Requirements for Your Site

Before we start building your commerce site, let’s take a look at the following set of requirements that the final site should satisfy:

1. The Web site should enable customers to shop with a shopping cart.

2. The catalog of products can contain:

   1. Products from various vendors

   2. Sale announcements and other promotions

3. The Web site should feature customer registration.

4. The Web site should support online payment using credit cards. Additionally, the site should:

   1. Support an e-Wallet

   2. Securely transfer credit card information

5. The customer should receive e-mail confirmation of his order.

6. The e-mail should also have a link to the Order Status page.

7. Any order that is yet to be shipped can be cancelled by the customer.

8. The Web site should include appropriate error handling.

9. The Web site should suggest other recommended products to the customer.

10. The Web site should support both Internet Explorer and Navigator^[3].

Note

Following the usual commerce site development methodology suggested earlier, this set of requirements would have been arrived at in the Scope stage.

Building the Prototype

You are now ready to build a prototype sample site. Building a site using a commerce server essentially involves customizing a site generated by the use of wizards. Thus, the wizard-generated site after implementing the initial user interface can be used as the prototype. A commerce server should give you a choice between making a copy of one of the commerce server sample sites or a custom site. After you have generated a site, you can get down to a database and user-interface design. Building the prototype site involves the following steps:

1. Creating the site database

2. Creating database logins

3. Creating the data source name (DSN)

4. Creating the site foundation

5. Generating the site^[3]

A commerce server should be able to distinguish between the site’s administrator and the site operator. The administrator performs steps 1–4 and manages the server while the manager builds the site, maintains, and manages it. Now, let’s take a look at each of the preceding steps.

Preparing the Database (Steps 1, 2, and 3)

When the wizard is run, you need to supply a data source name (DSN), a database login name and password, and other information that is needed for a connection string. The wizard will create two configuration files: one for the site and one for its manager pages. Both files hold the connection string used for accessing the site’s database. The wizard then obtains the database connection information from the file and uses it to connect to the database and create the schema. The next step (step 3) is to create a DSN for the sample site.