In addition to telecommunications, hardware and software add up to the
infrastructure of an e-commerce website. As a manager responsible for creating
e-commerce website, you will need to have basic information about both, hardware
and software.
Simple Vs Multi-Tiered Website Architecture
Preceding the improvement in e-commerce, sites basically delivered web pages to
users who were making requests through their browsers for HTML pages with
content of different sorts. Site programming was properly very simple, it comprised
of a server PC running fundamental web server software. We may consider this
arrangement a single tier system architecture. System architecture refers to the
arrangement of software, machinery, and jobs in a data system expected to
accomplish a particular functionality. Numerous sites began this way, there are no
money related exchanges. A huge number of websites till now perform this way.
Requests can generally be brought in by phone and not taken online.
Nonetheless, the advancement of e-commerce needs significantly more interactive
functionality, for example, the capacity to respond to user request, take client orders
for services and merchandise, clear credit card on the fly, counsel cost and item
databases, and even change promoting on the screen dependent on user attributes.
This sort of extended functionality required the advancement of web application
servers and a multi-tiered system architecture to deal with the processing loads.
Web application servers, are specific software programs that play out a wide variety
of transaction processing needed by e-commerce.
Along with having specific application servers, e-commerce websites should have the option to pull data from and add data to preexisting corporate databases. These
older databases which originate before the e-commerce time are called back-end or
legacy databases. Enterprises have made huge investments in these systems to store
their data on users, employees, product and sellers. These back-end systems
comprise an extra layer in a multi-tiered site.
Fig 2.4.1 shows complex multi-tier architecture and two-tier architecture for
e-commerce site. In two-tier architecture, a web server responds to HTTP requests
for web pages and a database server provides backend data storage. In a multi-tier
architecture, conversely, the web server is connected to a middle-tier layer that
typically incorporates a series of application servers that perform particular jobs, as
well as to a backend layer of existing corporate systems containing product,
customer, and pricing information. A multi-tiered website generally utilizes several
physical computers, each running portion of the software applications and sharing
the workload across number of physical computers.
Dynamic Page Generation Tools
Development of dynamic page generation tools is one the major innovations took place in website operation. Before e-commerce came into the picture, websites were mainly having static content as HTML pages.
The successful e-commerce website’s contents are always changing. There are new products and advertising, news events, changing prices and user testimonials.
E-commerce websites should effectively communicate with users who not only request web pages but also request for product, cost, availability and information regarding inventory. eBay is one of the most dynamic sites. The content on such sites changes every minute.
The dynamic and complex nature of e-commerce websites needs various specialized tools along with static HTML pages. Perhaps one of the most significant is dynamic page generation tool. In this the contents of web page are stored in database as objects, in place of keeping it as hard-coded in HTML. Once the web page request is sent by user, the contents for that particular web page are retrieved from the database.
The objects can be fetched from database by using Active Server Pages (ASP), Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Java Server Pages (JSP), or other server-side scripting programs. These ways are more effective than working directly with HTML code.
Changing contents of a database is more simple than changing HTML page coding. Application can access data from any database with the help of an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). It acts as a translator between database and application. ODBC drivers are available for majority of database management systems which are provided by organizations like SAP, Oracle, Sybase and IBM.
Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is a kind of ODBC driver which acts as a translator between various databases and applications written in Java programming language. Nowadays there are different web development platform available which permits developer to directly access database, which make ODBC/JDBC drivers needless.
Dynamic page generation tool provides e-commerce various capabilities which generate revenue and profitability edge over traditional commerce. It helps in reducing menu cost, the cost which is charged by vendors for making update in price and description of product. It also allows simpler online market segmentation, by which you can sell the same product to various markets.
For example, you may want different variety of same ad banner based on number of times the customer has seen that banner. For car ad, initially you may want to highlight brand and unique features. In the next viewing you may want to highlight superlatives like “most family friendly” s that user can compare it with other brands.
The same ability makes it possible to do cost-free differentiation in price, by which you can sell the same product at different price to different customers. For example, you may want to sell the same product to government agencies and to other companies, but using different marketing strategy.
Depending on the cookies placed on user’s computer, or from question’s response asked on website to user regarding if they are from corporation or from government agency, you can select different promotional material for different customers.
You may want to give low prices to loyal customers and can take full price from first time user. Dynamic page generation tool permit you to address different users with different pricing and message.
It also allows using Content Management System (CMS), which is used to manage and create web page content. A CMS segregates presentation and design of web page content from the process of content creation. All the web page content is stored in the database and are connected dynamically to the website.
A CMS generally contains templates which can be applied automatically to existing as well as to new content, WYSIWYG editing tools which makes it simpler to describe and edit content, workflow, data management tools and collaboration. Generally, an experienced developer is required to install the system initially, but later, content of web pages can be managed and modified by nontechnical staff.
There are number of commercial CMSs available like IBM, OpenText, Adobe, PaperThin, Sitecore, Oracle, also have hosted SaaS (software as a service) model by Acquia, Crownpeak and Clickability. Various open source content management systems are also available like Joomla, WordPress, Drupal etc.
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