Submitted by

DIVYA RAJGURU BCA Third Year

Bachelor of Computer Applications

Dezyne Ersquocole College Ajmer

wwwdezyneecolecom

Electronic Commerce

Information Technology

Acknowledgment

I am thankful to Dezyne Ersquocole 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

Divya Rajguru

Bachelor of Computer Application

Third Year

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Introduction Chapter 2

Electronic Commerce and the World Wide Web Chapter 3

Architectural Framework for Electronic Commerce Chapter 4

Technology Behind the Web Chapter 5

Network Security and Firewalls Chapter 6

Electronic Commerce Companies Chapter 7

Pictorial Representation E-Buying Methodology Chapter 8

Conclusion

Chapter 1

Introduction

Every individual or company that wants to make money and become the next Microsoft needs

to understand the market potential business implication and technical foundation of

electronic commerce But what is electronic commerce everybody is talking about How does

it affect the organization way of doing business What sort of technical and business are

needed to successful

Companies and customer are discussing that global networking and other technological

innovation are powerful assets if we used as competitive weapons in their day to day activity

E-commerce is associated with buying and selling of informationrsquos product and service via a

computer network today

Consumer desires are very hard to predict pin point or decipher of electronic markets whose

shapes structure and population are still in early stages Needs envisioned included

entertainment on demand including five hundred channel TV video on demand games no

demand electronic retailing via a catalogs and kiosk and shopping network

In future viewer will decide what they want to see and they want to participated a successful

market place are expected to those that cater to consumerrsquos loneliness boredom education

and career IN a highly competitive society where neighbors seldom talk to one another these

outlets give consumer someone to through after going home

Let take a look at the changing condition in the ldquonew economyrdquo with respect to the retail

industry Consumers are passing retailers to the wall demanding lower price better quality

and a large section of in season goods retailer are scrambling to fill the order They are

slashing back Office costs reducing profit-margins reduce cycle times buying more wisely

and marking huge investment in technology

They are revamping distributions channels to make sure that the warehouses cost are down

by reducing their average inventory levels and coronations the consumer demand and supply

pattern IN the push to reduce prices more and more retailers are Turing to overseas

suppliers in part because of cheaper labor costs

Retail are the immediate line of fire and had to do the cost cutting They put the pressure on

the manufacturer and then to the suppliers end of pipeline

E-commerce is forcing companies to rethink the existing ways of doing target marketing

relationship marketing and even event marketing Adaption would include moving towards

computerized ldquopaperlessrdquo operation to reduce trading cost and facilitate the adaption 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

Chapter 2

Electronic Commerce and the World-Wide-Web

We have broadly define electronic commerce as a modem 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 organization

In sort electronic commerce appears to be integrates force that representation the digital

convergence of twenty-first century business application and computing technology

Electronic commerce applications emphasis the generations and exploitation of new

business opportunity and use to the popular buzzword ldquoGenerate business valuerdquo For

instance when buyer-seller transactions occur in the electronic market place information is

accesses observed arrange and sold in different in fact the information about a product of

service is separated from the physical product or services and has become important on its

own In some cases the information can become as crucial as his actual product or service

in term if its effect on a companyrsquos in short information ways business truncation are creating

new ways of doing business and even new type of business

Electronic commerce application are quite varied In its most common from e-commerce is

also used to donate the paperless exchange of business information using EDI electronic

mail (E-mail) electronic bulletin board electronic funds transfer (EFT) and other similar

technologies These technologies are normally applied in high-pay of areas recognizing that

paper-handling activity usually increase expense without adding value On the other hand the

term electronic commerce is used to describe a new online approach to perform traditional

function such as payment and funds transfer order entry and point-of-sale Data gathering

More recently company have resized that the advertising marketing can customer support

functions are also part of electronic commerce application domain These functions act as

initiator order management cycle that incorporates the more established motions of electronic

commerce

In sort what we are witnessing is the use of term electronic commerce as an umbrella

concept to integrate a wide range of new and old application

Despite the change taking place business have three goals stay compitative improve

productivety and deliver quality serviec These goals are the giving buoys for firms plotting

their course in the turbulent waters of electronic commerce There are other factors that

companies need to keep in mind first most company have alrady made enormous

information technology investment to automate their kry internal process such as pruchasing

invocing and other similar function So some aspect of technology infrastructure for electrinc

commerce are alrady place The challenge now becomes how to effiectivly leverge this

investment second prices for computer hardware and equipment continue to fall marking

information technology an appealing investment for many business electrically when itrsquos used

for high impact application such as linking there distributed operations however investment

without a clear idea of the electronic commerce architecture being whoul be akin to driving

with blinders on as a result companies that decide thet electronic commerce application

represent one of the best strategic investment they can make must first exert some efforts

to understand the technology underlying electronic commerce applications

At first glance it appears that messaging-based and information management services from 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 naver been seen before This integrated architecture is emerging in the form the World Wide Web(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 dominant technology

Electronic

Commerce

Electronic document interchange

Electronic funds transfer (EFT) Electronic data interchange (EDI)

Marketing advertising

Electronic

Publishing Sales customer support

Fax E-mail

Corporate Digital

Library

Information Sharing

Collaborative

Work

Electronic Messaging

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 todayrsquos closed systems and allow the development of E-commerce applications It is important to understand that the aim of the architectural framework itself is not to build new database management system data repository computer languages software agent-based transaction monitors or communication protocols Rather the architecture should focus on synthesizing the diverse resources 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

Application Services

Customer-to-business business-to-business Intra- organizational

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 (SGMLHTML) Compound documents (OLEOpenDoc)

Network Infrastructure

Wireless-Cellular Radio PCS Wireline-POTS Coaxile Fibre optics

These layers cooperate to provide a seamless transition between todayrsquos computing

resources and those of tomorrow by transparently integrating information access and

exchange within the context of the chosen application As seen in above fig 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 aspect

of the network infrastructure that transports information

Electronic Commerce Application Services -

The application service 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 ndashto-business and intra

organization

Procurement distribution and logistics

Manufacturing

And production

Accounting finance

And management

Engineering

and research

Advertising Sales Customer service

Customer ndashoriented electronic

commerce

Customer

Global Suppliers

Classic EDI

Internal Publishing Private Commerce

Customer-to-business transactions

We call this category marketplace transaction In a market place transaction customers

learn about products differently through electronic publishing buy them differently using

electronic cash and secure payment systems and have them delivered differently Also how

customers allocate their loyalty may also be differently

In light of this organization itself has to adapt to a world where the traditional concepts of

brand differently no longer hold- where ldquoqualityrdquo has a new meaning where ldquocontentrdquo may

not be equated to ldquoproductrdquo where ldquodistribution ldquo may not automatically mean ldquo physical

transportrdquo

In this new environment brand equity can rapidly evaporate forcing firms to develop new

way of doing business

Business-to-Business Transactions

We call this category market ndashlink 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 transactions 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 account payable occurs through the exchange of paper documents

Each year the trading partners exchanges millions of invoices checks purchase orders

financial reports and other transactions

Most of the documents are in electronic from at their point of origin but are printed and key

entered at point of receipt The current manual process of printing mailing rekeying is costly

time consuming and error-prone Given this situation and faced with the need to reduce costs

small business are looking towards electronic commerce as a possible savior

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 satisfactory an ongoing

objective To maintain the relations that are critical to delivering superior customer value

management must pay close attention to service both before and after sales

Information Brokerage and Management

The information brokerage and management layer provides service integration trough 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 series integration between customer and information provides

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

to the knowledge and ownership

Whorsquos got what How do you use it What do they charge Most professional have enough

trouble keeping trap of files or interest on one or two database services Will all have

complexity associated with large number of on-line bureaus itrsquos impossible to expect

humans to do the searching It will have to be software programs-information brokers

software agents to use the most popular term-act on searcherrsquos behalf Information

brokerage does more than searching

Interface and Support Service

The third layer interface and support services will provide interface 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 catalogs are the customize interface to consumer application such as home

shopping An interactive catalog is an extension of the paper-based catalog and incorporates

additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more

attractive

Directories on the other hand operate behind the seen and attempt to organize the

enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitated 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 us to locate

people and telephone numbers In the case of electronic commerce directory would play an

important role in information management functions

For instance take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stopovers with a caveat

that the time between layovers be minimized This search would require several quires to

various on-line directory to find empty seats on various airline and then the availability of

seats would be coordinated with the amount of time spent in the airport terminal

Secure Messaging and Structure Document Interchange Service

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 still sitting on your

fax operatorrsquos disk 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 Itrsquos called

integrated messaging a group of computer service that through the use of a network send

receive and combine messages faxes and large data files Some better known examples are

electronic mail enhanced facts and electronic data interchange

Broadly define messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the

clients or electronic commerce application masking the peculiarities of the environment

Others defines messaging as a framework for the total implementation of portable

applications divorcing you from the architecture primitives of your system In general

messaging product are not applications that solve problems they are more enablers of the

application that solve problems

Messaging services offers solution for communicating non-formatted (unstructured) data

such as purchase order shipping notices and invoices Unstructured messaging consist of

facts e-mail and form based system like Lotus Notes Structure documents messaging

consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved messages via a

telecommunication lines Example of structure 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 when a message is sent work continues (software does not

wait for a response) This allows the transfer of message 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 jungle of standards it

involves Because of the lack of standards there is often no interoperability between different

messaging vendors lading to islands of messaging Also security privacy and confidentiality

to move 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

invitations it came into being out of necessity Users in 1970s when vendors delivered

homogeneous systems that worked did not have a need for middleware When conditions

changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations could not cope The

tools were inadequate the backlog goes enormous and the pressure was overwhelming

And the users were dissatisfied Something was needed to solve all the interface translation

transformation interpretation problems that were driving applications developers crazy

With the growth of networks client-server technology and all other forms of communicating

between among unlike platforms the problems of gettingrsquos all the pieces to work to together

grew form formidable to horrendous As the cry for distributed computing spared user

demanded interactions between dissimilar systems 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

then 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 underlying network infrastructure is in charge of The ideal picture is one

of a ldquovirtualrdquo 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 easy

accessed whole

Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing

environment This gives users and applications transparent accessed to data computation

and other resources across collections of multivendor heterogonous systems The strategic

architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware The

key to relaxing the theoretical benefits of such an architecture is transparency Users need

not spend their time to understand were 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 than satisfy the

request any way it can using remote information

Transition Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in electronic commerce

market Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce

model Transaction integrity must be given for business that cannot afford any loss or

inconsistency in data For electronic commerce middleware provide the qualities expected

in the standard TP system the so-called ACID properties (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 implementation and competing vendors This

diversity while good for innovation causes problem as the e-commerce application try to

impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks It is ironic that the

real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities-

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 retrieved in a consistent and simple way

To access information in the this seamless world we will need the ability to address may

types of data - text files images sound files animation sequence

The universal readership concept promotes the idea that unlike the segmented applications

of the past we can use one application ndash 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 (authorized) person nearly 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 application The core browser implements only

minimal functionality and attempts to offload more spectated 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 client 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

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

Acknowledgment

I am thankful to Dezyne Ersquocole 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

