ecommerce

Fundamentals of

Ecommerce

CSC-356

Abstract

Twenty first century of electronic world owe digitalized everything. The decade is growing, developing and updating IT world rapidly. Ever growing up the e-commerce and the World Wide Web digitalized the business applications and everyone else is not so far from the internet applications. The project on CSC 356, Fundamental of Ecommerce helps us to develop the website with core knowledge of ecommerce. This project has been developed with an aim to electronize the business; by using open source software for ecommerce named Prestashop.

The software has advanced functions for each and every task and trasactions that has to be done while selling goods and services online, like nice display and categorizing of products, adding of items in cart. Payment gateways like Paypal, E-Sewa, Moneybookers, Liberty Reserve and many more makes online transactions possible through this website. Moreover, it has provision for SSL which makes the online transaction more secure.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We take this opportunity to express our profound gratitude and deep regards to our guide and lecturer Mr. Rabindra Acharya for his exemplary guidance, monitoring and constant encouragement throughout the course of this project work.

We also take this opportunity to express a deep sense of gratitude to BSc. Coordinator, Dilli Prasad Sharma his cordial support, valuable information and guidance, which helped us in completing this task through various stages.

We are obliged to lab staff members of Prime College, for the valuable information and support and guidance provided by them from their respective fields. We are grateful for their cooperation during the period of the task.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgement

Chapter ONE: Executive Summary

Chapter TWO: Introduction

• Online opportunities

• Business model

• Marketing strategies

• Payment method / Procedure

Chapter THREE: Business Problem Analysis and Solution

• Problem Analysis

• Solutions

Chapter FOUR: Website Design

Chapter FIVE: Conclusion

Chapter ONE: Executive Summary

The purpose of this document is to define the features, different strategies, business model, problem and their solution of the Nepal handicraft e-commerce website. In this website visitor can see publicly available Nepalese handicraft products, view the detail of each products including the size, color and cost, and view other static contents of the site. Registered users can view all publicly available features and in addition to this they can purchase the product by adding them into the shopping cart. Since this site is mainly targeted to the Nepalese citizens living in the foreign country, but it is also accessible to non-Nepalese citizens, they will be able to make the use of the site to get the information about the Nepal’s different handicrafts and can add to the cart at minimum price and get delivered straight to the destination location within the country.

Chapter TWO: Introduction

The use of the internet for business transaction has grown dramatically over the past few years. Approximately three out of five companies are using e-commerce to some extent and an additional one-fifth say they intend to participate in the future. So talking about the opportunity, business model, marketing strategies and payment method that our e-commerce website that will live up to the desire and demand of the physical market/consumer are briefly define below:

Online opportunity

Consumer behavior is changing. Consumers have increasingly turned to online channels, and they are satisfied when doing so. According to the survey made overall satisfaction is 85.9 % online compared to the 75.8 % on average for all sales channels. Our site will provide the unique benefits for the Nepalese people as well as other to purchase Nepalese handmade craft of the following way:

• Cost effective delivery channel: Since, the web storefront is open for 24 hours a day the consumer can order the product any time they want through the web store.

• Streamlined enrollment: All the information related to the consumer are transfer electronically so the verification and the validation is much easier than in the paper-based workflows. There is very less chance of the fault information about the customer.

• Categorized: The entire products present in the web store are categorized according to the need of customers. It makes easy for customers to find the related product they want to buy.

• Discount: Discounts are also available on some of the products.

Business Model

The main model that our ecommerce follow is B2C (Business to Consumer).Here the customer first identifies their needs and then starts to search the product. After customer finds the product, they add the desired products in the cart and choose suitable online payment method for payment. Then the business organization will verify the customer identity, validate the payment and then deliver the product to the customer as soon as possible. The basic structure the business model is shown below:

Marketing Strategies

To make the e-commerce website, it is imperative to plan and implement an effective marketing strategy that will generate leads and increase sales conversions. As there are other e-commerce sites which provide the same service and product as we do. So, the strategy our business organization is planning for the online competition are:

1. Public Relation: We will use the online resources like blogs, e-zines, article marketing, Facebook page and website, to tell the reader about our service, products and the web store. This will lead the consumer to our website through back-links.

2. Referrals: Referrals is considered being the best form of advertising available. The business organization will offer some fabulous scheme on purchasing the product to make sure that our customer are happy and they will be eager to tell their friends and colleagues about our site. For this purpose we have easy-to-use system that allows the customer to email friends directly through our site and they will be credited certain percent of the whole transaction.

