BUILDING AN E-COMMERCE

WEBSITE
 GUIDE

■ Create your product

■ Determine pricing
■ Figure out shipping options
■ Choose e-commerce platform
■ Pick a domain name and brand
■ Build your e-commerce website
■ Set up merchant account
■ Add a SSL certificate to website
CREATE YOUR PRODUCT

■ Do some research to make sure your product is viable.

Is there already a market out there for your product?
■ If there is already an established market, consider
whether your product is unique enough to break in.
Will you be able to compete on pricing?
DETERMINE PRICING

To figure out the pricing that makes sense you have to first figure out your own
cost. That includes:
■ the cost of materials to make your product
■ web hosting for your eCommerce site
■ taxes
■ shipping
■ the percentage payment systems (e.g. credit cards or PayPal) will skim off the
top
■ additional marketing and advertising costs
■ then figure out how much you want to add on top to pay yourself (and make a
profit!).
RESEARCH SHIPPING COSTS AND
OPTIONS
Consider offering one of these shipping methods:
■ Offer free shipping, no questions asked
■ Offer free shipping and increase your product pricing
slightly to cover the cost
■ Offer free shipping for orders of a certain size/quantity
■ Offer a flat shipping fee
CHOOSE ECOMMERCE WEB HOSTING

■ If you want a website and brand that’s all your own, many website
hosting platforms make it easy to find compatible eCommerce
options that you can work with in the same space you use to work
on your website. This way you can direct people to
youronlinestore.com. You look like a real, live store!
■ An ecommerce software will make it easy for you to list your
products, set your price, and add a shopping cart to the website.
They take care of ensuring the process is intuitive for both you and
your customers, so you can just focus on selling.
PICK A DOMAIN NAME AND BRAND

■ Brainstorm words and phrases that say something

about the products you’ll be selling, and words and
phrases that mean something to you. And be sure to
stay away from names that have already been
copyrighted by other businesses
 BUILD THE WEBSITE

Once you set up your site, you have to do more than just add your
products. In addition to product pages, your eCommerce website
should also include the following pages:
■ A home page where you feature weekly deals and sale items
■ An about page with a brief description of what you do
■ A contact or customer service page so customers can easily reach
you
■ A blog where you post updates, industry news, and helpful titbits
 SET UP A MERCHANT ACCOUNT

■ Online stores need a way to receive money – specifically,

a way to receive credit card payments. A merchant
account does the very important job of ensuring you can
get paid.
■ You will have to pay something to the company in order
to get your money, but the ability to accept the money
your customers send should make the fees well worth it.
GET YOUR SSL CERTIFICATE

■ When you create your site, be sure to install a SSL

certificate. An SSL certificate for your website
encrypts all the sensitive information customers
provide so that hackers won’t be able to grab that
credit card information as it’s sent over the web.
 DESIGN PHASES AND DEVELOPMENT
PROCESS
■ Information Gathering
■ Planning
■ Design
■ Development
■ Testing and Delivery
■ Maintenance
PHASE ONE: INFORMATION
GATHERING
■ Purpose
What is the purpose of the site?
■ Goals
What do you hope to accomplish by building this web site?
■ Target Audience
Is there a specific group of people that will help you reach your goals? It
is helpful to picture the “ideal” person you want to visit your web site.
■ Content
What kind of information will the target audience be looking for on your
site?
PHASE TWO: PLANNING
■ Requirement Assessment – Requirement assessment refers to finding
out the precise requirements of the website. This includes determining
the target audience, website goals, detailed features, and other similar
information about the website.
■ Project Summary – Project summary sums up the website’s
requirements. The document is typically concise, and serves as a
reference point throughout the web development process.
■ Determining Required Resources – The project planning stage also
defines the software and other resource requirements for the website
project. In this step, any 3rd party media needs is identified. All of the
resource requirements is then added to the budget of the project.
■ Key performance goals – The website planning stage
also involves determining key performance goals.
Project deadlines, budgeted costs, and page speed are
some of the website design and development goals that
are set at this stage.
■ Competitor Analysis – Finally, this stage also involves
conducting competitor analysis. Which are the rival
businesses of your website? How many visitors will visit
the website? What will be their bounce rate? Other
important things that are considered at this stage include
visual branding, call to action, navigation, and layout.
PHASE THREE: DESIGN

■ Focuses on selecting the theme, colour, layout,

features, and other aspects of the website.
■ Incorporates various elements such as company logo,
colour that strengthens brand identity, theme that
reflects the company’s product portfolio, and layout
that is elegant and looks appealing.
PHASE FOUR: DEVELOPMENT

■ Takes individual elements of the website and uses them to

create a functional website. The stage involves developing
a home page after which a “shell” is created for the
interior pages. The shell contains navigational structure
and site layout without the web content.
■ On the technical side, the website development process
includes elements such as designing interactive contact
forms, implementing payment gateways, and choosing a
CMS (content management system)
PHASE FIVE: TESTING AND
DELIVERY(DEPLOYMENT)
■ Adds final touches to the site and tests the website before deployment. The
designer will test complete functionality of the site to ensure that it runs
smoothly without any glitch. The website designer will test the scripts and
forums, ensure that the site displays well on different devices and platforms,
verify internal links, and other similar tasks.
■ The website designer will also validate the website codes to ensure that it
meets latest website After the website has been uploaded to the hosting
server, a final run through is conducted to ensure that the site performs
without any problem. This step is performed just to validate that all the files
have been uploaded correctly, and that the site is fully functional.
PHASE SIX: MAINTENANCE

