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Online E-Book Store Website Design

Article · June 2011

DOI: 10.26634/jse.5.4.1449

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RESEARCH PAPERS

ONLINE E-BOOK STORE WEBSITE DESIGN

By

MOHAMMED A. ABDALA * NOOR AHMED KHIDER **

*-** Assistant Professor, Information & Comm. Eng. Dept., College of Information Engineering, AL-Nahrain University, Baghdad,
Iraq.

ABSTRACT
The ability to perform safe, quick, and efficient, commercial processes, made the idea of selling and purchasing goods
online very popular and profitable, especially with the wide spread of internet usage throughout the world. In this paper
an e-commerce website for online book sale (e-book store) is developed that offers a collection of scientific and
engineering books to choose from. They are arranged in different categories, some are free and others are available for
purchase in the store. The site offers a search facility to find books more efficiently, and a friendly interface to make the
buying process easy and simple. The site's administrator is provided with a simple control panel to facilitate the process of
adding and removing books from the site's database. The system makes use of a shopping cart system that stores
customer orders, and allows each customer to order more than one book at the same time. For validation and
simulation purposes, the visa card standard was adopted in the design of a virtual bank database that contains user
accounts' information. The database is connected to the system and is used in validating users' requests. The system was
implemented using PHP programming language with MySQL relational database on Apache server, and was tested
using Internet explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox.
Keywords: E-commerce, Online Book Sale, Website Design.

INTRODUCTION launched. In 1996, Dell began to sell personal computers

E‐commerce was first made possible by the
development of electronic data interchange (EDI), the
exchange of business documents from one computer to
another in a standard format. EDI originated in the
mid‐1960s, when companies in transportation and some
retail industries were attempting to create “paperless”
offices. In 1993, Mosaic, one of the first Internet browsers,
was released, and with Mosaic's graphical interface and
rapid proliferation, the Internet became more
user‐friendly and visually appealing. One year later,
Netscape released its Navigator browser; that signaled
the start of the golden age of e-commerce. Commercial
use of the Internet gradually became the dominant
pattern of Internet use in the mid‐1990s [1].
The term e‐commerce came into popular use in 1995,
signifying the rapid development of commercial
applications of the Internet. In 1995, Amazon.com, the
world's largest online bookstore, was launched, two
months later, eBay, the world's first online auction site, was
directly to consumers on the Internet and, in 1997, the
commercial domain (.com) replaced the educational
domain (.edu) as the largest in use. The Internet became
the fastest growing technology in economic history.
Investors, businesses, and consumers alike were attracted
by e‐commerce during that period [2].
E-Books are the books that are available in digital format;
e-books provide an alternate reading choice for lovers of
technology. E-Books offer a new dimension to the written
word, allowing books to be distributed and enjoyed so
much more easily. E-Books can be ordered online and
delivered electronically to your computer. You save
money with no shipping and the lowest prices.
An online store is a website where consumers buy
products or services. This type of site is most commonly
referred to as an e-commerce site or a “B2C” (Business to
Consumer) site. In addition to most, if not all, of the
content found in a normal site, an online store displays
products/services along with detailed information (e.g.

