Ecommerce - Online Store

Ecommerce - Online Store

Project Description

This project was intended to be a generic store front that was customized for several clients in the future. The intended objective was to build once and deploy for several clients with easy customization. The desired server side script was PHP and it was run inside Apache on a Windows server. This Project was looking for development with Feature like; Informational pages on the site get managed in admin panel with CMT editor. Categorized product catalog on site gets managed in admin panel in terms of adding or updating product / price / discount / availability information. Customers have a shopping cart and checkout page to pay online and get an order tracking number that they can enter on the site to know their order status. Customer orders can be browsed in admin panel and their order status can be updated. Manage inventory in terms of sale and purchase quantities with records of suppliers and customers

Capability Analysis:

In this analysis, we have described how the process works for the application is listed below.

1. Informational pages on the site get managed in admin panel with CMT editor. Hence the following pages that appear in Marina Paul site can be easily managed and a few more pages can be added if required:
2. Beads and Stones
3. Meet the Artist
4. Terms and Conditions
5. Policies
6. Categorized product catalog on site gets managed in admin panel in terms of adding or updating product / price / discount / availability information. Hence the following features are involved in context of Marina Paul site:
7. Left categories that display on main site can be edited in admin panel
8. There was a dynamically generated category listing page
9. There was a product details page when any item was clicked on the listings page
10. In admin panel products with associated description, price, availability and discount info can be added to specific categories
11. Customers have a shopping cart and checkout page to pay online and get an order tracking number that they can enter on the site to know their order status. Customers have got the following features:
12. Customers can browse products on the site and add to shopping cart. They can edit the cart at any time
13. Customers can place an order for items added to cart by filling the checkout form that asks for credit card details
14. The successful checkout leads to a confirmation page, which gives a order tracking number to the customer and also sends a mail to customer with order details
15. Customer can enter the order tracking number anytime on the site to view the current order status and shipping details.

Customer orders can be browsed in admin panel and their order status can be updated. Hence the following features are available in admin panel:

1. Site Admin can browse the list or customers and their associated orders
2. Order status can be updated and shipping details can be entered as remarks for each order.
3. Admin can browse the list of payments received in the store
4. No API integration with FEDEX or UPS or DHL or any other third party logistics provider was envisaged
5. Admin can reply messages on a board for any customer order
6. Customers can register and login to see their order and payment history as well as use a message board for to and fro communication related to their orders with site manager
7. Admin can publish news / events on the site
8. Admin can publish featured products or specials on home page
9. Contact page to receive enquiries and reply them over e-mail
10. Admin can run basic reports related to sales, payments and available inventory
11. Admin can set taxes and shipping charges that was automatically applied during checkout process
12. Multi-language and multi-currency features are not covered in this phase of work
13. Basic meta tag / titles based keyword optimization for search engines

In Phase 2: the following features were included:

1. Bidding platform for buyers and sellers
2. Manage inventory in terms of sale and purchase quantities with records of suppliers and customers. We assume that no shipment integration with DHL / FEDEX / UPS was needed. We assume that this was a simple module without purchase order process or customer order processing workflow
3. Site admin can see site statistics (open source log analyzer was integrated) - This was use Google Analytics and was also provide custom tracking by category, so that the site admin can determine which categories are popular and which ones are not.

Technology Architecture

The application was programmed in web architecture using PHP 4 + and MY SQL 4 + as RDBMS (LAMP architecture). Application architecture was centralized for easy manageability. Application was optimized for Internet Explorer 6+ but HTML 4 compliance was preserved to ensure cross browser compatibility with other common browsers like Firefox and Netscape Navigator.

Cross browser compatibility was largely ensured through use of XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4 compliance. All application testing was done in Firefox which has a more restrictive implementation of HTML / JavaScript and this ensures that it runs well in IE browsers too. Any cross browser issues was debugged if they arise during module testing.

Optimistic locking was used in database operations to improve concurrent user performance. Extensive use of stored procedures was ease network traffic and database performance.

Tangible Benefits:

1. This application has able to manage inventory in terms of sale and purchase quantities with records of suppliers and customers.
2. The new site was truly interactive with interfaces; Site admin can see site statistics. So that the site admin can determine which categories are popular.
3. This portal was designed from Sellers & Buyers perspective, Sellers are able to post products on sale with buy now option & Buyers are able to post bids or exercise buy now option.
4. It's oriented towards the needs of Customers and provided user-oriented menus and navigational aids that made it much easier for Customers to locate information.