■ Ongoing
BUILDING AN ECOMMERCE WEBSITE:
A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH

Most important management challenges:

– Developing a clear understanding of business
objectives
– Knowing how to choose the right technology to
achieve those objectives
PIECES OF THE SITE BUILDING
PUZZLE
Main areas where you will need to make decisions:
– Human resources and organizational capabilities
– Hardware
– Software
– Telecommunications
– Site design
 THE SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT LIFE
CYCLE
Five major steps:
1. Systems analysis/planning
2. Systems design
3. Building the system
4. Testing
5. Implementation
 SYSTEM ANALYSIS/ PLANNING

■ Business objectives
■ System functionalities
■ Information requirements
SYSTEMS DESIGN:
HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE PLATFORM

■ System design specification

■ Two components of system design:
1. Logical design
2. Physical design
LOGICAL DESIGN FOR A SIMPLE
WEBSITE
PHYSICAL DESIGN FOR A SIMPLE
WEBSITE
 BUILD/HOST YOUR SITE VS
OUTSOURCING
■ Build own vs. outsourcing
■ Host own vs. outsourcing
Hosting: hosting company responsible for ensuring site is
accessible 24/7, for monthly fee
Co-location: firm purchases or leases Web server (with
control over its operation), but server is located at vendor’s
facility
TESTING, IMPLEMENTATION AND
MAINTENANCE
■ Testing
– Unit testing
– System testing
– Acceptance testing
■ Implementation and maintenance:
– Maintenance is ongoing
– Maintenance costs: parallel to development costs
– Benchmarking
WEBSITE BUDGET

Components of budget:
– System maintenance
– System development
– Content design & development
– Hardware
– Telecommunications
– Software
WEB SERVER SOFTWARE

■ Apache
Leading Web server software (47% of market)
Works with UNIX, Linux, Windows, Macintosh
■ Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS)
Second major Web server software (25% of market)
Windows-based
 Azure
A cloud computing service created by Microsoft
E-COMMERCE MERCHANT SERVER
SOFTWARE
Provides basic functionality for online sales:
– Online catalog
– Shopping cart
– Credit card processing
MERCHANT SERVER SOFTWARE
PACKAGES
Key factors in selecting a package
– Functionality
– Support for different business models
– Business process modeling tools
– Visual site management and reporting
– Performance and scalability
– Connectivity to existing business systems
– Compliance with standards
– Global and multicultural capability
– Local sales tax and shipping rules
SITE MANAGEMENT TOOLS

■Basic tools
–Included in all Web servers
–Verify that links on pages are still valid
–Identify orphan files
■Third-party software and services for advanced site
management
–Monitor customer purchases, marketing campaign
effectiveness, etc.
E.g. WebTrends Analytics 9, Google Analytics
APPLICATION SERVERS

■ Web application servers:

– Provide specific business functionality required for a Web site
– Type of middleware
■ Isolate business applications from Web servers and
databases
– Single-function applications increasingly being replaced by
integrated software tools that combine all functionality needed
for e-commerce site
CHOOSING THE HARDWARE FOR
AN E-COMMERCE WEBSITE
■ Hardware platform:
Underlying computing equipment that system uses to achieve
e-commerce functionality
■ Objective:
Enough platform capacity to meet peak demand without
wasting money
■ Important to understand the different factors that affect speed,
capacity, and scalability of a site
RIGHT SIZING YOUR HARDWARE PLATFORM:
THE DEMAND SIDE

Factors in overall demand:

– Number of simultaneous users in peak periods
– Nature of customer requests (user profile)
– Type of content (dynamic versus static Web pages)
– Required security
– Number of items in inventory
– Number of page requests
RIGHT SIZING YOUR HARDWARE PLATFORM:
THE SUPPLY SIDE

■ Scalability:
Ability of site to increase in size as demand warrants
■ Ways to scale hardware:
– Vertically
Increase processing power of individual components
– Horizontally
Employ multiple computers to share workload
– Improve processing architecture
OTHER E-COMMERCE SITE TOOLS

■ Web site design: Basic business considerations

– Enabling customers to find and buy what they need
■ Tools for Web site optimization
– Search engine placement
■ Keywords, page titles
■ Identify market niches, localize site
■ Expertise
■ Links
■ Search engine ads
TOOLS FOR INTERACTIVITY AND
ACTIVE CONTENT
■ Web design elements: Widgets, Mashups
■ CGI (Common Gateway Interface)
■ ASP (Active Server Pages)
■ Java, JSP, and JavaScript
■ ActiveX and VBScript
■ ColdFusion
PERSONALIZATION TOOLS

■ Personalization
Ability to treat people based on personal qualities and prior
history with site
■ Customization
Ability to change the product to better fit the needs of the
customer
■ Tools to achieve:
Cookies
THE INFORMATION POLICY SET

■ Privacy policy
Set of public statements declaring how site will treat
customers’ personal information that is gathered by site
■ Accessibility rules
Set of design objectives that ensure disabled users can
affectively access site