3. Daily Deal Promotions: Daily deal promotions are quickly growing in popularity. An increasing number of consumers are becoming more price-conscious and are eager to get good deal whenever they can. So our site will use the software to create and schedule daily deals to post on blogs, Facebook page and other social media platforms which makes it easy to reach out to the mass.

4. Online banner Advertisement: The first-impressions are important. So, we can design the attractive, high-quality promotional banners to run on the targeted website. For this we will first try to draw a similar customer-base sites where our banner plays the effective role on the promotion of our site.

5. Affiliate Program: Looking for exchanging advertising or offering a small commission fee to related business that is willing to advertise for our website. For this purpose we will choose the site which is based on the promotion of Nepalese handicrafts.

6. Contests: There will be the contest or a monthly-drawing where the registered customers will be getting attractive prizes, it will help to generate the traffic to our website by those interested in entering contest, and help to acquire contact information through the drawing entries for possible new leads and remarketing offers.

7. Search Engine Optimization: The key to increasing traffic is to increase your online visibility by ranking high in search engine results. The majority of shoppers choose to click on a result from the first-page of results, so our extra effort will be to assure that our website is among those results. We will use the basic strategies of targeting keywords, inserting meta tags, and developing creative contents that are relevant to website objective.

Payment Procedures

In this website we have handful options for payment gateways. Paypal, Moneybookers, Western Union, MoneyGram, Liberty Reserve, Alertpay, Wire Transfers are already integrated in this software. We have developed an API for E-Sewa, a local payment partner for Nepal and it is also integrated in this system. So this system can accept payment from Nepal and most of the countries where the international payment gateways give services to.

Chapter THREE: Business Problem Analysis and Solution

Problem Analysis

This e-commerce site just like any other thing in the life; so it has its good and bad sides. Below the most common problems that may be encounter while selling various products and services online:

1. Difficulty in Payment: The checkout procedure may be confusing and problematical for an average computer user as there are multiple steps to checkout.

2. Length Process: All the people who visit the site to buy some product but may get irritated on creating the account and giving some personal details to the web store. They will expect us to buy the product within minutes.

3. Broken Links: Since the product will be changing all the time as the requirement the page name may be change for the specific product. So, if the customer redirects the link which they had saved earlier may not find the same product in that page.

4. No-Service Sales: Since the online sale and service we will not be able to give the description, information and the value of that product and the customer may get confused where to start from as their will be no navigation.

5. False Customer Data: The customer may provide the wrong information regarding personal information, delivery places, etc., which need to be verified which is a tough task to perform.

Solutions:

The solution that may solve the above mention problems of describe below:

1. Easy payment: For the easy payment we can place a text box or a brief audio or video tutorial assisting online visitors in the buying process.

2. Segmentation: There will be the segmentation of the customer who are frequent to the web store and has already purchase the product. It will help us to find the fraud customer and there will be detail verification for the new customer who has just sign up to the web store.

3. Listen and Serve: By giving the ability to the customer to tell what they want, we can provide the instant message/chat box to the site where the customer can interact with our sales representative and tell what they need and what they are looking for.

4. Use different security services: For the maintenance and security of the website by:  Using a SSL (Secure Socket Layer encryption) on the web site to encrypt

sensitive customer data.

 Not storing the customer credit card information on the server. Instead providing the payment gateways and make them responsible for the credit card security.

 Collecting the card verification and value of the credit card for further card verification.

5. Use Common Sense: If the order looks suspicious it is better not to process it, or wait until the next day. Often if the card is stolen the card will be reported as stolen the next day and we will avoid the fraudulent transaction.

Chapter FOUR: Website design

Homepage Design:

Delivery Address Information Page:

Chapter FIVE: Conclusion

The website we have developed here is the outcome of our group’s hard work. It is not in its complete form for now. It still needs some features that have to be integrated as user customization that will suit the need of customer and will assist customers for doing quick shopping and checkout.

In the end, our hard task gave us a good result. It took us about a month to complete this project work. While doing this assignment we learn many things like doing task in group, how to communicate with team members, scheduling task with priorities, requirement gathering, etc. which are essential to learn for upcoming future projects.

References

• Kalakota Whinston, Frontiers of Electronic Commerce, Pearson Education, 2007 3rd

Edition.

• Baikuntha Sigdel, Dilli Prasad Sharma, Hiranya Prasad Bastakoti, Nawaraj Pokhrel, An Introduction to Ecommerce, Hamro Ocean Publication, 2011 1st _Edition.