Dezyne E'cole College BCA Student Work

1. Submitted By
Chirag Janani, BCA-III year Bachelors of Computer Applications Dezyne E’cole College, Ajmer WWW.dezyneecole.com
Electronic Commerce

2. Acknowledgement
I am thankful to Dezyne E’Cole College to help in making this project on E-Commerce. A special thanks to Ms. Jyoti Phulwani to guide us step by step in the making of this project report.
Thanking you
Chirag janani
Bachelors of Computer Applications
3rd Year

3. CONTENTS
 Chapter1
Introduction
 Chapter2
Electronic Commerce and the World-Wide-Web
 Chapter3
Architectural Framework for Electronic Commerce
 Chapter4
Technological Behind the Web
 Chapter5
Network Security and Firewalls
 Chapter6
Electronic Commerce Companies
 Chapter7
Pictorial Representation: E-buying Methodology
 Chapter 8 Conclusion

4. Chapter 1
Introduction
Every individual of company that wants to make money and become the next Microsoft needs to understand the market potential, business implication and technological foundation of Electronic Commerce. But what is Electronic Commerce everybody is talking about? How does it affect the organizations way of doing business? What sort of technical and business skills are needed to be successful?
Companies and consumers are discovering that global networking and other technological innovations are powerful assets if used as competitive weapons in their day to day activities. E-Commerce is associated with the buying and selling of information products and services via computer network today.
Consumer desires are very hard to predict, pinpoint or decipher in electronic markets whose shape, structure and population are still in early stages. Needs envisioned include entertainment on demand including 500 channels T.V., video on demand, games on demand, electronic retailing via catalogues and kiosks and home shopping networks.
In future viewers will decide what they want to see and when they want to participate and successful market places are expected to those that cater to consumer’s loneliness, boredom, education and carrier. In a highly competitive society, where neighbors seldom talk to one another these outlets give consumer someone to talk after going home.
Let’s take a look at the changing conditions in the “NEW Economy” with respect to the retail industry. Consumers are pushing retailers to the wall demanding lower prices, better quality, and a large-section of in-season goods. Retailers are scrambling to fill the order. They are slushing back-office cost producing profit margins, producing cycle-times, buying more wisely and making huge investment in technology. They are revamping distribution channels to make sure that warehouses cost are down by reducing their average inventory levels and coordinating the consumer demand and supply pattern.
In the push to reduce prices, more and more retailers are turning to overseas suppliers in part because of cheaper labour cost. Retail are the immediate line of fire and had to do the cost cutting. They put the pressure on the manufacturer and then the supplier end of the pipeline.
Electronic Commerce is forcing companies to rethink the existing ways of doing target marketing, relationship marketing and even event marketing. Adaptation would include moving towards computerized “Paperless” operations to, reduce trading cost and facilitate the adoption of new business process.
Japanese approach JIT (Just in Time) system, total quality control and quality circles are focused now for delivery of goods through electronic commerce.

5. Chapter 2
Electronic Commerce and the World-Wide-Web
We have broadly defined electronic commerce as a modern business methodology that address the desire of firms, consumers and management to cut costs while improving the quality of goods and increasing the speed of services. The need for electronic commerce stems from the demand within business and government to make better use of computing, that is, better apply computer technology to improve business process and information exchange both within an enterprise and across organizations. In short electronic commerce appears to be an integrating force that represents the digital conversions of Twenty-First Century business applications and computing technologies.
Electronic Commerce applications emphasis the generation and exploitation of new business opportunity and to use the popular buzzword, “Generate Business Value”. For instance, when buyer-seller transactions occur in the electronic marketplace, information is accessed, observed, arranged and sold in different ways. In fact, the information about a product or service is separated from the physical product or service and has become important on its own. In some cases, the information can become as crucial as the actual product or service in terms of its effect in a company’s profits. In short, information based business transactions are creating new ways of doing business and even new types of business.
Electronic Commerce applications are quite varied. In its most common form, E- commerce is also used to donate the paperless exchange of business information using EDI, Electronic-mail (E-mail), Electronic Bulletin-boards, Electronic funds transfer (EFT) and other similar technologies. These technologies are normally applied in high-payoff areas, recognizing that paper-handling activity usually increase expense without having value. On the other hand, the term Electronic Commerce is used to describe a new on-line approach to perform traditional functions such as payment and funds transfer, order entry and processing, invoicing, inventory management, cargo tracking, electronic catalogues and point-of-sale data gathering. More recently, companies have realized that the advertising, marketing and customer support functions are also part of Electronic-Commerce application domain. These business functions act as initiator to the entire order management cycle that incorporates the more established notions of Electronic Commerce. In short, what we are witnessing is the use of the term Electronic Commerce as an umbrella concept to integrate a wide range of new and old applications.

