tugas e-bisnis

Building An E-Commerce Web Site

The two most important management challenges in building a successfull e-commerce site are:
1.Developing a clear understanding of your bussiness objectives and
2.Knowing how to choose the right technology to achieve those objectives

Pieces Of The Site-Building Puzzle
Let’s assume you are a manager for a medium sized, industrial parts firm of around 10,000 employees worldwide, operating in ten countries in Europe, Asia, and North America. Senior management has given you a budget of $1 million to build an e-commerce site within one year. The purpose of this site will be to sell and service the firm’s 20,000 customers, who are mostly small machine and metal fabricating shops around the world.
1.You must be aware of the main areas where you will need to make decisions. On the organizational and human resources front, you will have to bring together a team of individuals who possess the skill sets needed to build and manage a successfull e-commerce site. This team will make the key decisions about technology, site design, and the social and information policies that will be applied at your site. The entire site development effort must be closely managed if you hope to avoid that disasters that have occurred at some firms.
2.You will also need to make decisions about your site’s hardware, software, and telecommunications infrastructure. While you will have technical advisors help you make this decisions, ultimately the operation of the site is your responsibility. The demands of your customers should drive your choices of technology. Your customers will want technology that enables them to find what their want easily, view the product, purchase the product, and then receive the product from your warehouse quickly. You will also carefully have to consider your site’s design. Once you have identified the key decision areas, you will need to think about a plan for the project.

Planning: The Systems Development Life Cycle
One methodology for developing an e-commerce site plan is the systems development life cycle. The system development life cycle (SDLC) is a methodology for understanding the business objectives of any system and designing an appropriate solution. The five major steps involved in the systems development life cycle for an e-commerce site are:
1.Systems Analysis/Planning
2.Systems Design
3.Building the System
4.Testing
5.Implementation

Factors In Optimizing Web Site Performance
The purpose of a Web site is to deliver content to customers and to complete transactions. The faster and more reliably these two objectives are met, the more effective the Web site is from a commerce perspective. The optimization of web site performance is more complicated than it seems and involved three factors: page content, page generation, and page delivery.

Web Site Budgets
While how much you spend to build a Web site depends on how much you can afford, and, of course, the size of the opportunity. Web site costs according to a survey of 125 Web site managers. About 75% of the costs of Web sites involved technology cost-development, software licenses, and hardware. About 18% of costs will be for design and development, and 6% for marketing the site. (Source: Jupiter Media Metrix, 2002)

Choosing Server Software
What you able to do at an e-commerce site is largely a function of the software. As a business manager in charge of building the site, you will need to know some basic information about e-commerce software. The more sophisticated the software and the more ways you can sell goods and services, the more effective your business will be.

Simple Versus Multi-Tiered Web Site Architecture
Prior to development of e-commerce, Web sites simply delivered Web pages to users who were making requests through their browser for HTML pages. Web site software was appropriately quite simple-it consisted of a server computer running basic Web server software. We might call this arrangement a single-tier system architecture. System architecture refers to arrangement of software, machinery, and tasks in an information system needed to achieve a spesific functionality (much like a home’s architecture refers to arrangement of building materials to achieve a particular functionality).
In addition to having specialized application servers, e-commerce sites must be able to pull information from and add information to pre-existing corporate databases. These older databases that predate the e-commerce era are called backend or legacy databases. Corporation have made massive investments in these systems to store their information on customers, products, employees, and vendors. These backend systems constitute an additional layer in a multi-tiered site.
In two-tier architecture, a Web server responds to requests for Web pages and a database server provides backend data storage. In a multi-tier architecture, in contrast, the Web server is linked to a middle-tier layer that typically includes a series of application servers that perform specific, tasks, as well as to a backend layer of existing corporate systems containing product, customer, and pricing information. A multi-tiered site typically employs several or more physical computers, each running some of the software applications and sharing the work load across many physical computers.

The nine basic business and system functionalities an e-commerce site should contain include:
Digital catalog-allows a site to display goods using text and graphics.
Product database-provides product information, such as a description, stocking number, and inventory level.
Customer on-site traking-ebables a site to create a site log for each customer visit, aiding in personalizing the shopping experience and identifying common customer paths and destination.
Shopping cart/payment system-provides an ordering system, secure credit-card clearing, and other payment options.
Customer database-include customer information such as the name, address, phone number, and e-mail address.
Sales database-contain information regarding the customer ID, product purchased, date, payment, and shipment to be able to provide after-sale customer support.
Ad server-tracks the site behavior of prospects and customer that come through e-mail or banner ad campaigns.
Site tracking and reporting system-monitors the number of unique visitor, page visited, and product purchased.
Inventory management system-provides a link to production and suppliers in order to facilitate order replenishment.