Divya Rajguru

Bachelor of Computer Application

Third Year

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Introduction Chapter 2

Electronic Commerce and the World Wide Web Chapter 3

Architectural Framework for Electronic Commerce Chapter 4

Technology Behind the Web Chapter 5

Network Security and Firewalls Chapter 6

Electronic Commerce Companies Chapter 7

Pictorial Representation E-Buying Methodology Chapter 8

Conclusion

Chapter 1

Introduction

Every individual or company that wants to make money and become the next Microsoft needs

to understand the market potential business implication and technical foundation of

electronic commerce But what is electronic commerce everybody is talking about How does

it affect the organization way of doing business What sort of technical and business are

needed to successful

Companies and customer are discussing that global networking and other technological

innovation are powerful assets if we used as competitive weapons in their day to day activity

E-commerce is associated with buying and selling of informationrsquos product and service via a

computer network today

Consumer desires are very hard to predict pin point or decipher of electronic markets whose

shapes structure and population are still in early stages Needs envisioned included

entertainment on demand including five hundred channel TV video on demand games no

demand electronic retailing via a catalogs and kiosk and shopping network

In future viewer will decide what they want to see and they want to participated a successful

market place are expected to those that cater to consumerrsquos loneliness boredom education

and career IN a highly competitive society where neighbors seldom talk to one another these

outlets give consumer someone to through after going home

Let take a look at the changing condition in the ldquonew economyrdquo with respect to the retail

industry Consumers are passing retailers to the wall demanding lower price better quality

and a large section of in season goods retailer are scrambling to fill the order They are

slashing back Office costs reducing profit-margins reduce cycle times buying more wisely

and marking huge investment in technology

They are revamping distributions channels to make sure that the warehouses cost are down

by reducing their average inventory levels and coronations the consumer demand and supply

pattern IN the push to reduce prices more and more retailers are Turing to overseas

suppliers in part because of cheaper labor costs

Retail are the immediate line of fire and had to do the cost cutting They put the pressure on

the manufacturer and then to the suppliers end of pipeline

E-commerce is forcing companies to rethink the existing ways of doing target marketing

relationship marketing and even event marketing Adaption would include moving towards

computerized ldquopaperlessrdquo operation to reduce trading cost and facilitate the adaption 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

Chapter 2

Electronic Commerce and the World-Wide-Web

We have broadly define electronic commerce as a modem 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 organization

In sort electronic commerce appears to be integrates force that representation the digital

convergence of twenty-first century business application and computing technology

Electronic commerce applications emphasis the generations and exploitation of new

business opportunity and use to the popular buzzword ldquoGenerate business valuerdquo For

instance when buyer-seller transactions occur in the electronic market place information is

accesses observed arrange and sold in different in fact the information about a product of

service is separated from the physical product or services and has become important on its

own In some cases the information can become as crucial as his actual product or service

in term if its effect on a companyrsquos in short information ways business truncation are creating

new ways of doing business and even new type of business

Electronic commerce application are quite varied In its most common from e-commerce is

also used to donate the paperless exchange of business information using EDI electronic

mail (E-mail) electronic bulletin board electronic funds transfer (EFT) and other similar

technologies These technologies are normally applied in high-pay of areas recognizing that

paper-handling activity usually increase expense without adding value On the other hand the

term electronic commerce is used to describe a new online approach to perform traditional

function such as payment and funds transfer order entry and point-of-sale Data gathering

More recently company have resized that the advertising marketing can customer support

functions are also part of electronic commerce application domain These functions act as

initiator order management cycle that incorporates the more established motions of electronic

commerce

In sort what we are witnessing is the use of term electronic commerce as an umbrella

concept to integrate a wide range of new and old application

Despite the change taking place business have three goals stay compitative improve

productivety and deliver quality serviec These goals are the giving buoys for firms plotting

their course in the turbulent waters of electronic commerce There are other factors that

companies need to keep in mind first most company have alrady made enormous

information technology investment to automate their kry internal process such as pruchasing

invocing and other similar function So some aspect of technology infrastructure for electrinc

commerce are alrady place The challenge now becomes how to effiectivly leverge this

investment second prices for computer hardware and equipment continue to fall marking

information technology an appealing investment for many business electrically when itrsquos used

for high impact application such as linking there distributed operations however investment

without a clear idea of the electronic commerce architecture being whoul be akin to driving

with blinders on as a result companies that decide thet electronic commerce application

represent one of the best strategic investment they can make must first exert some efforts

to understand the technology underlying electronic commerce applications

At first glance it appears that messaging-based and information management services from 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 naver been seen before This integrated architecture is emerging in the form the World Wide Web(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 dominant technology

Electronic

Commerce

Electronic document interchange

Electronic funds transfer (EFT) Electronic data interchange (EDI)

Marketing advertising

Electronic

Publishing Sales customer support

Fax E-mail

Corporate Digital

Library

Information Sharing

Collaborative

Work

Electronic Messaging

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 todayrsquos closed systems and allow the development of E-commerce applications It is important to understand that the aim of the architectural framework itself is not to build new database management system data repository computer languages software agent-based transaction monitors or communication protocols Rather the architecture should focus on synthesizing the diverse resources 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

Application Services

Customer-to-business business-to-business Intra- organizational

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 (SGMLHTML) Compound documents (OLEOpenDoc)

Network Infrastructure

Wireless-Cellular Radio PCS Wireline-POTS Coaxile Fibre optics

These layers cooperate to provide a seamless transition between todayrsquos computing

resources and those of tomorrow by transparently integrating information access and

exchange within the context of the chosen application As seen in above fig 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 aspect

of the network infrastructure that transports information

Electronic Commerce Application Services -

The application service 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 ndashto-business and intra

organization

Procurement distribution and logistics

Manufacturing

And production

Accounting finance

And management

Engineering

and research

Advertising Sales Customer service

Customer ndashoriented electronic

commerce

Customer

Global Suppliers

Classic EDI

Internal Publishing Private Commerce

Customer-to-business transactions

We call this category marketplace transaction In a market place transaction customers

learn about products differently through electronic publishing buy them differently using

electronic cash and secure payment systems and have them delivered differently Also how

customers allocate their loyalty may also be differently

In light of this organization itself has to adapt to a world where the traditional concepts of

brand differently no longer hold- where ldquoqualityrdquo has a new meaning where ldquocontentrdquo may

not be equated to ldquoproductrdquo where ldquodistribution ldquo may not automatically mean ldquo physical

transportrdquo

In this new environment brand equity can rapidly evaporate forcing firms to develop new

way of doing business

Business-to-Business Transactions

We call this category market ndashlink 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 transactions 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 account payable occurs through the exchange of paper documents

Each year the trading partners exchanges millions of invoices checks purchase orders

financial reports and other transactions

Most of the documents are in electronic from at their point of origin but are printed and key

entered at point of receipt The current manual process of printing mailing rekeying is costly

time consuming and error-prone Given this situation and faced with the need to reduce costs

small business are looking towards electronic commerce as a possible savior

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 satisfactory an ongoing

objective To maintain the relations that are critical to delivering superior customer value

management must pay close attention to service both before and after sales

Information Brokerage and Management

The information brokerage and management layer provides service integration trough 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 series integration between customer and information provides

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

to the knowledge and ownership

Whorsquos got what How do you use it What do they charge Most professional have enough

trouble keeping trap of files or interest on one or two database services Will all have

complexity associated with large number of on-line bureaus itrsquos impossible to expect

humans to do the searching It will have to be software programs-information brokers

software agents to use the most popular term-act on searcherrsquos behalf Information

brokerage does more than searching

Interface and Support Service

The third layer interface and support services will provide interface 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 catalogs are the customize interface to consumer application such as home

shopping An interactive catalog is an extension of the paper-based catalog and incorporates

additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more

attractive

Directories on the other hand operate behind the seen and attempt to organize the

enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitated 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 us to locate

people and telephone numbers In the case of electronic commerce directory would play an

important role in information management functions

For instance take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stopovers with a caveat

that the time between layovers be minimized This search would require several quires to

various on-line directory to find empty seats on various airline and then the availability of

seats would be coordinated with the amount of time spent in the airport terminal

Secure Messaging and Structure Document Interchange Service

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 still sitting on your

fax operatorrsquos disk 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 Itrsquos called

integrated messaging a group of computer service that through the use of a network send

receive and combine messages faxes and large data files Some better known examples are

electronic mail enhanced facts and electronic data interchange

Broadly define messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the

clients or electronic commerce application masking the peculiarities of the environment

Others defines messaging as a framework for the total implementation of portable

applications divorcing you from the architecture primitives of your system In general

messaging product are not applications that solve problems they are more enablers of the

application that solve problems

Messaging services offers solution for communicating non-formatted (unstructured) data

such as purchase order shipping notices and invoices Unstructured messaging consist of

facts e-mail and form based system like Lotus Notes Structure documents messaging

consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved messages via a

telecommunication lines Example of structure 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 when a message is sent work continues (software does not

wait for a response) This allows the transfer of message 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 jungle of standards it

involves Because of the lack of standards there is often no interoperability between different

messaging vendors lading to islands of messaging Also security privacy and confidentiality

to move 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

invitations it came into being out of necessity Users in 1970s when vendors delivered

homogeneous systems that worked did not have a need for middleware When conditions

changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations could not cope The

tools were inadequate the backlog goes enormous and the pressure was overwhelming

And the users were dissatisfied Something was needed to solve all the interface translation

transformation interpretation problems that were driving applications developers crazy

With the growth of networks client-server technology and all other forms of communicating

between among unlike platforms the problems of gettingrsquos all the pieces to work to together

grew form formidable to horrendous As the cry for distributed computing spared user

demanded interactions between dissimilar systems 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

then 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 underlying network infrastructure is in charge of The ideal picture is one

of a ldquovirtualrdquo 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 easy

accessed whole

Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing

environment This gives users and applications transparent accessed to data computation

and other resources across collections of multivendor heterogonous systems The strategic

architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware The

key to relaxing the theoretical benefits of such an architecture is transparency Users need

not spend their time to understand were 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 than satisfy the

request any way it can using remote information

Transition Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in electronic commerce

market Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce

model Transaction integrity must be given for business that cannot afford any loss or

inconsistency in data For electronic commerce middleware provide the qualities expected

in the standard TP system the so-called ACID properties (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 implementation and competing vendors This

diversity while good for innovation causes problem as the e-commerce application try to

impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks It is ironic that the

real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities-

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 retrieved in a consistent and simple way

To access information in the this seamless world we will need the ability to address may

types of data - text files images sound files animation sequence

The universal readership concept promotes the idea that unlike the segmented applications

of the past we can use one application ndash 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 (authorized) person nearly 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 application The core browser implements only

minimal functionality and attempts to offload more spectated 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 client 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

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Introduction Chapter 2

Electronic Commerce and the World Wide Web Chapter 3

Architectural Framework for Electronic Commerce Chapter 4

Technology Behind the Web Chapter 5

Network Security and Firewalls Chapter 6

Electronic Commerce Companies Chapter 7

Pictorial Representation E-Buying Methodology Chapter 8

Conclusion

Chapter 1

Introduction

Every individual or company that wants to make money and become the next Microsoft needs

to understand the market potential business implication and technical foundation of

electronic commerce But what is electronic commerce everybody is talking about How does

it affect the organization way of doing business What sort of technical and business are

needed to successful

Companies and customer are discussing that global networking and other technological

innovation are powerful assets if we used as competitive weapons in their day to day activity