6. Electronic Document Interchange (EDI)
Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT)
Electronic Publishing
Despite the change taking place, business have three goals: stay competative, improve productivity and deliver quality service. These goals are guiding buoys for firma plotting their course in the turbulent waters of electronic commerce. There are other factors that companies need to keep in mind. First, most companies have already made enormous information technology investments to automate their key internal processes such as purchasing, invoicing and other simliar functons. So, some aspects of the technological infratructure for electronic commerce are already in place. The challenge now become : How to effectively leverage this investment. Second, prices for computer hardware and network equipment continue to fall, marking information technology an appealing investment for many businesses, specially when its used for high-impact application such as linking their distributed operations. However, investment without a clear idea of the electronic commerce architecture being built would be akin to driving with blinders on. As a result, companies that have decided that electronic commerce applications represent one of the best strategic investment they can make must first exert some effort to understand the technology underlying electronic commerce applications.
At first glance, it appears that messaging based technologies such as EDI and Mail- Enabled applications, combined with database and information management service, form the technical foundation for effective electronic commerce solutions no single one of these technologies can deliver the full potential of electronic commerce, however. What we require is an integrated architecture the likes of which has never been seen before. This integrated architecture is emerging in the form of the World Wide Wed (WWW). As electronic commerce becomes more mature, we are beginning to see sophisticated application being developed on WWW. Technically and commercially, the WWW client-server model seems poised to become a dominent technology.
Electronic Document Interchange
Electronic Commerce
Information Sharing
Marketing, Advertising
Collaborative Work
Sales, Customer Support
E-mail
Fax
Electronic Messaging
Corporate Digital Library

7. Chapter 3
Architectural Framework for Electronic Commerce
The software framework necessary for building Electronic Commerce applications is little understood in existing literature. In general a framework is intended to define and create tools that integrate the information found in today’s closed systems and allow the development of E-commerce applications. It is important to understand that the aim of the architechtural framework itself is not to build new database management system, data repository, computer languages, software agent-based transaction monitors or communication protocols. Rather tha architecture should focus on synthesizing the diverse resoures already in place in corporations to facilitate the integration of data and software for better application.
We propound that the electronic commerce application architecture consist of six layers of functionality or services :
(1) Application
(2) Brokerage services, data or transaction management
(3) Interface and support layers
(4) Secure messaging and electronic document interchange
(5) Middleware and structured document interchange and
(6) Network infrastructure and basic communication services
These layer cooperate to provide a seamless transition between today’s computing resources and those of tommorow by transparently integrating information access and exchange within the context of the chosen application. As seen in above figure, Application Services
Customer-to-business business-to-business Intra-organisational Brokerage and data management
Order Processing-mail-order houses Payment schemes-electronic cash clearinghouse or virtual mall Interface layer
Interactive catalogue directory support function Software agents Secure messaging
Secure hypertext transfer protocol Encrypted E-mail, EDI
Remote Programming (RPC) Middle layer services
Structure documents (SGML,HTML) Compound documents (OLE,OpenDoc) Network Infrastructure
Wireless-Cellular, Radio, PCS Wireline-POTS, Coaxile, Fibre optics

