Components of an Electronic Commerce Application

Electronic Commerce Application

From an application point of view, the buying and selling of products in an electronic market can be defined in terms of interactions between several major components. Most of these components are activities or processes that take place when a consumer browses an electronic commerce site and places an order for a product.

Some of these processes have a user-interface, but others are invoked through user events to initiate an online shopping and complete a purchase. This is illustrated in Figure 1.

The plain rectangles define the processes that take place between a merchant and its consumers, and the shaded rectangles define those processes that typically take place between a merchant and its business partners such as banks and shipping companies.

Electronic Catalog

Electronic catalog is equivalent of a retail store or hard-copy catalog of a merchant. It contains all items that the merchant sells, and the items are typically organized in categories or by some common attributes of items.

For example, a publisher may organize its books by subject, author, ISBN number, keyword, and so on. From the application point of view, an electronic catalog might be a simple relational database stored in the merchant’s computer.

Catalog Browsing

Catalog browsing is a capability of the consumer provided by the merchant to search for products in the electronic catalog of the merchant.

Copyright 2002: Mohammad A. Rob From the application point of view, this might be a form displayed on the consumer’s desktop that provides searching capability of items from the merchant’s database according to certain attributes of the items.

Shopping Cart

Shopping cart is a dynamic storage area where a consumer can select or deselect products of his or her choice. From an application point of view, this might be items that are added or deleted from an order table in the merchant’s database.

Checkout

Checkout involves final selection of items by the consumer from the shopping cart and a response from the merchant regarding the itemized cost of products, tax, and total cost of the purchase.

Depending on the merchant, it might also involve collecting some information of the consumer including payment options.

From an application point of view, this might involve displaying a form with the selected items and the price from the order table as well as a request of information for payment.

Payment

In this process, the consumer provides some personal information including shipping address and selects an option for payment.

Typically, this is a Web form that is completed by the consumer and submits it for payment processing. Depending on the merchant, there are also marketing information that are included in this form.

Payment processing is the functionality of the merchant. For real- time credit card processing, it requires interaction between the merchant computer and a third party computer such as that from an automatic clearing-house.

Various other methods such as collecting credit card information off- line or charge on delivery may be used. In this paper, we will consider that the merchant has already set-up an account with a financial institution that provided a credit card processing machine.

Thus the merchant is collecting the order from the Internet clients and then processing the credit cards manually for each order. If the charge is cleared, then the merchant processes the shipment.

Receipt

The path to getting a receipt may not be as simple as a retail store unless a merchant is using an on-line credit card processing. In most cases, the receipt might be an acknowledgement of the order. This might a Web page displayed to the consumer’s desktop and/or an automated e-mail message sent to the consumer.

Shipment Processing

Normally a third party is involved for shipment processing such as UPS, FedEx. Thus communication between the merchant e- commerce system and the shipping company computer needs to be established. The communication can be done through the Internet or through a value added network (VAN).

Catalog Payment Browsing Processing

Shopping Consumer Cart Payment Check Out

The most popular use of the Internet is the World Wide Web, containing interlinked documents or Web pages in various computers around the world. Web pages are marked with tags, which govern the display and formatting of text elements.

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)

SGML is a international standard programming meta language, meaning that rather than being a complete language in itself, it is actually a language framework that can be used to define any number of markup languages for specific purposes.

It represents a system of marking up documents that is independent of any software application. It is device-independent and machine independent method of representing electronic documents. But, it is not well suited for quick development of Web pages. It is also costly to set up and requires a steep learning curve.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

HTML is based on SGML. It is a particular instance of SGML, however HTML’s document type definition is easier to learn and use. This system uses codes called tags to describe, format and display documents on the Web. All of the Web page elements such as graphic positioning, tables, frames, heading and title bars are created by HTML. Thus HTML became the standard for developing Web pages.

Further Reading: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a meta-markup language that provides a format for describing structured data. XML is a subset of SGML that is optimized for delivery over the Web; it is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), ensuring that structured data will be uniform and independent of applications or vendors. In XML, one can define an unlimited set of tags.

XML maintains the separation of the user interface from the structured data. While HTML specifies how to display data in a browser, XML defines the content. For example, in HTML you use tags to tell the browser to display data as bold or italic; in XML you only use tags to describe data, such as city name, temperature, and barometric pressure.

Once the data is on the client desktop, it can be manipulated, edited, and presented in multiple views, without return trips to the server. Servers can now become more scalable, due to lower computational and bandwidth loads. Also, since data is exchanged in the XML format, it can be easily merged from different sources.

It is important to mention that in business-to-business e-commerce, a high volume of electronic data is exchanged between business partners. A standard format for documents (purchase orders, invoices, checks) is necessary to interpret the contents of the documents.

XML provides a data standard that can be used to mark up an ordinary document, a structured record such as a purchase order, an object with data and methods, and a data record such as the result set of a query.

To create a new markup language from SGML, one must create a Document Type Definition (DTD) which uses the SGML structure to define the tags that define the new language. HTML has its own DTD. SGML is usually perceived as excessively complex, and hence XML was conceived as a cut-down version of SGML. XML allows the production of DTDs that are a specification for a set of tags and the order in which they are allowed to occur.

Further Reading: http://www.w3.org/XML/Activity.html

There are scripting languages that are used within the HTML codes to create dynamic Web pages that run programs in the client and/or server machine. Thus, there are client-side scripting and server-side scripting technology.

Microsoft® Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting technology. An ASP page is an HTML document with embedded scripts that are processed by a Web server. Server-side scripts are run when a browser requests an ASP file from the Web server. The Web server runs the script, formats a standard Web page and sends it back to the browser.

In an electronic commerce application, where a database is used to store catalog, shopping cart, and transaction information, ASP pages are used to write SQL scripts within the HTML codes. These SQL scripts are run when a browser requests this ASP page. When the Web server encounters the SQL code, the processing is turned to the database server.

To create an ASP page, one can use a text editor (or a tool such as Visual InterDev) to insert script commands into an HTML page. Saving the page with an .asp file name extension tells the Web server how to process the script commands.

VBScript is the default scripting language for ASP, although JavaScript can also be used. In HTML, one uses brackets as delimiters around the tags, while in ASP, tags are placed inside one pair of VBScript delimiters.

Figure1: Major Processes in an Electronic Commerce