E-commerce is associated with buying and selling of informationrsquos product and service via a

computer network today

Consumer desires are very hard to predict pin point or decipher of electronic markets whose

shapes structure and population are still in early stages Needs envisioned included

entertainment on demand including five hundred channel TV video on demand games no

demand electronic retailing via a catalogs and kiosk and shopping network

In future viewer will decide what they want to see and they want to participated a successful

market place are expected to those that cater to consumerrsquos loneliness boredom education

and career IN a highly competitive society where neighbors seldom talk to one another these

outlets give consumer someone to through after going home

Let take a look at the changing condition in the ldquonew economyrdquo with respect to the retail

industry Consumers are passing retailers to the wall demanding lower price better quality

and a large section of in season goods retailer are scrambling to fill the order They are

slashing back Office costs reducing profit-margins reduce cycle times buying more wisely

and marking huge investment in technology

They are revamping distributions channels to make sure that the warehouses cost are down

by reducing their average inventory levels and coronations the consumer demand and supply

pattern IN the push to reduce prices more and more retailers are Turing to overseas

suppliers in part because of cheaper labor costs

Retail are the immediate line of fire and had to do the cost cutting They put the pressure on

the manufacturer and then to the suppliers end of pipeline

E-commerce is forcing companies to rethink the existing ways of doing target marketing

relationship marketing and even event marketing Adaption would include moving towards

computerized ldquopaperlessrdquo operation to reduce trading cost and facilitate the adaption 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

Chapter 2

Electronic Commerce and the World-Wide-Web

We have broadly define electronic commerce as a modem 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 organization

In sort electronic commerce appears to be integrates force that representation the digital

convergence of twenty-first century business application and computing technology

Electronic commerce applications emphasis the generations and exploitation of new

business opportunity and use to the popular buzzword ldquoGenerate business valuerdquo For

instance when buyer-seller transactions occur in the electronic market place information is

accesses observed arrange and sold in different in fact the information about a product of

service is separated from the physical product or services and has become important on its

own In some cases the information can become as crucial as his actual product or service

in term if its effect on a companyrsquos in short information ways business truncation are creating

new ways of doing business and even new type of business

Electronic commerce application are quite varied In its most common from e-commerce is

also used to donate the paperless exchange of business information using EDI electronic

mail (E-mail) electronic bulletin board electronic funds transfer (EFT) and other similar

technologies These technologies are normally applied in high-pay of areas recognizing that

paper-handling activity usually increase expense without adding value On the other hand the

term electronic commerce is used to describe a new online approach to perform traditional

function such as payment and funds transfer order entry and point-of-sale Data gathering

More recently company have resized that the advertising marketing can customer support

functions are also part of electronic commerce application domain These functions act as

initiator order management cycle that incorporates the more established motions of electronic

commerce

In sort what we are witnessing is the use of term electronic commerce as an umbrella

concept to integrate a wide range of new and old application

Despite the change taking place business have three goals stay compitative improve

productivety and deliver quality serviec These goals are the giving buoys for firms plotting

their course in the turbulent waters of electronic commerce There are other factors that

companies need to keep in mind first most company have alrady made enormous

information technology investment to automate their kry internal process such as pruchasing

invocing and other similar function So some aspect of technology infrastructure for electrinc

commerce are alrady place The challenge now becomes how to effiectivly leverge this

investment second prices for computer hardware and equipment continue to fall marking

information technology an appealing investment for many business electrically when itrsquos used

for high impact application such as linking there distributed operations however investment

without a clear idea of the electronic commerce architecture being whoul be akin to driving

with blinders on as a result companies that decide thet electronic commerce application

represent one of the best strategic investment they can make must first exert some efforts

to understand the technology underlying electronic commerce applications

At first glance it appears that messaging-based and information management services from 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 naver been seen before This integrated architecture is emerging in the form the World Wide Web(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 dominant technology

Electronic

Commerce

Electronic document interchange

Electronic funds transfer (EFT) Electronic data interchange (EDI)

Marketing advertising

Electronic

Publishing Sales customer support

Fax E-mail

Corporate Digital

Library

Information Sharing

Collaborative

Work

Electronic Messaging

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 todayrsquos closed systems and allow the development of E-commerce applications It is important to understand that the aim of the architectural framework itself is not to build new database management system data repository computer languages software agent-based transaction monitors or communication protocols Rather the architecture should focus on synthesizing the diverse resources 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

Application Services

Customer-to-business business-to-business Intra- organizational

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 (SGMLHTML) Compound documents (OLEOpenDoc)

Network Infrastructure

Wireless-Cellular Radio PCS Wireline-POTS Coaxile Fibre optics

These layers cooperate to provide a seamless transition between todayrsquos computing

resources and those of tomorrow by transparently integrating information access and

exchange within the context of the chosen application As seen in above fig 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 aspect

of the network infrastructure that transports information

Electronic Commerce Application Services -

The application service 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 ndashto-business and intra

organization

Procurement distribution and logistics

Manufacturing

And production

Accounting finance

And management

Engineering

and research

Advertising Sales Customer service

Customer ndashoriented electronic

commerce

Customer

Global Suppliers

Classic EDI

Internal Publishing Private Commerce

Customer-to-business transactions

We call this category marketplace transaction In a market place transaction customers

learn about products differently through electronic publishing buy them differently using

electronic cash and secure payment systems and have them delivered differently Also how

customers allocate their loyalty may also be differently

In light of this organization itself has to adapt to a world where the traditional concepts of

brand differently no longer hold- where ldquoqualityrdquo has a new meaning where ldquocontentrdquo may

not be equated to ldquoproductrdquo where ldquodistribution ldquo may not automatically mean ldquo physical

transportrdquo

In this new environment brand equity can rapidly evaporate forcing firms to develop new

way of doing business

Business-to-Business Transactions

We call this category market ndashlink 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 transactions 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 account payable occurs through the exchange of paper documents

Each year the trading partners exchanges millions of invoices checks purchase orders

financial reports and other transactions

Most of the documents are in electronic from at their point of origin but are printed and key

entered at point of receipt The current manual process of printing mailing rekeying is costly

time consuming and error-prone Given this situation and faced with the need to reduce costs

small business are looking towards electronic commerce as a possible savior

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 satisfactory an ongoing

objective To maintain the relations that are critical to delivering superior customer value

management must pay close attention to service both before and after sales

Information Brokerage and Management

The information brokerage and management layer provides service integration trough 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 series integration between customer and information provides

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

to the knowledge and ownership

Whorsquos got what How do you use it What do they charge Most professional have enough

trouble keeping trap of files or interest on one or two database services Will all have

complexity associated with large number of on-line bureaus itrsquos impossible to expect

humans to do the searching It will have to be software programs-information brokers

software agents to use the most popular term-act on searcherrsquos behalf Information

brokerage does more than searching

Interface and Support Service

The third layer interface and support services will provide interface 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 catalogs are the customize interface to consumer application such as home

shopping An interactive catalog is an extension of the paper-based catalog and incorporates

additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more

attractive

Directories on the other hand operate behind the seen and attempt to organize the

enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitated 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 us to locate

people and telephone numbers In the case of electronic commerce directory would play an

important role in information management functions

For instance take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stopovers with a caveat

that the time between layovers be minimized This search would require several quires to

various on-line directory to find empty seats on various airline and then the availability of

seats would be coordinated with the amount of time spent in the airport terminal

Secure Messaging and Structure Document Interchange Service

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 still sitting on your

fax operatorrsquos disk 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 Itrsquos called

integrated messaging a group of computer service that through the use of a network send

receive and combine messages faxes and large data files Some better known examples are

electronic mail enhanced facts and electronic data interchange

Broadly define messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the

clients or electronic commerce application masking the peculiarities of the environment

Others defines messaging as a framework for the total implementation of portable

applications divorcing you from the architecture primitives of your system In general

messaging product are not applications that solve problems they are more enablers of the

application that solve problems

Messaging services offers solution for communicating non-formatted (unstructured) data

such as purchase order shipping notices and invoices Unstructured messaging consist of

facts e-mail and form based system like Lotus Notes Structure documents messaging

consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved messages via a

telecommunication lines Example of structure 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 when a message is sent work continues (software does not

wait for a response) This allows the transfer of message 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 jungle of standards it

involves Because of the lack of standards there is often no interoperability between different

messaging vendors lading to islands of messaging Also security privacy and confidentiality

to move 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

invitations it came into being out of necessity Users in 1970s when vendors delivered

homogeneous systems that worked did not have a need for middleware When conditions

changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations could not cope The

tools were inadequate the backlog goes enormous and the pressure was overwhelming

And the users were dissatisfied Something was needed to solve all the interface translation

transformation interpretation problems that were driving applications developers crazy

With the growth of networks client-server technology and all other forms of communicating

between among unlike platforms the problems of gettingrsquos all the pieces to work to together

grew form formidable to horrendous As the cry for distributed computing spared user

demanded interactions between dissimilar systems 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

then 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 underlying network infrastructure is in charge of The ideal picture is one

of a ldquovirtualrdquo 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 easy

accessed whole

Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing

environment This gives users and applications transparent accessed to data computation

and other resources across collections of multivendor heterogonous systems The strategic

architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware The

key to relaxing the theoretical benefits of such an architecture is transparency Users need

not spend their time to understand were 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 than satisfy the

request any way it can using remote information

Transition Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in electronic commerce

market Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce

model Transaction integrity must be given for business that cannot afford any loss or

inconsistency in data For electronic commerce middleware provide the qualities expected

in the standard TP system the so-called ACID properties (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 implementation and competing vendors This

diversity while good for innovation causes problem as the e-commerce application try to

impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks It is ironic that the

real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities-

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 retrieved in a consistent and simple way

To access information in the this seamless world we will need the ability to address may

types of data - text files images sound files animation sequence

The universal readership concept promotes the idea that unlike the segmented applications

of the past we can use one application ndash 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 (authorized) person nearly 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 application The core browser implements only

minimal functionality and attempts to offload more spectated 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 client 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

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

Chapter 1

Introduction

Every individual or company that wants to make money and become the next Microsoft needs

to understand the market potential business implication and technical foundation of

electronic commerce But what is electronic commerce everybody is talking about How does

it affect the organization way of doing business What sort of technical and business are

needed to successful

Companies and customer are discussing that global networking and other technological

innovation are powerful assets if we used as competitive weapons in their day to day activity

E-commerce is associated with buying and selling of informationrsquos product and service via a

computer network today

Consumer desires are very hard to predict pin point or decipher of electronic markets whose

shapes structure and population are still in early stages Needs envisioned included

entertainment on demand including five hundred channel TV video on demand games no

demand electronic retailing via a catalogs and kiosk and shopping network

In future viewer will decide what they want to see and they want to participated a successful

market place are expected to those that cater to consumerrsquos loneliness boredom education

and career IN a highly competitive society where neighbors seldom talk to one another these

outlets give consumer someone to through after going home

Let take a look at the changing condition in the ldquonew economyrdquo with respect to the retail

industry Consumers are passing retailers to the wall demanding lower price better quality

and a large section of in season goods retailer are scrambling to fill the order They are

slashing back Office costs reducing profit-margins reduce cycle times buying more wisely

and marking huge investment in technology

They are revamping distributions channels to make sure that the warehouses cost are down

by reducing their average inventory levels and coronations the consumer demand and supply

pattern IN the push to reduce prices more and more retailers are Turing to overseas

suppliers in part because of cheaper labor costs

Retail are the immediate line of fire and had to do the cost cutting They put the pressure on

the manufacturer and then to the suppliers end of pipeline

E-commerce is forcing companies to rethink the existing ways of doing target marketing

relationship marketing and even event marketing Adaption would include moving towards

computerized ldquopaperlessrdquo operation to reduce trading cost and facilitate the adaption 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