8. Internal Publishing
electronic commerce applications are based on several elegant technologies. But only when they are integrated do they provide uniquely powerful solutions. In the ensuing discussion of each of these layers,we will not elaborate on the various aspects of the network infrastructure that transports information.
 Electronic Commerce Application Services:
The application services layer of E-Commerce will be comprised of existing and future applications built on innate architecture. Three distinct classes of Electronic Commerce application can be distinguished : Customer-to-Business, Business-to- business and intra organisation.
i. Customer-to-Business Transactions:
We call this category market place transaction. In a market place transaction, customer learn about products differently through electronic publishing, buy them differently using electronic cash and secure payment systems, and have then delivered. Also, how customers allocate their loyalty may also be different.
Manufacturing and production
Engineering and Research
Accounting, Finance and management
Global Suppliers
Classic EDI
Procurement, distribution and logistics
Advertising Sales Customer Service
Customer-oriented Electronic Commerce
Customers

9. In light of this, organization itself has to adopt to a world where the traditional concepts of brand differentiation no longer hold – where “Quality” has a new meaning, where “Content” may not be equated to “product”, where “Distribution” may not automatically mean “Physical Transport”. In this new environment, brand equity can rapidly evaporate forcing firms to develop new ways of doing business.
ii. Business-to-business Transaction:
We call this category market-link transactions. Here, business, government and other organizations depend on computer-to-computer communication as a fast, an economical and a dependable way to conduct business transactions. Small companies are also beginning to see the benefits of adopting the same methods. Business-to-business transaction include the use of EDI and Electronic-mail for purchasing goods and services, buying information and consulting services, submitting requests for proposals and receive proposals.
For example, the current accounts payable process occurs through the exchange of paper documents. Each year the trading partners exchange millions of invoices, checks, purchase orders, financial reports and other transactions. Most of the documents are in electronic form at their point of origin but are printed and key-entered at the point of receipt. The current manual process of printing, mailing and rekeying is costly, time consuming and error-prone. Given this situation and faced with the need to reduce costs, small businesses are looking towards electronic commerce as possible saviour.
iii. Intra-organizational Transactions:
We call this category market-driven transaction. A company becomes market driven by dispersing throughout the firm information about its customers and competitors; by spreading strategic and tactical decision making so that all units can participate; and by continuously monitoring their customer commitment by making improved customer satisfaction an ongoing objective. To maintain the relationships that are critical to delivering superior customer value, management must pay close attention to service, both before and after sales.
 Information Brokerage & management:
The Information Brokerage and Management layer provide service integration through the notion of information brokerages, the development of which is necessitated by the increasing information resource fragmentation. We use the notion of Information Brokerage to represent an intermediary who provides service integration between customers and information providers, given some constraint such as a low price, fast service or profit maximization for a client.
Information Brokers, for example, are rapidly becoming necessary in dealing with the voluminous amounts of information on the networks. As on-line database migrate to consumer information utilities, consumers and information professionals will have to keep up the knowledge and ownership of all these systems. Who’s got what? How do you use it? What do they charge? Most professionals have enough trouble keeping

10. trap of files of interest on one or two database services. With all the complexity associated with large number of on-line databases and service bureau, it’s impossible to expect humans to do the searching it will have to be software programs-information brokers or software agents, to use the most popular term-act on searchers behalf. Information Brokerage does more than just searching.
 Interface and Support Service:
The third layer, interface and support services, will provide interfaces for electronic commerce application such as interactive catalogues and will support directory services-functions necessary for information search and access. These two concepts are very different. Interactive catalogues are the customized interface to consumer applications such as home shopping. An interactive catalogue is an extension of the paper-based catalogue and incorporates additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more attractive.
Directories, on the other hand, operate behind the scenes and attempt to organize the enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitate electronic commerce. Directory services database make data from any server appear as a local file. A classic example of a directory is the telephone White Pages, which allows to locate people and telephone numbers. In the case of electronic commerce, directories would play an important role in information management functions. For instance, take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stop overs with a caveat that the time between layovers be minimize. This search would require several queries to various on-line directories to find empty seats on various airlines and then the availability of seeds would be coordinated with the amount time spent in the airport terminals.
 Secure Messaging and Structure Document Interchange Services:
The importance of the fourth layer, Secure Messaging, is clear. Everyone in business knows that electronic messaging is a critical business issue. Consider a familiar business scenario: you hand over an urgent fax on Monday and find out on Tuesday that it’s still sitting on your fax operator’s desk. What happened? The line was busy and he thought he would try again later. Or, the number was wrong, but he forgot to let you know. Or, you are in London and you need to send a spreadsheet that details a marketing plan for a product introduction strategy to co-worker in New York. This must be done today, not tomorrow when the courier service would deliver. There is a solution to these common and frustrating problems. It’s called integrated messaging: a group of computer services that through the use of a network send, receive and combine messages, faxes and large data files. Some better known examples are electronic mail, enhances fax and electronic data interchange.
Broadly defined, messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the clients or electronic commerce applications, masking the peculiarities if the environment. Others define messages as a framework for the total implementation of portable applications, divorcing you from the architectural primitives of your system. In general, messaging products are not applications that solve problems; they are more enablers of the application that solve problems.

