Building an E-commerce Presence: Websites, Mobile Sites, and App (I)

Question 1

Components in e-com vision

Answer 1

Mission statement - what do we want to be?
Target audience - who are we reaching?
Intended market space
Strategic analysis
Marketing matrix (pricing, promotion, product)
Development timeline
Preliminary budget

Question 2

4 types of e-commerce presence

Answer 2

Website/app
Social media
E-mail
Offline media

Question 3

Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Answer 3

Methodology for understanding business objective of a system and designing an appropriate solution

Question 4

5 steps of a systems development life cycle

Answer 4

Systems analysis/planning
Systems design
Building the system
Testing
Implementation

Question 5

Best practices for e-commerce

Answer 5

Continuous availability
Design for scalability
Build in management for end-to-end delivery
Plan for growth
Design system for high-speed performance
Understand and optimize workload on system

Question 6

System analysis/planning

Answer 6

Business objective (what capabilities you want your site to have - eg: catalog, payment pages)
System functionalities (list of IS capabilities needed to achieve business objectives)
Information requirements (information elements that system must produce in order to achieve business objectives)

Question 7

System analysis example
Products, payment

Answer 7

Products:
Business objective - display products
System functionalities - digital catalog
Information requirements - dynamic text and graphics catalog

Payment:
Business objective - execute a transaction
System functionalities - shopping cart & payment system
Information requirement - secure credit card payment, multiple payment options

Question 8

System design specification (2 types)

Answer 8

Description of main components of a system and their relationship to one another
2 types:
Logical design
Physical design

Question 9

Logical design (system design specification)

Answer 9

Data flow diagrams, processing functions, databases

Question 10

Physical design (systems design specifications)

Answer 10

Specifies actual physical, software components, models and so on

Question 11

Building the system

Answer 11

Can outsource or use in-house methods

More customization, expensive, maintenance

Question 12

Outsourcing

Answer 12

Hiring vendors to provide services involved in building site

Less expensive, accessible all the time, dedicated functionality

Limited customization, no control

Question 13

In-house system building

Answer 13

Requires team with diverse skill set; choice of software tools; both risks and possible benefits

Question 14

Hosting companies for systems building (outsourcing)

Answer 14

Hosting company responsible for ensuring site is accessible 24/7, for monthly fee

Question 15

Co-location for systems building

Answer 15

Firm purchases or leases web server (with control over its operation), but server is located at vendor’s facility

Question 16

5 ways to test a system

Answer 16

Unit testing
System testing
Final acceptance testing
A/B testing
Multivariate testing

Question 17

Unit testing (testing a system)

Answer 17

Testing site’s program modules one at a time

Question 18

System testing (testing a system)

Answer 18

Testing the site as a whole, in the same way a typical user would when using the site

Question 19

Final acceptance testing (testing a system)

Answer 19

Firm’s key personnel and managers in marketing, production, sales and general management actually use the system as installed on a test Internet or intranet server

Question 20

A/B testing (testing a system)

Answer 20

Showing 2 versions of a webpage or website to users to see which one performs better

Question 21

Multivariate testing (testing a system)

Answer 21

Identifying specific elements or variables on a web page (headline, image, button, text) and creating versions for each element and combinations

Question 22

Benchmarking

Answer 22

A process in which the site is compared with those of competitors in terms of response speed, quality of layout and design

Question 23

Web server software

Answer 23

All e-com sites require basic web server software to answer requests from customers for html and XML pages

The two largest web server software are Apache and Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS)

Question 24

Basic funtionalities of web servers

Answer 24

Processing HTTP requests
Security services (SSL/TLS)
FTP
Search engine
Data capture
E-mail
Site management tools

Question 25

Dynamic page generation

Answer 25

Contents of a web page are stored as objects in a database, rather than being hard coded in HTML. When the user requests a web page, the contents for that page are then fetched from the database

Question 26

Web application servers

Answer 26

Software programs that provide specific business functionality required of a website

Question 27

E-com merchant server software

Answer 27

Provides basic functionalities for sales
eg: product catalog, shopping cart, credit card processing, merchandise display, order management

Question 28

3 components of website optimization

Answer 28

Page generation
Page delivery
Page content

Question 29

Prototyping

Answer 29

Building a sample or model rapidly and inexpensively to test a concept or process

Question 30

Agile development

Answer 30

Breaks down a large project into a series of smaller subprojects that are completed in short periods of time using iteration and continuous feedback

Question 31

Scrum

Answer 31

Type of agile development that provides a framework for managing the development process

Question 32

DevOps

Answer 32

Builds on agile development principles as an organizational strategy to create a culture and environment that further promote rapid and agile development practices

Question 33

Component-based development

Answer 33

Enables a system to be built by assembling and integrating various software components that already have been assembled and that provide common functions

Question 34

Web services

Answer 34

Loosely coupled, reusable software components using XML and other open protocols and standards that enable one application to communicate with another via an application programming interface (API) without requiring any custom programming to share data and services

Question 35

Service-oriented architecture (SOA)

Answer 35

A style of software design that employs a set of self-contained services that
communicate with each other to create a working software application

Question 36

Microservices

Answer 36

Very granular implementation of SOA
in which an application is decomposed into a number of smaller services, each responsible for a discrete task, that can
communicate with other services to solve a larger, complex business problem