Chapter 2

Electronic Commerce and the World-Wide-Web

We have broadly define electronic commerce as a modem 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 organization

In sort electronic commerce appears to be integrates force that representation the digital

convergence of twenty-first century business application and computing technology

Electronic commerce applications emphasis the generations and exploitation of new

business opportunity and use to the popular buzzword ldquoGenerate business valuerdquo For

instance when buyer-seller transactions occur in the electronic market place information is

accesses observed arrange and sold in different in fact the information about a product of

service is separated from the physical product or services and has become important on its

own In some cases the information can become as crucial as his actual product or service

in term if its effect on a companyrsquos in short information ways business truncation are creating

new ways of doing business and even new type of business

Electronic commerce application are quite varied In its most common from e-commerce is

also used to donate the paperless exchange of business information using EDI electronic

mail (E-mail) electronic bulletin board electronic funds transfer (EFT) and other similar

technologies These technologies are normally applied in high-pay of areas recognizing that

paper-handling activity usually increase expense without adding value On the other hand the

term electronic commerce is used to describe a new online approach to perform traditional

function such as payment and funds transfer order entry and point-of-sale Data gathering

More recently company have resized that the advertising marketing can customer support

functions are also part of electronic commerce application domain These functions act as

initiator order management cycle that incorporates the more established motions of electronic

commerce

In sort what we are witnessing is the use of term electronic commerce as an umbrella

concept to integrate a wide range of new and old application

Despite the change taking place business have three goals stay compitative improve

productivety and deliver quality serviec These goals are the giving buoys for firms plotting

their course in the turbulent waters of electronic commerce There are other factors that

companies need to keep in mind first most company have alrady made enormous

information technology investment to automate their kry internal process such as pruchasing

invocing and other similar function So some aspect of technology infrastructure for electrinc

commerce are alrady place The challenge now becomes how to effiectivly leverge this

investment second prices for computer hardware and equipment continue to fall marking

information technology an appealing investment for many business electrically when itrsquos used

for high impact application such as linking there distributed operations however investment

without a clear idea of the electronic commerce architecture being whoul be akin to driving

with blinders on as a result companies that decide thet electronic commerce application

represent one of the best strategic investment they can make must first exert some efforts

to understand the technology underlying electronic commerce applications

At first glance it appears that messaging-based and information management services from 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 naver been seen before This integrated architecture is emerging in the form the World Wide Web(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 dominant technology

Electronic

Commerce

Electronic document interchange

Electronic funds transfer (EFT) Electronic data interchange (EDI)

Marketing advertising

Electronic

Publishing Sales customer support

Fax E-mail

Corporate Digital

Library

Information Sharing

Collaborative

Work

Electronic Messaging

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 todayrsquos closed systems and allow the development of E-commerce applications It is important to understand that the aim of the architectural framework itself is not to build new database management system data repository computer languages software agent-based transaction monitors or communication protocols Rather the architecture should focus on synthesizing the diverse resources 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

Application Services

Customer-to-business business-to-business Intra- organizational

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 (SGMLHTML) Compound documents (OLEOpenDoc)

Network Infrastructure

Wireless-Cellular Radio PCS Wireline-POTS Coaxile Fibre optics

These layers cooperate to provide a seamless transition between todayrsquos computing

resources and those of tomorrow by transparently integrating information access and

exchange within the context of the chosen application As seen in above fig 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 aspect

of the network infrastructure that transports information

Electronic Commerce Application Services -

The application service 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 ndashto-business and intra

organization

Procurement distribution and logistics

Manufacturing

And production

Accounting finance

And management

Engineering

and research

Advertising Sales Customer service

Customer ndashoriented electronic

commerce

Customer

Global Suppliers

Classic EDI

Internal Publishing Private Commerce

Customer-to-business transactions

We call this category marketplace transaction In a market place transaction customers

learn about products differently through electronic publishing buy them differently using

electronic cash and secure payment systems and have them delivered differently Also how

customers allocate their loyalty may also be differently

In light of this organization itself has to adapt to a world where the traditional concepts of

brand differently no longer hold- where ldquoqualityrdquo has a new meaning where ldquocontentrdquo may

not be equated to ldquoproductrdquo where ldquodistribution ldquo may not automatically mean ldquo physical

transportrdquo

In this new environment brand equity can rapidly evaporate forcing firms to develop new

way of doing business

Business-to-Business Transactions

We call this category market ndashlink 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 transactions 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 account payable occurs through the exchange of paper documents

Each year the trading partners exchanges millions of invoices checks purchase orders

financial reports and other transactions

Most of the documents are in electronic from at their point of origin but are printed and key

entered at point of receipt The current manual process of printing mailing rekeying is costly

time consuming and error-prone Given this situation and faced with the need to reduce costs

small business are looking towards electronic commerce as a possible savior

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 satisfactory an ongoing

objective To maintain the relations that are critical to delivering superior customer value

management must pay close attention to service both before and after sales

Information Brokerage and Management

The information brokerage and management layer provides service integration trough 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 series integration between customer and information provides

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

to the knowledge and ownership

Whorsquos got what How do you use it What do they charge Most professional have enough

trouble keeping trap of files or interest on one or two database services Will all have

complexity associated with large number of on-line bureaus itrsquos impossible to expect

humans to do the searching It will have to be software programs-information brokers

software agents to use the most popular term-act on searcherrsquos behalf Information

brokerage does more than searching

Interface and Support Service

The third layer interface and support services will provide interface 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 catalogs are the customize interface to consumer application such as home

shopping An interactive catalog is an extension of the paper-based catalog and incorporates

additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more

attractive

Directories on the other hand operate behind the seen and attempt to organize the

enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitated 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 us to locate

people and telephone numbers In the case of electronic commerce directory would play an

important role in information management functions

For instance take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stopovers with a caveat

that the time between layovers be minimized This search would require several quires to

various on-line directory to find empty seats on various airline and then the availability of

seats would be coordinated with the amount of time spent in the airport terminal

Secure Messaging and Structure Document Interchange Service

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 still sitting on your

fax operatorrsquos disk 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 Itrsquos called

integrated messaging a group of computer service that through the use of a network send

receive and combine messages faxes and large data files Some better known examples are

electronic mail enhanced facts and electronic data interchange

Broadly define messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the

clients or electronic commerce application masking the peculiarities of the environment

Others defines messaging as a framework for the total implementation of portable

applications divorcing you from the architecture primitives of your system In general

messaging product are not applications that solve problems they are more enablers of the

application that solve problems

Messaging services offers solution for communicating non-formatted (unstructured) data

such as purchase order shipping notices and invoices Unstructured messaging consist of

facts e-mail and form based system like Lotus Notes Structure documents messaging

consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved messages via a

telecommunication lines Example of structure 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 when a message is sent work continues (software does not

wait for a response) This allows the transfer of message 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 jungle of standards it

involves Because of the lack of standards there is often no interoperability between different

messaging vendors lading to islands of messaging Also security privacy and confidentiality

to move 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

invitations it came into being out of necessity Users in 1970s when vendors delivered

homogeneous systems that worked did not have a need for middleware When conditions

changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations could not cope The

tools were inadequate the backlog goes enormous and the pressure was overwhelming

And the users were dissatisfied Something was needed to solve all the interface translation

transformation interpretation problems that were driving applications developers crazy

With the growth of networks client-server technology and all other forms of communicating

between among unlike platforms the problems of gettingrsquos all the pieces to work to together

grew form formidable to horrendous As the cry for distributed computing spared user

demanded interactions between dissimilar systems 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

then 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 underlying network infrastructure is in charge of The ideal picture is one

of a ldquovirtualrdquo 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 easy

accessed whole

Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing

environment This gives users and applications transparent accessed to data computation

and other resources across collections of multivendor heterogonous systems The strategic

architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware The

key to relaxing the theoretical benefits of such an architecture is transparency Users need

not spend their time to understand were 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 than satisfy the

request any way it can using remote information

Transition Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in electronic commerce

market Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce

model Transaction integrity must be given for business that cannot afford any loss or

inconsistency in data For electronic commerce middleware provide the qualities expected

in the standard TP system the so-called ACID properties (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 implementation and competing vendors This

diversity while good for innovation causes problem as the e-commerce application try to

impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks It is ironic that the

real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities-

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 retrieved in a consistent and simple way

To access information in the this seamless world we will need the ability to address may

types of data - text files images sound files animation sequence

The universal readership concept promotes the idea that unlike the segmented applications

of the past we can use one application ndash 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 (authorized) person nearly 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 application The core browser implements only

minimal functionality and attempts to offload more spectated 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 client 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

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

Chapter 2

Electronic Commerce and the World-Wide-Web

We have broadly define electronic commerce as a modem 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 organization

In sort electronic commerce appears to be integrates force that representation the digital

convergence of twenty-first century business application and computing technology

Electronic commerce applications emphasis the generations and exploitation of new

business opportunity and use to the popular buzzword ldquoGenerate business valuerdquo For

instance when buyer-seller transactions occur in the electronic market place information is

accesses observed arrange and sold in different in fact the information about a product of

service is separated from the physical product or services and has become important on its

own In some cases the information can become as crucial as his actual product or service

in term if its effect on a companyrsquos in short information ways business truncation are creating

new ways of doing business and even new type of business

Electronic commerce application are quite varied In its most common from e-commerce is

also used to donate the paperless exchange of business information using EDI electronic

mail (E-mail) electronic bulletin board electronic funds transfer (EFT) and other similar

technologies These technologies are normally applied in high-pay of areas recognizing that

paper-handling activity usually increase expense without adding value On the other hand the

term electronic commerce is used to describe a new online approach to perform traditional

function such as payment and funds transfer order entry and point-of-sale Data gathering

More recently company have resized that the advertising marketing can customer support

functions are also part of electronic commerce application domain These functions act as

initiator order management cycle that incorporates the more established motions of electronic

commerce

In sort what we are witnessing is the use of term electronic commerce as an umbrella

concept to integrate a wide range of new and old application

Despite the change taking place business have three goals stay compitative improve

productivety and deliver quality serviec These goals are the giving buoys for firms plotting

their course in the turbulent waters of electronic commerce There are other factors that

companies need to keep in mind first most company have alrady made enormous

information technology investment to automate their kry internal process such as pruchasing

invocing and other similar function So some aspect of technology infrastructure for electrinc

commerce are alrady place The challenge now becomes how to effiectivly leverge this

investment second prices for computer hardware and equipment continue to fall marking

information technology an appealing investment for many business electrically when itrsquos used

for high impact application such as linking there distributed operations however investment

without a clear idea of the electronic commerce architecture being whoul be akin to driving

with blinders on as a result companies that decide thet electronic commerce application

represent one of the best strategic investment they can make must first exert some efforts

to understand the technology underlying electronic commerce applications

At first glance it appears that messaging-based and information management services from 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 naver been seen before This integrated architecture is emerging in the form the World Wide Web(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 dominant technology