11. Messaging services offer solution for communicating non-formatted (Unstructured) data such as purchase orders, shipping notices and invoices. Unstructured messaging consists of fax, e-mail and form based systems like Lotus Notes. Structured documents messaging consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved messages between computer applications, via telecommunications lines. Examples of structured document messaging include EDI.
Messaging is gaining momentum in electronic commerce and seems to have many advantages. It supports both synchronous (immediate) and asynchronous (delayed) message delivery and processing. With asynchronous messaging, when a message is sent, work continues (software doesn’t wait for a response). This allows the transfer of messages through store-and-forward methods.
The main disadvantages of messaging are the new types of applications it enables- which appear to be more complex, especially to traditional programmers-and the jungle of standards it involves. Because of the lack of standards, there is often no interoperability between different messaging vendors leading to islands of messaging. Also, security, privacy and confidentiality through data encryption and authentication techniques are important issues that need to be resolved for ensuring the legality of the message-based transactions themselves.
 Middleware Services:
Middleware is a relatively new concept that emerged only recently. Like so many other innovations, it came in being out of necessity. Users in the 1970’s, when vendors delivered homogenous systems that worked, didn’t have a need for middleware. When conditions changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations couldn’t: The tools were inadequate, the backlog was enormous, and the pressure was over whelming. And, the users were dissatisfied. Something was needed to solve all the interface, translation, transformation and interpretation problems that were driving application developers crazy.
With the growth of networks, client-server technology, and all other forms of communicating between/among unlike platforms, the problems of getting all pieces to work together grew from formidable to horrendous. As the cry for distributed computing spread, users demanded interaction between dissimilar system, networks that permitted shared resources, and applications that could be accessed by multiple software programs. In simple terms, middleware is the ultimate mediator between diverse software programs that enables them talk to one another.
 Transparency:
Transparency implies that users should be unaware that they are accessing multiple systems. Transparency is essential for dealing with higher-level issues than physical media and interconnection that the underlying network infrastructure is in charge of. The ideal picture is one of a “Virtual” network: a collection of work-group, departmental, enterprise and inter-enterprise LANs that appears to the end user or client application to be a seamless and easily accessed whole.

12. Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilities a distributed computing environment. This gives users and applications transparent access to data, computation, and other resources across collections of multivendor, heterogeneous systems. The strategic architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware. The key to realizing the theoretical benefits of such an architecture is transparency. Users need not spend their time to understand where something is. Nor should application developers have to code into their applications the exact locations of resources over the network. The goal is for the applications to send a request to the middleware layer, which then satisfies the request any way it can, using remote information.
 Transaction Security and management:
Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in the electronic commerce market. Security and Management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce model. Transaction integrity must be given for businesses that cannot afford any loss or inconsistency in data. For electronic commerce, middleware provides the qualities expected in the standard TP system: the so-called ACID property (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability).
World Wide Web (WWW) As the Architecture
Electronic commerce depends on the unspoken assumption that computers cooperate efficiently for seamless information sharing. Unfortunately, this assumption of interoperability has been supported by the realities of practical computing. Computing is still a world made up of many technical directions, product implementations and competing vendors. This diversity, while good for innovation, causes problem as the E-Commerce applications try to impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks. It is ironic that real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibility-architectures, data formats and communication protocols.
 What does the WEB Encompass?
The Web has become an umbrella for a wide range of concepts and technologies that differ markedly in purpose and scope. These include the global hypertext publishing concept, the universal reader concept and the client-server concept.
The global hypertext publishing concept promotes the idea of seamless information world in which all on-line information can be accessed and retrieve in a consistent and simple way. To access information in this seamless world, we will need the ability to address many types of data-text files, images, sound files and animation sequences.
The universal readership concept promotes the idea that, unlike the segmented applications of the past, we can use one application-a universal (or common) user interface-to read a variety of documents. This concept implies that once information is published it is accessible from any type of computer, in any country and that any