Describe the major issues surronding the decision to outsource site development and/or hosting.
Advantage of building a site in-house include:
the ability to change and adapt the site quickly as the market demands, and
the ability to build a site that does exactly what company needs.
Disadvantage of building a site in-house include:
the costs may be higher;
the risks of failures may be greater, given the complexity of issues such as security, privacy, and inventory management;
the process may be more time-consuming than if you had hired an outside specialist firm to manage the effort; and
staff may experience a longer learning curve that delays your entry into the market.
Using design templates cuts development time, but pre-set templates can also limit functionality.
A similar decision is also necessary regarding outsourcing the hosting of the site versus keeping it in-home. Relying on an outside vendor to ensure that the site is life twenty-four hours a day places the burden of reliability on someone else, in return for a monthly hosting fee. The downside is that if the site requires fast upgrades due to heavy traffic, the chosen hosting company may or may not be capable of keeping up. Reliability versus scalability are the issues in this instance.

Identify and understand the major considerations involved in choosing Web server and e-commerce merchant server software.
Early Web sites used single-tier system architecture and consisted of a single-server computer that delivered static. Web pages to users making requests through their browsers. The extended functionality of today’s Web sites required the development of a multi-tiered systems architecture, which utilizes a variety of specialized Web servers, as well as link to pre-existing “backend” or “legacy” corporate databases.
All e-commerce site require basic Web server software to answer requests from customer for HTML and XML pages. When choosing Web server software, companies are also choosing what operating system the site will run on; Apache, which runs on the UNIX system, is the market leader.

Web server provide a host of services, including
processing user HTML requests
security services
file transfer protocol
search engine
data engine
e-mail
site management tools

Dynamic server software allows sites to deliver dynamic content, rather than static, unchanging information. Web application server programs enable a wide range of e-commerce functionality, including creating a customer database, creating an e-mail promotional program, accepting and processing orders, as well as many other services.

E-commerce merchant server software is another important software package that provides catalog displays, information storage and customer tracking, order taking (shopping cart), and credit card puchase processing. E-commerce suites can save time and money, but customization can significantly drive up costs. Factors to consider when choosing an e-commerce suite include the functionality, support for different business models, visual site management tools and reporting system, performance and scalability, connectivity to existing business systems, compliance with standards, and global and multicultural capability.

Understand the issues involved in choosing the most appropriate hardware for an commerce site.
Speed, capacity, and scalability are three of the most important considerations when selecting an operating system, and therefore the hardware that it runs on.
To evaluate how fast the site needs to be, companies need to assess the number of simultaneous users the site espects to see, the nature of their requests, the type of information requested, and the bandwidth available to the site. The answer to these question will provides guidance regarding the processors necessary to meet customer demand. In some cases, adding additional processing power can add capacity, thereby improving system speed.
Scalability is also an important issue. Increasing processing supply by scaling up to meet demand can be done through:
vertical scaling-improving the processing power of the hardware, but maintaining the same number of servers;
Horizontal scaling-adding more of the same processing hardware; and
Improving processing architecture-identifying opretions with similar workloads and using dedicated tuned servers for each type of load.

Identify additional tools that can can improve Web site performance.
In addition to providing a speedy Web site, companies must also strive to have a well-designed site that encourages visitors to buy. Building in interactivity improves site effectiveness, as does personalization technique that provide the ability to track customers while they are visiting the site. Commonly used software tools for achieving high levels of Web site interactivity and customer personalization include:
Common gateway interface (CGI) scripts-a set of standards for communication between a browser and a program on a server that allows for interaction between the user and the server.
Active Server Pages (ASP)-a Microsoft tool that also permits interaction between the browser and the server.
Java applets-programs written in Java programming language that also provide interactivity.
JavaScript-used to validate user input, such as an e-mail address.
ActiveX and VBScript-Microsoft’s version of Java and JavaScript, respectively.
Cookies-text files stored on the the user’s hard drive that provide information regarding the user and his or her past experience at a Web site.