Electronic

Commerce

Electronic document interchange

Electronic funds transfer (EFT) Electronic data interchange (EDI)

Marketing advertising

Electronic

Publishing Sales customer support

Fax E-mail

Corporate Digital

Library

Information Sharing

Collaborative

Work

Electronic Messaging

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 todayrsquos closed systems and allow the development of E-commerce applications It is important to understand that the aim of the architectural framework itself is not to build new database management system data repository computer languages software agent-based transaction monitors or communication protocols Rather the architecture should focus on synthesizing the diverse resources 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

Application Services

Customer-to-business business-to-business Intra- organizational

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 (SGMLHTML) Compound documents (OLEOpenDoc)

Network Infrastructure

Wireless-Cellular Radio PCS Wireline-POTS Coaxile Fibre optics

These layers cooperate to provide a seamless transition between todayrsquos computing

resources and those of tomorrow by transparently integrating information access and

exchange within the context of the chosen application As seen in above fig 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 aspect

of the network infrastructure that transports information

Electronic Commerce Application Services -

The application service 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 ndashto-business and intra

organization

Procurement distribution and logistics

Manufacturing

And production

Accounting finance

And management

Engineering

and research

Advertising Sales Customer service

Customer ndashoriented electronic

commerce

Customer

Global Suppliers

Classic EDI

Internal Publishing Private Commerce

Customer-to-business transactions

We call this category marketplace transaction In a market place transaction customers

learn about products differently through electronic publishing buy them differently using

electronic cash and secure payment systems and have them delivered differently Also how

customers allocate their loyalty may also be differently

In light of this organization itself has to adapt to a world where the traditional concepts of

brand differently no longer hold- where ldquoqualityrdquo has a new meaning where ldquocontentrdquo may

not be equated to ldquoproductrdquo where ldquodistribution ldquo may not automatically mean ldquo physical

transportrdquo

In this new environment brand equity can rapidly evaporate forcing firms to develop new

way of doing business

Business-to-Business Transactions

We call this category market ndashlink 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 transactions 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 account payable occurs through the exchange of paper documents

Each year the trading partners exchanges millions of invoices checks purchase orders

financial reports and other transactions

Most of the documents are in electronic from at their point of origin but are printed and key

entered at point of receipt The current manual process of printing mailing rekeying is costly

time consuming and error-prone Given this situation and faced with the need to reduce costs

small business are looking towards electronic commerce as a possible savior

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 satisfactory an ongoing

objective To maintain the relations that are critical to delivering superior customer value

management must pay close attention to service both before and after sales

Information Brokerage and Management

The information brokerage and management layer provides service integration trough 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 series integration between customer and information provides

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

to the knowledge and ownership

Whorsquos got what How do you use it What do they charge Most professional have enough

trouble keeping trap of files or interest on one or two database services Will all have

complexity associated with large number of on-line bureaus itrsquos impossible to expect

humans to do the searching It will have to be software programs-information brokers

software agents to use the most popular term-act on searcherrsquos behalf Information

brokerage does more than searching

Interface and Support Service

The third layer interface and support services will provide interface 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 catalogs are the customize interface to consumer application such as home

shopping An interactive catalog is an extension of the paper-based catalog and incorporates

additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more

attractive

Directories on the other hand operate behind the seen and attempt to organize the

enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitated 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 us to locate

people and telephone numbers In the case of electronic commerce directory would play an

important role in information management functions

For instance take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stopovers with a caveat

that the time between layovers be minimized This search would require several quires to

various on-line directory to find empty seats on various airline and then the availability of

seats would be coordinated with the amount of time spent in the airport terminal

Secure Messaging and Structure Document Interchange Service

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 still sitting on your

fax operatorrsquos disk 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 Itrsquos called

integrated messaging a group of computer service that through the use of a network send

receive and combine messages faxes and large data files Some better known examples are

electronic mail enhanced facts and electronic data interchange

Broadly define messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the

clients or electronic commerce application masking the peculiarities of the environment

Others defines messaging as a framework for the total implementation of portable

applications divorcing you from the architecture primitives of your system In general

messaging product are not applications that solve problems they are more enablers of the

application that solve problems

Messaging services offers solution for communicating non-formatted (unstructured) data

such as purchase order shipping notices and invoices Unstructured messaging consist of

facts e-mail and form based system like Lotus Notes Structure documents messaging

consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved messages via a

telecommunication lines Example of structure 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 when a message is sent work continues (software does not

wait for a response) This allows the transfer of message 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 jungle of standards it

involves Because of the lack of standards there is often no interoperability between different

messaging vendors lading to islands of messaging Also security privacy and confidentiality

to move 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

invitations it came into being out of necessity Users in 1970s when vendors delivered

homogeneous systems that worked did not have a need for middleware When conditions

changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations could not cope The

tools were inadequate the backlog goes enormous and the pressure was overwhelming

And the users were dissatisfied Something was needed to solve all the interface translation

transformation interpretation problems that were driving applications developers crazy

With the growth of networks client-server technology and all other forms of communicating

between among unlike platforms the problems of gettingrsquos all the pieces to work to together

grew form formidable to horrendous As the cry for distributed computing spared user

demanded interactions between dissimilar systems 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

then 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 underlying network infrastructure is in charge of The ideal picture is one

of a ldquovirtualrdquo 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 easy

accessed whole

Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing

environment This gives users and applications transparent accessed to data computation

and other resources across collections of multivendor heterogonous systems The strategic

architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware The

key to relaxing the theoretical benefits of such an architecture is transparency Users need

not spend their time to understand were 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 than satisfy the

request any way it can using remote information

Transition Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in electronic commerce

market Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce

model Transaction integrity must be given for business that cannot afford any loss or

inconsistency in data For electronic commerce middleware provide the qualities expected

in the standard TP system the so-called ACID properties (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 implementation and competing vendors This

diversity while good for innovation causes problem as the e-commerce application try to

impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks It is ironic that the

real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities-

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 retrieved in a consistent and simple way

To access information in the this seamless world we will need the ability to address may

types of data - text files images sound files animation sequence

The universal readership concept promotes the idea that unlike the segmented applications

of the past we can use one application ndash 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 (authorized) person nearly 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 application The core browser implements only

minimal functionality and attempts to offload more spectated 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 client 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

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

Despite the change taking place business have three goals stay compitative improve

productivety and deliver quality serviec These goals are the giving buoys for firms plotting

their course in the turbulent waters of electronic commerce There are other factors that

companies need to keep in mind first most company have alrady made enormous

information technology investment to automate their kry internal process such as pruchasing

invocing and other similar function So some aspect of technology infrastructure for electrinc

commerce are alrady place The challenge now becomes how to effiectivly leverge this

investment second prices for computer hardware and equipment continue to fall marking

information technology an appealing investment for many business electrically when itrsquos used

for high impact application such as linking there distributed operations however investment

without a clear idea of the electronic commerce architecture being whoul be akin to driving

with blinders on as a result companies that decide thet electronic commerce application

represent one of the best strategic investment they can make must first exert some efforts

to understand the technology underlying electronic commerce applications

At first glance it appears that messaging-based and information management services from 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 naver been seen before This integrated architecture is emerging in the form the World Wide Web(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 dominant technology

Electronic

Commerce

Electronic document interchange

Electronic funds transfer (EFT) Electronic data interchange (EDI)

Marketing advertising

Electronic

Publishing Sales customer support

Fax E-mail

Corporate Digital

Library

Information Sharing

Collaborative

Work

Electronic Messaging

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 todayrsquos closed systems and allow the development of E-commerce applications It is important to understand that the aim of the architectural framework itself is not to build new database management system data repository computer languages software agent-based transaction monitors or communication protocols Rather the architecture should focus on synthesizing the diverse resources 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

Application Services

Customer-to-business business-to-business Intra- organizational

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 (SGMLHTML) Compound documents (OLEOpenDoc)

Network Infrastructure

Wireless-Cellular Radio PCS Wireline-POTS Coaxile Fibre optics

These layers cooperate to provide a seamless transition between todayrsquos computing

resources and those of tomorrow by transparently integrating information access and

exchange within the context of the chosen application As seen in above fig 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 aspect

of the network infrastructure that transports information

Electronic Commerce Application Services -

The application service 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 ndashto-business and intra

organization

Procurement distribution and logistics

Manufacturing

And production

Accounting finance

And management

Engineering

and research

Advertising Sales Customer service

Customer ndashoriented electronic

commerce

Customer

Global Suppliers

Classic EDI

Internal Publishing Private Commerce

Customer-to-business transactions

We call this category marketplace transaction In a market place transaction customers

learn about products differently through electronic publishing buy them differently using

electronic cash and secure payment systems and have them delivered differently Also how

customers allocate their loyalty may also be differently

In light of this organization itself has to adapt to a world where the traditional concepts of

brand differently no longer hold- where ldquoqualityrdquo has a new meaning where ldquocontentrdquo may

not be equated to ldquoproductrdquo where ldquodistribution ldquo may not automatically mean ldquo physical

transportrdquo

In this new environment brand equity can rapidly evaporate forcing firms to develop new

way of doing business

Business-to-Business Transactions

We call this category market ndashlink 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 transactions 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 account payable occurs through the exchange of paper documents

Each year the trading partners exchanges millions of invoices checks purchase orders

financial reports and other transactions

Most of the documents are in electronic from at their point of origin but are printed and key

entered at point of receipt The current manual process of printing mailing rekeying is costly

time consuming and error-prone Given this situation and faced with the need to reduce costs

small business are looking towards electronic commerce as a possible savior

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 satisfactory an ongoing

objective To maintain the relations that are critical to delivering superior customer value

management must pay close attention to service both before and after sales

Information Brokerage and Management

The information brokerage and management layer provides service integration trough 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 series integration between customer and information provides

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

to the knowledge and ownership

Whorsquos got what How do you use it What do they charge Most professional have enough

trouble keeping trap of files or interest on one or two database services Will all have

complexity associated with large number of on-line bureaus itrsquos impossible to expect

humans to do the searching It will have to be software programs-information brokers

software agents to use the most popular term-act on searcherrsquos behalf Information

brokerage does more than searching

Interface and Support Service

The third layer interface and support services will provide interface 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 catalogs are the customize interface to consumer application such as home

shopping An interactive catalog is an extension of the paper-based catalog and incorporates

additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more

attractive

Directories on the other hand operate behind the seen and attempt to organize the

enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitated 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 us to locate

people and telephone numbers In the case of electronic commerce directory would play an

important role in information management functions

For instance take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stopovers with a caveat

that the time between layovers be minimized This search would require several quires to

various on-line directory to find empty seats on various airline and then the availability of

seats would be coordinated with the amount of time spent in the airport terminal

Secure Messaging and Structure Document Interchange Service

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 still sitting on your

fax operatorrsquos disk 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 Itrsquos called

integrated messaging a group of computer service that through the use of a network send

receive and combine messages faxes and large data files Some better known examples are

electronic mail enhanced facts and electronic data interchange

Broadly define messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the

clients or electronic commerce application masking the peculiarities of the environment