13. (authorized) person merely needs to use one simple program to access it. This is accomplished in the web by using a core browser or application that is augmented by supporting applications. The core browser implements only minimal functionality and attempts to offload more specialized work onto the supporting applications.
The client-server concept allows the web to grow easily without any centralized control. Anyone can publish information and anyone (as long as He or She is authorized) can read and download it. Publishing information requires a server program, and reading data requires a client browser. All the clients and all the servers are connected to one another by the Internet. The various standard protocols allows all clients to communicate with all servers.
In practice the web hands on a number of essential concepts, including the following:
i) The addressing schemes known as Uniform Resource Locator (URL) makes the hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols.
ii) A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client browsers and servers offers performance and features not otherwise available.
iii) A mark-up language (HTML), which every web client is requires to understand, is used for the representation of hypertext documents containing text, list boxes, and graphics information across the net.

14. Chapter 4
Technological Behind the Web
Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called servers) from which the browsers (client can obtain information). These programs can either be Wed servers that understand the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), “Gateway” program that convert an existing information format to hypertext, or a non-HTTP server that Web browsers can access-anonymous FTP or Gopher servers.
Web servers are composed of two major parts: the Hypertext Transfer protocol for transmitting documents between servers and clients and the hypertext Markup language (HTML) format for documents. The link between HTML files and the HTTP servers is provided by the Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).
 Uniform Resource Locator:
The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contains pointers to other documents. The browsers let you deal with the pointers in a transparent way – select the pointer and you are presented with the text to which it points. This pointer is implemented using a concept that is central to Web browsers: Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). One way to think about URLs is to use the libraries and location on a shelf as a metaphor. A URL for a digital library would be a unique call number that provides the exact location of every book in the world, including the country, city, street and library shelf location.
In practice, URLs are the strings used as addresses of objects (documents, images) on the Web. Think of them as analogous to your E-mail address. Just as your address is unique and maybe used by any other Internet users to send you mail without knowing exactly where you are, a URL marks the unique location on the Internet where a file or service can be found.
URLs follow a fairly consistent pattern. The first part describes the type of resource: the second part gives the name of the server housing the resource: and the third part gives full file name of the resource. URLs are Universal in that they provide access to a wide range of network services which required separate applications in the past. For a new network protocol one can easily form an address as the set of parameters necessary to retrieve the object. If these parameters are encoded into a concise string, with a prefix to identify the protocols and encoding, one has a new URL scheme. Take a look at the URL formats below:
FTP : ftp://server.address/complete.file.name
Gopher : gopher://server.address:port/directory/filename
TELNET : telnet://server.address:port
HTTP : http://server.address:port/homepage.html
News : news:misc.stocks.invest

15. These are URLs for Internet news articles and news groups (The NNTP protocol) and for HTTP archives, for TELNET destinations, E-mail addresses and so on. The same can done for names of objects in a given name space. For example, the URL of the main page for the Web project happens to be: http://web.w3.org/hypertext/web/TheProject.html. The prefix “HTTP” in the preceding example indicates the address space and defines the interpretation of the rest of the string. The HTTP protocol is to be used, so the string contains the address of the server to be contacted and a sub string to be passed to the server.
As noted earlier, different protocols use different syntaxes but they do have a small amount in common. For example, the common URL syntax reserve the solidus (/) as a way of representing a hierarchical space, the pound label (#) as a way of pointing inside the document and question mark (?) as a separator between the address of an object and the query operation applied to it. Hierarchical spaces are useful for hypertext, where one “work” maybe split up into many interlinked documents the # allows relative name to exploit the hierarchical structure and allows links to be made within the work independent of the higher parts of the URL, such as the server name.
URLs are central to the Web architecture. The fact that it is easy to address and object anywhere on the internet is essential for the system to scale and for the information space to be independent of the network and server topology.