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specifications and pricing) usually from a database with
search features, and a method for online purchase. An
online store must also provide extensive information
about the products/services offered that not only aids in
attracting consumers, but gives them enough
confidence in the seller and the products/services to take
the next step- making an online purchase [2].
Although there is plenty of opportunity for growth, the
development of e‐commerce is limited by factors such
as universal access, privacy and security concerns, and
Internet fraud. These limitations must be adequately
addressed to ensure strong growth in e‐commerce [1].
1. Electronic Commerce (E-commerce)
E-commerce, or electronic commerce, is the term used
to denote a commercial transaction that takes place
between two or more people using the communications
infrastructure known as the Internet [3]. There are seven
features of e-commerce technology that are unique to
this medium [4]:
·Is ubiquitous, it is available just about everywhere, at
all times.
·Has global reach, permitting commercial
transactions to cross cultural and national
boundaries.
·Operates according to universal standards shared by
all nations around the world.
·Provides information richness, which refers to the
complexity and content of a message.
·Is interactive—it allows for two way communication
between merchant and consumer.
·Increases information density. The Internet reduces
information collection, storage, processing, and
communication costs while increasing the currency,
accuracy, and timeliness of information.
·Permits personalization and customization.
Merchants can target their marketing messages to
specific individuals by adjusting the message to a
person's name, interests, and past purchases.
E-commerce can be classified according to the nature
of the transactions or interactions into six types [5]:
42
·Business to Business (B2B): E-Commerce model in
which all of the participants are businesses or other
organizations.
·Business to Customer (B2C): E-Commerce model in
which businesses sell to individual shoppers.
·E-tailing: Online retailing, usually B2C.
·Business to Business to Customer (B2B2C): E-
Commerce model in which a business provides
some product or service to a client business that
maintains its own customers.
·Customer to Business (C2B): E-Commerce model in
which an individual use the internet to sell products or
services to organizations or individuals seek sellers to
bid on products or services they need.
·Customer to Customer (C2C): E-Commerce model in
which customer could sell directly to other customers.
2. Proposed E-Book Store Design
The system was designed based on the study of famous
online book stores such as "Amazon" or "Google books"
with the Iraqi market environment in mind. The system
interfaces were designed to be simple and direct,
providing all information needed by the user, while
increasing security and protection of the database.
The system was implemented using PHP (Hypertext
Preprocessor) scripting language because of its speed of
development, popularity and portability. The system also
make use of MySQL relational database management
software package, mainly for its high compatibility with
php and ease of use. Based on the website design
features above, the proposed system is designed as
shown in Figure 1. A description of the main units of the
design is given below:
·User: the site requires no registration so the user can
be any person browsing the internet.
·Admin: the administrator is the person responsible for
managing the system database. The administrator is
the only person capable of adding and removing
books from the database.
·Books Database: The book database contain
information about all books in the website such as
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title, author, ISBN, price,…etc. The search and

browsing process include database access for
retrieving books' information.
·Browsing: The website offers different categories for
books (e.g. web, mathematics, Programming…etc)
which the user can sort through author names, book
titles, or years of publish and other attributes. In
addition the website offers some books for free.
·Search: The website offer the capability to search for
books using part of the book title, the author name, or
ISBN.
·Adding to Cart: The shopping cart system stores the Figure 2. Basic page layout of the website
customers' order and allow the purchase of more
below this logo. On the left side of the page there is a list of
than one book at a time. The user must add the book
the different book genres or categories that the user can
to the shopping cart before proceeding to buy it.
choose from. The content of each page are displayed in
·Purchase: The purchase process consists of three the middle area of the page. The main features of the
basic steps: website can be explained by giving a brief description of
Filling the form: the user must enter credit card each website page as follows:
information. 3.1 Home Page
Validating input: the system checks the validity of The home page is the first page that the user interacts
the input data with. It displays the most viewed and most purchased
Delivering the book. books to help the user find the most popular books that
·Bank Database: A simple database used to simulate other users liked as can be shown in Figure 3.
a virtual bank, it contains Visa Card information 3.2 Genre Page
(name, visa number, expiry date) for a number of The Genre page is a dynamic page that displays books in
users. This database is securely protected and is used a specific desired category selected by user. It offers the
for validation purposes only. user the option to order the displayed books according to
3. Implementation and Results title, author or year of publish. An example of the
The website pages have a similar basic layout design that Networking category sorted by year can be shown in
can be illustrated in Figure 2. The website logo is displayed Figure 4.
in the top of the page, moreover, links to home page,
search, free section and shopping cart are displayed

Figure 1. Block diagram of the proposed system Figure 3. Home page layout design

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Figure 4. The 'Networking' genre page sorted by year