Others defines messaging as a framework for the total implementation of portable

applications divorcing you from the architecture primitives of your system In general

messaging product are not applications that solve problems they are more enablers of the

application that solve problems

Messaging services offers solution for communicating non-formatted (unstructured) data

such as purchase order shipping notices and invoices Unstructured messaging consist of

facts e-mail and form based system like Lotus Notes Structure documents messaging

consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved messages via a

telecommunication lines Example of structure 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 when a message is sent work continues (software does not

wait for a response) This allows the transfer of message 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 jungle of standards it

involves Because of the lack of standards there is often no interoperability between different

messaging vendors lading to islands of messaging Also security privacy and confidentiality

to move 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

invitations it came into being out of necessity Users in 1970s when vendors delivered

homogeneous systems that worked did not have a need for middleware When conditions

changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations could not cope The

tools were inadequate the backlog goes enormous and the pressure was overwhelming

And the users were dissatisfied Something was needed to solve all the interface translation

transformation interpretation problems that were driving applications developers crazy

With the growth of networks client-server technology and all other forms of communicating

between among unlike platforms the problems of gettingrsquos all the pieces to work to together

grew form formidable to horrendous As the cry for distributed computing spared user

demanded interactions between dissimilar systems 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

then 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 underlying network infrastructure is in charge of The ideal picture is one

of a ldquovirtualrdquo 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 easy

accessed whole

Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing

environment This gives users and applications transparent accessed to data computation

and other resources across collections of multivendor heterogonous systems The strategic

architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware The

key to relaxing the theoretical benefits of such an architecture is transparency Users need

not spend their time to understand were 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 than satisfy the

request any way it can using remote information

Transition Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in electronic commerce

market Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce

model Transaction integrity must be given for business that cannot afford any loss or

inconsistency in data For electronic commerce middleware provide the qualities expected

in the standard TP system the so-called ACID properties (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 implementation and competing vendors This

diversity while good for innovation causes problem as the e-commerce application try to

impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks It is ironic that the

real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities-

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 retrieved in a consistent and simple way

To access information in the this seamless world we will need the ability to address may

types of data - text files images sound files animation sequence

The universal readership concept promotes the idea that unlike the segmented applications

of the past we can use one application ndash 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 (authorized) person nearly 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 application The core browser implements only

minimal functionality and attempts to offload more spectated 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 client 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

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

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 todayrsquos closed systems and allow the development of E-commerce applications It is important to understand that the aim of the architectural framework itself is not to build new database management system data repository computer languages software agent-based transaction monitors or communication protocols Rather the architecture should focus on synthesizing the diverse resources 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

Application Services

Customer-to-business business-to-business Intra- organizational

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 (SGMLHTML) Compound documents (OLEOpenDoc)

Network Infrastructure

Wireless-Cellular Radio PCS Wireline-POTS Coaxile Fibre optics

These layers cooperate to provide a seamless transition between todayrsquos computing

resources and those of tomorrow by transparently integrating information access and

exchange within the context of the chosen application As seen in above fig 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 aspect

of the network infrastructure that transports information

Electronic Commerce Application Services -

The application service 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 ndashto-business and intra

organization

Procurement distribution and logistics

Manufacturing

And production

Accounting finance

And management

Engineering

and research

Advertising Sales Customer service

Customer ndashoriented electronic

commerce

Customer

Global Suppliers

Classic EDI

Internal Publishing Private Commerce

Customer-to-business transactions

We call this category marketplace transaction In a market place transaction customers

learn about products differently through electronic publishing buy them differently using

electronic cash and secure payment systems and have them delivered differently Also how

customers allocate their loyalty may also be differently

In light of this organization itself has to adapt to a world where the traditional concepts of

brand differently no longer hold- where ldquoqualityrdquo has a new meaning where ldquocontentrdquo may

not be equated to ldquoproductrdquo where ldquodistribution ldquo may not automatically mean ldquo physical

transportrdquo

In this new environment brand equity can rapidly evaporate forcing firms to develop new

way of doing business

Business-to-Business Transactions

We call this category market ndashlink 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 transactions 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 account payable occurs through the exchange of paper documents

Each year the trading partners exchanges millions of invoices checks purchase orders

financial reports and other transactions

Most of the documents are in electronic from at their point of origin but are printed and key

entered at point of receipt The current manual process of printing mailing rekeying is costly

time consuming and error-prone Given this situation and faced with the need to reduce costs

small business are looking towards electronic commerce as a possible savior

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 satisfactory an ongoing

objective To maintain the relations that are critical to delivering superior customer value

management must pay close attention to service both before and after sales

Information Brokerage and Management

The information brokerage and management layer provides service integration trough 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 series integration between customer and information provides

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

to the knowledge and ownership

Whorsquos got what How do you use it What do they charge Most professional have enough

trouble keeping trap of files or interest on one or two database services Will all have

complexity associated with large number of on-line bureaus itrsquos impossible to expect

humans to do the searching It will have to be software programs-information brokers

software agents to use the most popular term-act on searcherrsquos behalf Information

brokerage does more than searching

Interface and Support Service

The third layer interface and support services will provide interface 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 catalogs are the customize interface to consumer application such as home

shopping An interactive catalog is an extension of the paper-based catalog and incorporates

additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more

attractive

Directories on the other hand operate behind the seen and attempt to organize the

enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitated 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 us to locate

people and telephone numbers In the case of electronic commerce directory would play an

important role in information management functions

For instance take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stopovers with a caveat

that the time between layovers be minimized This search would require several quires to

various on-line directory to find empty seats on various airline and then the availability of

seats would be coordinated with the amount of time spent in the airport terminal

Secure Messaging and Structure Document Interchange Service

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 still sitting on your

fax operatorrsquos disk 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 Itrsquos called

integrated messaging a group of computer service that through the use of a network send

receive and combine messages faxes and large data files Some better known examples are

electronic mail enhanced facts and electronic data interchange

Broadly define messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the

clients or electronic commerce application masking the peculiarities of the environment

Others defines messaging as a framework for the total implementation of portable

applications divorcing you from the architecture primitives of your system In general

messaging product are not applications that solve problems they are more enablers of the

application that solve problems

Messaging services offers solution for communicating non-formatted (unstructured) data

such as purchase order shipping notices and invoices Unstructured messaging consist of

facts e-mail and form based system like Lotus Notes Structure documents messaging

consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved messages via a

telecommunication lines Example of structure 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 when a message is sent work continues (software does not

wait for a response) This allows the transfer of message 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 jungle of standards it

involves Because of the lack of standards there is often no interoperability between different

messaging vendors lading to islands of messaging Also security privacy and confidentiality

to move 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

invitations it came into being out of necessity Users in 1970s when vendors delivered

homogeneous systems that worked did not have a need for middleware When conditions

changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations could not cope The

tools were inadequate the backlog goes enormous and the pressure was overwhelming

And the users were dissatisfied Something was needed to solve all the interface translation

transformation interpretation problems that were driving applications developers crazy

With the growth of networks client-server technology and all other forms of communicating

between among unlike platforms the problems of gettingrsquos all the pieces to work to together

grew form formidable to horrendous As the cry for distributed computing spared user

demanded interactions between dissimilar systems 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

then 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 underlying network infrastructure is in charge of The ideal picture is one

of a ldquovirtualrdquo 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 easy

accessed whole

Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing

environment This gives users and applications transparent accessed to data computation

and other resources across collections of multivendor heterogonous systems The strategic

architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware The

key to relaxing the theoretical benefits of such an architecture is transparency Users need

not spend their time to understand were 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 than satisfy the

request any way it can using remote information

Transition Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in electronic commerce

market Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce

model Transaction integrity must be given for business that cannot afford any loss or

inconsistency in data For electronic commerce middleware provide the qualities expected

in the standard TP system the so-called ACID properties (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 implementation and competing vendors This

diversity while good for innovation causes problem as the e-commerce application try to

impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks It is ironic that the

real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities-

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 retrieved in a consistent and simple way

To access information in the this seamless world we will need the ability to address may

types of data - text files images sound files animation sequence

The universal readership concept promotes the idea that unlike the segmented applications

of the past we can use one application ndash 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 (authorized) person nearly 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 application The core browser implements only

minimal functionality and attempts to offload more spectated 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 client 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

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

These layers cooperate to provide a seamless transition between todayrsquos computing

resources and those of tomorrow by transparently integrating information access and

exchange within the context of the chosen application As seen in above fig 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 aspect

of the network infrastructure that transports information

Electronic Commerce Application Services -

The application service 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 ndashto-business and intra

organization

Procurement distribution and logistics

Manufacturing

And production

Accounting finance

And management

Engineering

and research

Advertising Sales Customer service

Customer ndashoriented electronic

commerce

Customer

Global Suppliers

Classic EDI

Internal Publishing Private Commerce

Customer-to-business transactions

We call this category marketplace transaction In a market place transaction customers

learn about products differently through electronic publishing buy them differently using

electronic cash and secure payment systems and have them delivered differently Also how

customers allocate their loyalty may also be differently

In light of this organization itself has to adapt to a world where the traditional concepts of

brand differently no longer hold- where ldquoqualityrdquo has a new meaning where ldquocontentrdquo may

not be equated to ldquoproductrdquo where ldquodistribution ldquo may not automatically mean ldquo physical

transportrdquo

In this new environment brand equity can rapidly evaporate forcing firms to develop new

way of doing business

Business-to-Business Transactions

We call this category market ndashlink 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 transactions 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 account payable occurs through the exchange of paper documents

Each year the trading partners exchanges millions of invoices checks purchase orders

financial reports and other transactions

Most of the documents are in electronic from at their point of origin but are printed and key

entered at point of receipt The current manual process of printing mailing rekeying is costly

time consuming and error-prone Given this situation and faced with the need to reduce costs

small business are looking towards electronic commerce as a possible savior

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 satisfactory an ongoing

objective To maintain the relations that are critical to delivering superior customer value

management must pay close attention to service both before and after sales

Information Brokerage and Management

The information brokerage and management layer provides service integration trough 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 series integration between customer and information provides

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

to the knowledge and ownership

Whorsquos got what How do you use it What do they charge Most professional have enough

trouble keeping trap of files or interest on one or two database services Will all have

complexity associated with large number of on-line bureaus itrsquos impossible to expect

humans to do the searching It will have to be software programs-information brokers

software agents to use the most popular term-act on searcherrsquos behalf Information

brokerage does more than searching

Interface and Support Service

The third layer interface and support services will provide interface 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 catalogs are the customize interface to consumer application such as home

shopping An interactive catalog is an extension of the paper-based catalog and incorporates

additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more

attractive

Directories on the other hand operate behind the seen and attempt to organize the

enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitated 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 us to locate

people and telephone numbers In the case of electronic commerce directory would play an

important role in information management functions

For instance take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stopovers with a caveat

that the time between layovers be minimized This search would require several quires to

various on-line directory to find empty seats on various airline and then the availability of

seats would be coordinated with the amount of time spent in the airport terminal

Secure Messaging and Structure Document Interchange Service

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 still sitting on your

fax operatorrsquos disk 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 Itrsquos called

integrated messaging a group of computer service that through the use of a network send

receive and combine messages faxes and large data files Some better known examples are

electronic mail enhanced facts and electronic data interchange

Broadly define messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the

clients or electronic commerce application masking the peculiarities of the environment