16. Chapter 5
Network Security and Firewalls
The ability to conduct business on a public network has strong attraction – and the potential for big savings. Security and confidentiality are essential, however, before businesses can conduct financial transactions over the internet and a lack of widespread security measures remains at this time. At present, credit card numbers, financial records and other important information are not encrypted and can be intercepted by any savvy Internet hacker.
The discussion of security is concerns in electronic commerce can be divided into two broad types:
1. Client-server security usages various authorization methods to make sure that only valid users and programs have access to information resource such as database. Access control mechanisms must be set up to ensure that properly authentication user are allowed access only to those resource that they are entitled to use. Such mechanism includes password protection, encrypted smart card, biometric and firewalls.
2. Data and transaction security ensures the privacy and confidentiality in electronic messages and data packets, including the authentication of remote users in network truncation of activity such as on-line payment. The goal is to defeat any attempt to assume another identity while involved while electronic mail or other forms of data communication. Preventive measure include data encryption using various cryptographic methods.
 Data and message security
The lack of data and message security on the Internet has become a high profile problem due to increasing number of merchants trying to spur commerce on the global network. For instance, credit card numbers in there plain text form create a risk when transmitted across the internet where the possibility of the number falling into the wrong hands is relatively high. Would you be willing to type in your credit card number knowing the risk? Even worse, would you expose your customer to that risk? Just the thought of “sniffer” programs that collect credit card numbers en masse is enough to keep merchants away from on-line shopping given the possible lawsuits and other liability issues. In sort, the lack of business truncation security is widely acknowledge as a major implement to widespread e-commerce.
 Encrypted Documents and Electronic Mail
E-mail users who desires confidentiality and sender are using encryption. Encryption is simply to intend to keep personal thoughts personal. Some users are already using Pretty Good Personality (PGP); others are starting to use Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM).

17. E-mail is typically encrypted for the reason that all network correspondence is open for eavesdropping. Internet e-mail is obviously far less secure then the postal system, where envelopes protect correspondence for casual snooping. A glance at the header area of e-mail message, by contrast, will show that it has passed through a number of nodes on its way to you. Every one of these nodes presents the opportunity for snooping.

18. Chapter 6
Electronic Commerce Companies

19. Chapter 7 Pictorial Representation: E-buying Methodology Flipkart.com
STEP 1
STEP 2

20. STEP 3
STEP 4

21. STEP 5
STEP 6

22. STEP 7
STEP 8

23. STEP 9
STEP 10

24. STEP 11
STEP 12

25. Pictorial Representation: E-buying Methodology Yepme.com
STEP 1
STEP 2:

26. STEP 3
STEP 4

27. STEP 5
STEP 6

28. STEP 7
STEP 8

29. STEP 9

30. Chapter 8
Conclusion
E-commerce is growing tremendously. A lot of companies have joined between the period July and August. Online retail is still a tiny spot in India’s retail market of about $500 billion a year, but it is growing at a quick pace. A study by retail consultancy Techno-park predicts India’s e-tailing market will reach $32 billion by 2020 from $2.3 billion in 2014.
Ethnic Indian clothes and casual wear are favorite products but unusual products like Pets-too are to being offered online. With a huge growth that e-commerce has witnessed in recent times analysts like Devangshu Dutta, sales there is scope for more players to come in. But some also warn about the risks the space is fraught with, as only a few may have chances of making it big. They also see consolidation in the sector going forward.

31. Bibliography
 Frontiers of Electronic commerce by Ravi Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston.
 Big E-commerce deals stir up Sector-Economic Times.
 www.flipkart.com
 www.Yepme.com