Page 170 - DCAP306_DCAP511_E-COMMERCE_AND_E-BUSINESS

Unit 13: Designing and Building E-Commerce Web Site - Basics

4. MySQL is a database server used for low traffic Web sites and represents an inexpensive database
solution for small scale e-commerce Web site.

The back-end coding is used for interconnecting the Web host and the database. Coding languages
such as, PHP, XML, JavaScript, Ajax, and CSS are used for data security and accessing database. HTML
is used for creating the frontend GUI and designing of the Web site.

IDG e-commerce database helps the end-users to obtain a list of e-commerce products
and services. It is one of the largest sources of qualified e-commerce database. It
provides an excellent functionality of describing information regarding the software,
hardware, trade shows, seminars, services, and computer catalogs that are related to e-
commerce market.

Create a database for a cosmetic product Web site. Include various products belonging
to different companies. Develop tables in database such that it contains table attributes
that are linked with other tables.

13.4 Shopping Cart Applications
A shopping cart is a piece of software that helps in simplifying the shopping process for an online
customer when purchasing multiple products or services from a merchant's Web site. It provides an
interface between a company’s Web site and its deeper infrastructure. It allows consumers to select
merchandise, review the selected merchandise, and purchase the merchandise.

Basically, a shopping cart is a software that allows merchants to list their products on a Web site and
then automatically collect fees when a customer buys products from their Web site.

Assume that you have a grocery shop, and now you want to start selling grocery
products on a Web site. To do that, first, you must have shopping cart software.
You must also have a business bank account, payment gateway, and a service that
allows you to automatically process credit cards on the web site.
Once you have the shopping cart software set up on the Web site, you can add
grocery products to the Web site using a Web browser. The software allows you to
include images, description, prices which are stored in database and recalled on
structured queries. Shopping cart is as good as a shopping basket as it holds the
products.
Customers log into the Web site and add products to their shopping cart. When they are ready to buy
the products, they enter their shipping and credit card information in a form. This enables the merchant
to know where to ship the product and whom to charge it to. Once the customer clicks the button to
submit the order, the shopping cart uses the payment gateway and credit-card-processing service, to
validate the credit card and then transfer the money from the customer's credit card to the merchant’s
bank account.
Shopping carts are written in different types of programming languages. Some of them give full access
to the source code and thus, allow experienced programmers to make modifications to the system
features. Some shopping carts run on Windows Web servers, some on UNIX, and others on both. In
most cases, the merchant can place the shopping cart on a Web server by transferring the source code
files into the server using any File Transfer Protocol (FTP) software.

ProductCart, shopping cart software, is a collection of files written in a
programming language called Classic ASP. An e-commerce merchant can host that
software on a Windows server. As the source code is included, the experienced
programmers can customize the system as per their choice.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 163