Others defines messaging as a framework for the total implementation of portable

applications divorcing you from the architecture primitives of your system In general

messaging product are not applications that solve problems they are more enablers of the

application that solve problems

Messaging services offers solution for communicating non-formatted (unstructured) data

such as purchase order shipping notices and invoices Unstructured messaging consist of

facts e-mail and form based system like Lotus Notes Structure documents messaging

consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved messages via a

telecommunication lines Example of structure 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 when a message is sent work continues (software does not

wait for a response) This allows the transfer of message 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 jungle of standards it

involves Because of the lack of standards there is often no interoperability between different

messaging vendors lading to islands of messaging Also security privacy and confidentiality

to move 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

invitations it came into being out of necessity Users in 1970s when vendors delivered

homogeneous systems that worked did not have a need for middleware When conditions

changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations could not cope The

tools were inadequate the backlog goes enormous and the pressure was overwhelming

And the users were dissatisfied Something was needed to solve all the interface translation

transformation interpretation problems that were driving applications developers crazy

With the growth of networks client-server technology and all other forms of communicating

between among unlike platforms the problems of gettingrsquos all the pieces to work to together

grew form formidable to horrendous As the cry for distributed computing spared user

demanded interactions between dissimilar systems 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

then 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 underlying network infrastructure is in charge of The ideal picture is one

of a ldquovirtualrdquo 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 easy

accessed whole

Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing

environment This gives users and applications transparent accessed to data computation

and other resources across collections of multivendor heterogonous systems The strategic

architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware The

key to relaxing the theoretical benefits of such an architecture is transparency Users need

not spend their time to understand were 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 than satisfy the

request any way it can using remote information

Transition Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in electronic commerce

market Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce

model Transaction integrity must be given for business that cannot afford any loss or

inconsistency in data For electronic commerce middleware provide the qualities expected

in the standard TP system the so-called ACID properties (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 implementation and competing vendors This

diversity while good for innovation causes problem as the e-commerce application try to

impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks It is ironic that the

real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities-

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 retrieved in a consistent and simple way

To access information in the this seamless world we will need the ability to address may

types of data - text files images sound files animation sequence

The universal readership concept promotes the idea that unlike the segmented applications

of the past we can use one application ndash 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 (authorized) person nearly 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 application The core browser implements only

minimal functionality and attempts to offload more spectated 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 client 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

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

Customer-to-business transactions

We call this category marketplace transaction In a market place transaction customers

learn about products differently through electronic publishing buy them differently using

electronic cash and secure payment systems and have them delivered differently Also how

customers allocate their loyalty may also be differently

In light of this organization itself has to adapt to a world where the traditional concepts of

brand differently no longer hold- where ldquoqualityrdquo has a new meaning where ldquocontentrdquo may

not be equated to ldquoproductrdquo where ldquodistribution ldquo may not automatically mean ldquo physical

transportrdquo

In this new environment brand equity can rapidly evaporate forcing firms to develop new

way of doing business

Business-to-Business Transactions

We call this category market ndashlink 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 transactions 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 account payable occurs through the exchange of paper documents

Each year the trading partners exchanges millions of invoices checks purchase orders

financial reports and other transactions

Most of the documents are in electronic from at their point of origin but are printed and key

entered at point of receipt The current manual process of printing mailing rekeying is costly

time consuming and error-prone Given this situation and faced with the need to reduce costs

small business are looking towards electronic commerce as a possible savior

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 satisfactory an ongoing

objective To maintain the relations that are critical to delivering superior customer value

management must pay close attention to service both before and after sales

Information Brokerage and Management

The information brokerage and management layer provides service integration trough 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 series integration between customer and information provides

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

to the knowledge and ownership

Whorsquos got what How do you use it What do they charge Most professional have enough

trouble keeping trap of files or interest on one or two database services Will all have

complexity associated with large number of on-line bureaus itrsquos impossible to expect

humans to do the searching It will have to be software programs-information brokers

software agents to use the most popular term-act on searcherrsquos behalf Information

brokerage does more than searching

Interface and Support Service

The third layer interface and support services will provide interface 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 catalogs are the customize interface to consumer application such as home

shopping An interactive catalog is an extension of the paper-based catalog and incorporates

additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more

attractive

Directories on the other hand operate behind the seen and attempt to organize the

enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitated 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 us to locate

people and telephone numbers In the case of electronic commerce directory would play an

important role in information management functions

For instance take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stopovers with a caveat

that the time between layovers be minimized This search would require several quires to

various on-line directory to find empty seats on various airline and then the availability of

seats would be coordinated with the amount of time spent in the airport terminal

Secure Messaging and Structure Document Interchange Service

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 still sitting on your

fax operatorrsquos disk 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 Itrsquos called

integrated messaging a group of computer service that through the use of a network send

receive and combine messages faxes and large data files Some better known examples are

electronic mail enhanced facts and electronic data interchange

Broadly define messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the

clients or electronic commerce application masking the peculiarities of the environment

Others defines messaging as a framework for the total implementation of portable

applications divorcing you from the architecture primitives of your system In general

messaging product are not applications that solve problems they are more enablers of the

application that solve problems

Messaging services offers solution for communicating non-formatted (unstructured) data

such as purchase order shipping notices and invoices Unstructured messaging consist of

facts e-mail and form based system like Lotus Notes Structure documents messaging

consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved messages via a

telecommunication lines Example of structure 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 when a message is sent work continues (software does not

wait for a response) This allows the transfer of message 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 jungle of standards it

involves Because of the lack of standards there is often no interoperability between different

messaging vendors lading to islands of messaging Also security privacy and confidentiality

to move 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

invitations it came into being out of necessity Users in 1970s when vendors delivered

homogeneous systems that worked did not have a need for middleware When conditions

changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations could not cope The

tools were inadequate the backlog goes enormous and the pressure was overwhelming

And the users were dissatisfied Something was needed to solve all the interface translation

transformation interpretation problems that were driving applications developers crazy

With the growth of networks client-server technology and all other forms of communicating

between among unlike platforms the problems of gettingrsquos all the pieces to work to together

grew form formidable to horrendous As the cry for distributed computing spared user

demanded interactions between dissimilar systems 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

then 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 underlying network infrastructure is in charge of The ideal picture is one

of a ldquovirtualrdquo 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 easy

accessed whole

Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing

environment This gives users and applications transparent accessed to data computation

and other resources across collections of multivendor heterogonous systems The strategic

architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware The

key to relaxing the theoretical benefits of such an architecture is transparency Users need

not spend their time to understand were 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 than satisfy the

request any way it can using remote information

Transition Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in electronic commerce

market Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce

model Transaction integrity must be given for business that cannot afford any loss or

inconsistency in data For electronic commerce middleware provide the qualities expected

in the standard TP system the so-called ACID properties (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 implementation and competing vendors This

diversity while good for innovation causes problem as the e-commerce application try to

impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks It is ironic that the

real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities-

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 retrieved in a consistent and simple way

To access information in the this seamless world we will need the ability to address may

types of data - text files images sound files animation sequence

The universal readership concept promotes the idea that unlike the segmented applications

of the past we can use one application ndash 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 (authorized) person nearly 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 application The core browser implements only

minimal functionality and attempts to offload more spectated 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 client 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

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

consumer information utilities consumers and information professionals will have to keep up

to the knowledge and ownership

Whorsquos got what How do you use it What do they charge Most professional have enough

trouble keeping trap of files or interest on one or two database services Will all have

complexity associated with large number of on-line bureaus itrsquos impossible to expect

humans to do the searching It will have to be software programs-information brokers

software agents to use the most popular term-act on searcherrsquos behalf Information

brokerage does more than searching

Interface and Support Service

The third layer interface and support services will provide interface 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 catalogs are the customize interface to consumer application such as home

shopping An interactive catalog is an extension of the paper-based catalog and incorporates

additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more

attractive

Directories on the other hand operate behind the seen and attempt to organize the

enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitated 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 us to locate

people and telephone numbers In the case of electronic commerce directory would play an

important role in information management functions

For instance take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stopovers with a caveat

that the time between layovers be minimized This search would require several quires to

various on-line directory to find empty seats on various airline and then the availability of

seats would be coordinated with the amount of time spent in the airport terminal

Secure Messaging and Structure Document Interchange Service

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 still sitting on your

fax operatorrsquos disk 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 Itrsquos called

integrated messaging a group of computer service that through the use of a network send

receive and combine messages faxes and large data files Some better known examples are

electronic mail enhanced facts and electronic data interchange

Broadly define messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the

clients or electronic commerce application masking the peculiarities of the environment

Others defines messaging as a framework for the total implementation of portable

applications divorcing you from the architecture primitives of your system In general

messaging product are not applications that solve problems they are more enablers of the

application that solve problems

Messaging services offers solution for communicating non-formatted (unstructured) data

such as purchase order shipping notices and invoices Unstructured messaging consist of

facts e-mail and form based system like Lotus Notes Structure documents messaging

consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved messages via a

telecommunication lines Example of structure 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 when a message is sent work continues (software does not

wait for a response) This allows the transfer of message 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 jungle of standards it

involves Because of the lack of standards there is often no interoperability between different

messaging vendors lading to islands of messaging Also security privacy and confidentiality

to move 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

invitations it came into being out of necessity Users in 1970s when vendors delivered

homogeneous systems that worked did not have a need for middleware When conditions

changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations could not cope The

tools were inadequate the backlog goes enormous and the pressure was overwhelming

And the users were dissatisfied Something was needed to solve all the interface translation

transformation interpretation problems that were driving applications developers crazy

With the growth of networks client-server technology and all other forms of communicating

between among unlike platforms the problems of gettingrsquos all the pieces to work to together

grew form formidable to horrendous As the cry for distributed computing spared user

demanded interactions between dissimilar systems 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

then 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 underlying network infrastructure is in charge of The ideal picture is one

of a ldquovirtualrdquo 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 easy

accessed whole

Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing

environment This gives users and applications transparent accessed to data computation

and other resources across collections of multivendor heterogonous systems The strategic

architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware The

key to relaxing the theoretical benefits of such an architecture is transparency Users need

not spend their time to understand were 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 than satisfy the

request any way it can using remote information

Transition Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in electronic commerce

market Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce

model Transaction integrity must be given for business that cannot afford any loss or

inconsistency in data For electronic commerce middleware provide the qualities expected

in the standard TP system the so-called ACID properties (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 implementation and competing vendors This

diversity while good for innovation causes problem as the e-commerce application try to

impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks It is ironic that the

real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities-

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 retrieved in a consistent and simple way

To access information in the this seamless world we will need the ability to address may

types of data - text files images sound files animation sequence

The universal readership concept promotes the idea that unlike the segmented applications

of the past we can use one application ndash 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 (authorized) person nearly 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 application The core browser implements only

minimal functionality and attempts to offload more spectated 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 client 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

