e-Commerce and Web Development Final Project

Deliverables

Scope Document

• Provide a general overview of your site.
  • What business requirements does your site support.
  • What pages will be on your site and how are they connected (hierarchy diagram or Microsoft Word Outline). See pages 4,5 and 6 on this document
  • How will your site make use of folders. (You don't want all your pages in the same directory)
  • Will you use a third party shopping cart? Which one?
• Specify how you will handle payments
  • How will your customers pay for what you sell to them.
  • What is your estimate of how much it will cost you to collect on a $25 order?
  • Will you use PayPal? Will you use a credit card service from a local bank? Will you use some other payment approach?
  • What is your estimate of how much it will cost your business to collect on a $200 order?

Instructor Review

• Email your design document to me as soon as you finish it. I may be able to make some suggestions that will save you time and trouble in the rest of the project. Go ahead and create and populate your database tables.

Database Tables

• Product Table (priority one - must have)
  • Include a column to optionally specify the file name of a picture of the product
  • Include a column to optionally specify the name of a file that contains further product information
• Customer Table (optional)
  • Customer id (sequentially assigned)
  • Include Customer Name, Address, City, State, Zip
  • Include userid and password
    • Will you encrypt the password?
• Shipments Table (do this last)
  • Shipment record id (sequentially assigned)
  • Customer id
  • Product id
  • Quantity to be shipped
  • Date record added (timestamp)

Home (index) page

• Make it look professional.
• You want to use the same look and the same menu system on all pages
• Include your external style sheet and make use of it.
• Make sure there is a link to your products page
• After the professional looking part of your home page, include links to all your previous class assignments.

Product listing and selection system

• Build a professional looking page. This must be a php page because it will access the database
• Show your products (probably in a table).
  • At least one product must have a picture.
  • At least one product must have a link to a demonstration - probably a flash file.

Shopping Cart system

• You could build your own Shopping Cart system or use an open source system.
• It's probably easiest to build your own.
• If you build your own you would need to
  • Keep an array with product, quantity, product description and price
  • Update this array (new row) each time you receive control from the product list, the product demo, or the product picture
  • Display the contents of the array in a form
  • Give the user the option to checkout (go to the payment system).
  • Give the user the option to continue shopping (back to product listing)
  • Give the user the option to change quantities or delete products (save this for last. if you don't get to it, you will still have a working system even though the user cannot make changes after putting something into the shopping cart.

Checkout and payment system

• You will need to collect customer and payment information now.
• If you have implemented a customer registration system, ask the customer to either register or logon and then obtain the information from the customer database.
• If you have not implemented a customer registration system, get customer and payment information from a form.
• Pass the invoice total and the payment information to the payment system (merchant account or paypal).
• Pass the shopping cart details to your fulfillment system so you know what to ship. This is outside the scope of this project so for now, just dump the shopping cart details to a shipments table (sxx_shipments) in the database.
  • Customer id (if you have not implemented the customer registration system, plug this with 999)
  • Product id
  • Quantity to be shipped.
  • Date this record was added to the shipments table
• If you use Paypal, here are some usful references including code exampes:
• PHPToPayPal.doc
• PHPtoPayPal.html

Customer registration system

• Collect the customer's information and store it in the customer table.
• Use spry to validate the information.

Customer authentication (logon) system

• Get the userid and password and match it to the customer database
• When the information matches, store the customer id in memory for later use.
• Handle logon errors.

Suggested Project Management Strategy

You want to have a working site even if you are not able to complete all of the deliverables listed above. The order suggested in this section will allow for this.

• Create your scope (design) document. Include your shopping cart and payment design decisions even if you don't get that far in the implementation
• Design the overall look and feel of your site. Implement some of this in your external style sheet. Create all folders
• Implement your home page including the menu system you will use on other pages.
• Add new columns to your product table. Populate the product table with products. (You can leave the optional columns empty for now)
• Build the PHP product listing page. The listing page should give the user an opportunity to buy any product or add it to the shopping cart.
• Implement a dummy "shop.php" page. This page could display the id of the product that the user is trying to buy or add to the shopping cart.
• Update your product table to include the name of a picture (jpg) file in at least one of your products
• Get a picture (take one with a camera, take an image from the web). Upload the picture to your web site and give it a file name that matches the name you have placed in your database.
• Update the logic on your PHP product listing page to either display the picture on the product listing page itself or provide a link to a separate page with the picture. This separate page could include product details as well as the picture.This page should allow the user to buy the product or add it to the shopping cart.
• Update your product to include the name of a product demonstration file.
• Update the logic on your PHP product listing page to support linking to a product demonstration file for any product where a demonstration file name is specified.
• Build a "dummy" demonstration page using Flash. This could be a page that says a demonstration is coming soon.
• Build a more serious Flash demonstration.
• Enhance the shop.php page to implement shopping cart functionality (except for the ability to change or delete items on the cart).
• Enhance the shop.php page to link to the checkout and payment system.
• Implement a very simple checkout and payment system. (dump the shopping cart array and exit)
• Enhance the shop.php page to allow for changes and deletes in the shopping cart.
• Implement a real checkout and payment system.
• Implement customer registration and logon and integrate it with the checkout and payment system.