
marketing decision
• Business can offer customers a wide variety of payment option
• Customer data remains safe and secure—and out of your hands
Using Open-Source CMS for Development of E-
commerce Applications
• An e-commerce platform is an online software application that allows
online businesses and companies to manage their online sales,
website, marketing.
• Three options for CMS development are:
1.open-source
2.SaaS
open-source
• The first type is probably the oldest and most popular type.
• Usually, it’s free, open-source software, which can be installed on
your own hosting.
• This way is usually preferred by developers and more technical
entrepreneurs.
• It gives you complete freedom in customization and development.
However, it requires technical knowledge from owners.
SAAS
• The second type is Software-as-a-Service.
• It’s a type of software when you “rent” the e-commerce platform.
• The fact is that SaaS software removes the complexity of running an
online business.
• You don’t have to think about hosting, all technical stuff.
• It’s all about paying the monthly fee, and that’s all.