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

messaging product are not applications that solve problems they are more enablers of the

application that solve problems

Messaging services offers solution for communicating non-formatted (unstructured) data

such as purchase order shipping notices and invoices Unstructured messaging consist of

facts e-mail and form based system like Lotus Notes Structure documents messaging

consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved messages via a

telecommunication lines Example of structure 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 when a message is sent work continues (software does not

wait for a response) This allows the transfer of message 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 jungle of standards it

involves Because of the lack of standards there is often no interoperability between different

messaging vendors lading to islands of messaging Also security privacy and confidentiality

to move 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

invitations it came into being out of necessity Users in 1970s when vendors delivered

homogeneous systems that worked did not have a need for middleware When conditions

changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations could not cope The

tools were inadequate the backlog goes enormous and the pressure was overwhelming

And the users were dissatisfied Something was needed to solve all the interface translation

transformation interpretation problems that were driving applications developers crazy

With the growth of networks client-server technology and all other forms of communicating

between among unlike platforms the problems of gettingrsquos all the pieces to work to together

grew form formidable to horrendous As the cry for distributed computing spared user

demanded interactions between dissimilar systems 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

then 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 underlying network infrastructure is in charge of The ideal picture is one

of a ldquovirtualrdquo 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 easy

accessed whole

Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing

environment This gives users and applications transparent accessed to data computation

and other resources across collections of multivendor heterogonous systems The strategic

architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware The

key to relaxing the theoretical benefits of such an architecture is transparency Users need

not spend their time to understand were 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 than satisfy the

request any way it can using remote information

Transition Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in electronic commerce

market Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce

model Transaction integrity must be given for business that cannot afford any loss or

inconsistency in data For electronic commerce middleware provide the qualities expected

in the standard TP system the so-called ACID properties (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 implementation and competing vendors This

diversity while good for innovation causes problem as the e-commerce application try to

impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks It is ironic that the

real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities-

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 retrieved in a consistent and simple way

To access information in the this seamless world we will need the ability to address may

types of data - text files images sound files animation sequence

The universal readership concept promotes the idea that unlike the segmented applications

of the past we can use one application ndash 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 (authorized) person nearly 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 application The core browser implements only

minimal functionality and attempts to offload more spectated 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 client 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

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

not spend their time to understand were 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 than satisfy the

request any way it can using remote information

Transition Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in electronic commerce

market Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce

model Transaction integrity must be given for business that cannot afford any loss or

inconsistency in data For electronic commerce middleware provide the qualities expected

in the standard TP system the so-called ACID properties (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 implementation and competing vendors This

diversity while good for innovation causes problem as the e-commerce application try to

impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks It is ironic that the

real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities-

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 retrieved in a consistent and simple way

To access information in the this seamless world we will need the ability to address may

types of data - text files images sound files animation sequence

The universal readership concept promotes the idea that unlike the segmented applications

of the past we can use one application ndash 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 (authorized) person nearly 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 application The core browser implements only

minimal functionality and attempts to offload more spectated 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 client 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

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

1 The addressing schemas known as uniform resource locator (URL) makes the

hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols

2 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by client

browser and server offers performance and features not otherwise available

3 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

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

Chapter 4

Technology behind the Web

Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called server) from which the browser

(client) can obtain information The programs can either be Web servers that understand the

hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) ldquogatewayrdquo programs that convert an existing information

format to hypertext or a non-HTTP server that Web browser 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 HTTP servers is provided by the uniform

resource locators (URLs)

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext that contain 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

may be used by any other Internet user 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 white range of

network services which required a separate applications in the past For a new network

protocol one can easily form and 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 ftpserveraddresscompletefilename

Gopher gopherserveraddressportdirectoryfilename

TELNET telnetserveraddressport

HTTP httpserveraddressporthomepagehtml

News newsmiscstocksinvest

These are URLs for Internet news articles and news groups (the NNTP protocol) and for

HTTP archives for TELNET destinations e-mail address and so on The same can be 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 HTTPwebw3orghypertextwebtheTheProjecthtml The

prefix ldquoHTTPrdquo 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 substring to be passed to the server

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 majors

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 concern in electronic commerce can be divided into two broad types 1 Client-Server Security uses various authorization methods to make sure that only valid users and programs have access to information resources such as databases Access control mechanisms must be set up to ensure that properly authenticated users are allowed access only to those resources that they are entitled to use Such mechanisms include password protection encrypted smart cards biometrics 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 transactions for activities such as on-line payment The goal is to defeat any attempt to assume another identity while involved with electronic mail or other forms of data communication Preventive measures include data encryption using various cryptographic methods

Data and Message Security

The lack of data and message security on the Internet has become a profile problem due to increasing number of merchants trying to spur commerce on the global network For instance credit card numbers in their 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 customers to that risk Just the thought of ldquosnifferrdquo 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 short the lack of business transaction security is widely acknowledged as a major impediment to widespread e-commerce

Encrypted Documents and Electronic Mail

E-mail users who desire confidentiality and sender authentication are using encryption Encryption is simply intended to keep personal thoughts personal Some users are already using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) others are starting to use Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) 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 from casual snooping A glance at the header area of any

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 present the opportunity for snooping

Chapter 6

Electronic Commerce Companies

Chapter 7

Pictorial Representation E-Buying Methodology

Buying Procedure on on-line shopping website Flip kart Step 1 -

Step 2 -

Step 3 -

Step 4-

Step 5-

Step 6-

Step 7-

Step 8-

Step 9-

Step 10-

Step 11-

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 Indiarsquos retail market of about $500 billion a

year but it is growing at a quick pace A study by retail consultancy Technopark predicts

Indiarsquos e-tailing market will reach $32 billion by 2020 from $23 billion in 2014

Ethnic Indian clothes and casual wear are favorite products but unusual products like pets-

too are being offered on-line With the huge growth that e-commerce has witnessed in recent

times analysts like Devangshu Dutta says there is scope for more players to come in But

some also worn about the risks the space is fraught with as only a few way have chances of

making it big They also see consolidation in the sector going forward

Chapter 6

Electronic Commerce Companies

Chapter 7

Pictorial Representation E-Buying Methodology

Buying Procedure on on-line shopping website Flip kart Step 1 -

Step 2 -

Step 3 -

Step 4-

Step 5-

Step 6-

Step 7-

Step 8-

Step 9-

Step 10-

Step 11-

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 Indiarsquos retail market of about $500 billion a

year but it is growing at a quick pace A study by retail consultancy Technopark predicts

Indiarsquos e-tailing market will reach $32 billion by 2020 from $23 billion in 2014

Ethnic Indian clothes and casual wear are favorite products but unusual products like pets-

too are being offered on-line With the huge growth that e-commerce has witnessed in recent

times analysts like Devangshu Dutta says there is scope for more players to come in But

some also worn about the risks the space is fraught with as only a few way have chances of

making it big They also see consolidation in the sector going forward

Chapter 7

Pictorial Representation E-Buying Methodology

Buying Procedure on on-line shopping website Flip kart Step 1 -

Step 2 -

Step 3 -

Step 4-

Step 5-

Step 6-

Step 7-

Step 8-

Step 9-

Step 10-

Step 11-

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 Indiarsquos retail market of about $500 billion a

year but it is growing at a quick pace A study by retail consultancy Technopark predicts

Indiarsquos e-tailing market will reach $32 billion by 2020 from $23 billion in 2014

Ethnic Indian clothes and casual wear are favorite products but unusual products like pets-

too are being offered on-line With the huge growth that e-commerce has witnessed in recent

times analysts like Devangshu Dutta says there is scope for more players to come in But

some also worn about the risks the space is fraught with as only a few way have chances of

making it big They also see consolidation in the sector going forward

Step 3 -

Step 4-

Step 5-

Step 6-

Step 7-

Step 8-

Step 9-

Step 10-

Step 11-

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 Indiarsquos retail market of about $500 billion a

year but it is growing at a quick pace A study by retail consultancy Technopark predicts

Indiarsquos e-tailing market will reach $32 billion by 2020 from $23 billion in 2014

Ethnic Indian clothes and casual wear are favorite products but unusual products like pets-

too are being offered on-line With the huge growth that e-commerce has witnessed in recent

times analysts like Devangshu Dutta says there is scope for more players to come in But

some also worn about the risks the space is fraught with as only a few way have chances of

making it big They also see consolidation in the sector going forward

Step 5-

Step 6-

Step 7-

Step 8-

Step 9-

Step 10-

Step 11-

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 Indiarsquos retail market of about $500 billion a

year but it is growing at a quick pace A study by retail consultancy Technopark predicts

Indiarsquos e-tailing market will reach $32 billion by 2020 from $23 billion in 2014

Ethnic Indian clothes and casual wear are favorite products but unusual products like pets-

too are being offered on-line With the huge growth that e-commerce has witnessed in recent

times analysts like Devangshu Dutta says there is scope for more players to come in But

some also worn about the risks the space is fraught with as only a few way have chances of

making it big They also see consolidation in the sector going forward

Step 7-

Step 8-

Step 9-

Step 10-

Step 11-

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 Indiarsquos retail market of about $500 billion a

year but it is growing at a quick pace A study by retail consultancy Technopark predicts

Indiarsquos e-tailing market will reach $32 billion by 2020 from $23 billion in 2014

Ethnic Indian clothes and casual wear are favorite products but unusual products like pets-

too are being offered on-line With the huge growth that e-commerce has witnessed in recent

times analysts like Devangshu Dutta says there is scope for more players to come in But

some also worn about the risks the space is fraught with as only a few way have chances of

making it big They also see consolidation in the sector going forward

Step 9-

Step 10-

Step 11-

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 Indiarsquos retail market of about $500 billion a

year but it is growing at a quick pace A study by retail consultancy Technopark predicts

Indiarsquos e-tailing market will reach $32 billion by 2020 from $23 billion in 2014

Ethnic Indian clothes and casual wear are favorite products but unusual products like pets-

too are being offered on-line With the huge growth that e-commerce has witnessed in recent

times analysts like Devangshu Dutta says there is scope for more players to come in But

some also worn about the risks the space is fraught with as only a few way have chances of

making it big They also see consolidation in the sector going forward

Step 11-

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 Indiarsquos retail market of about $500 billion a

year but it is growing at a quick pace A study by retail consultancy Technopark predicts

Indiarsquos e-tailing market will reach $32 billion by 2020 from $23 billion in 2014

Ethnic Indian clothes and casual wear are favorite products but unusual products like pets-

too are being offered on-line With the huge growth that e-commerce has witnessed in recent

times analysts like Devangshu Dutta says there is scope for more players to come in But

some also worn about the risks the space is fraught with as only a few way have chances of

making it big They also see consolidation in the sector going forward

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 Indiarsquos retail market of about $500 billion a

year but it is growing at a quick pace A study by retail consultancy Technopark predicts

Indiarsquos e-tailing market will reach $32 billion by 2020 from $23 billion in 2014

Ethnic Indian clothes and casual wear are favorite products but unusual products like pets-

too are being offered on-line With the huge growth that e-commerce has witnessed in recent

times analysts like Devangshu Dutta says there is scope for more players to come in But

some also worn about the risks the space is fraught with as only a few way have chances of

making it big They also see consolidation in the sector going forward