Figure 7. Free section page
3.3 Search and Result Pages
pages, a dynamic page displays information about the
The search page gives the user the option to search for selected book, such as title, author, ISBN, price and
books using book title, author name, or ISBN. The search other information. Also there is an option to add the
page is shown in Figure 5. For the title search, the result book to the cart (or download link if the book is free) as
page displays book(s) that contain the given word in their can be shown in Figure 8. When the book is added to the
titles, while the author name search returns book(s) that cart a message 'the book is already in cart' is displayed
have been written by the given author. The ISBN search to prevent the user from adding the same book twice as
option returns only the unique book that has the given shown in Figure 9.
ISBN. An example of the result page of using title search
with the keyword 'software' is shown in Figure 6.
3.4 Free Section Page
The free section page displays books that the user can
download immediately without purchase as can be
shown in Figure 7.
3.5 Book Information Page
When a user select a book from any of the previous

Figure 8. Book information page

Figure 5. Search page

Figure 6. Search results using keyword 'software’ Figure 9. Book information page after adding to cart

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3.6 Shopping Cart Page
The shopping cart page displays a table of the book(s)
that the user has added to cart. With each book there is a
'remove' option to allow the user to remove any book that
may not be wanted anymore or added by mistake. Also
the total money required for the purchase is calculated
and displayed with an option to proceed in purchase as
can be shown in Figure 10.
3.7 Purchase Page
The purchase page consist of a form that the user is
required to fill. Since the Visa Card is the standard
payment method adopted by the system, the user is
asked to fill a form with his visa card information. The
user must supply his visa registered name, visa number
and expiry date. The required form can be shown in
Figure 11.
After the form is submitted, the system will then check the
input data with the following 10 different tests:
·Name length: must be at least 3 letters.
·Name must consist of letters only.
Figure 10. Shopping cart page
Figure 11. Visa card information form
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·Visa number must be 16 digits long.
·Visa number must consist of letters only.
·The first digit in visa number must be 4, because it is
the issuer identification number of visa.
·The five digits after the first must match the bank
number (which is 00000 for the designed virtual bank)
·The remaining 10 digits must satisfy luhn algorithm
that is a checksum mathematical formula used to
validate different credit card numbers including visa.
·The expiry date is compared to the date of the
purchase to ensure the card is not expired.
·After all the previous tests are carried, the system will
connect the bank database and match the input
data with those in the database to ensure prevent
fraud.
·The user credit is checked to ensure that it can
provide the required amount of money.
If and only if all the above tests came positive the system
will inform the user and provide him with a link to download
the book(s) as can be shown in Figure 12.
3.8 Admin Control Panel
The admin control panel is a separate page from the
website which is protected by a username and a
password for increased security. After the administrator is
logged in, two forms are displayed one for adding books
and one for removing them. The two forms can be shown
in Figure 13.
Figure 12. Download links displayed after input validation
Figure 13. Admin control panel
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Conclusions [1]. H. Wijayanto, (2010). "E-Commerce Resources Book",

This paper present an e-book store website that offers to
sell books to the user online The system is practical and
easy to use because it was designed with clear and
friendly user interfaces. In addition, checking the user
input before connecting to the database is used as a
method to ensure database protection. The administrator
control panel makes adding and removing books a
dynamic process without compromising the security of
the database.
References
Ieu Surabaya.
[2]. J. Reynolds, 2004(). "The Complete E-Commerce
Book: Design, Build and Maintain a Successful Web-
based Business", Second Edition, CMP Books.
[3]. P. Carey, "The Internet and E-Commerce", ThoroGood.
[4]. J. Turban and C. King, (2001) “Introduction to E-
Commerce”, Prentice Hall.
[5]. M. Khosrow, (2006). “E-Commerce, E-Government
and Mobile Commerce”, Idea Group Reference, 2006.

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46 i-manager’s Journal on Software Engineering, Vol. 5 l

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