Case Study: Book Seller, Inc.

Please thoroughly read the Book Seller, Inc. case study in the following sections to help you answer the questions at the end of the chapter.

Background

Book Seller, Inc. is a medium-sized business selling to consumers through an e-commerce book store that functions entirely over the Web. Established in 1995, Book Seller, Inc. has seen technology platforms come and go. Because of the loss of its primary investor, Book Seller, Inc. is short on staff and having problems handling the high customer volume. Some site features need to be expanded, but a portion of the current technology is no longer supported.

Book Seller, Inc.'s store includes features such as account management, membership, a shopping cart, affiliates, inventory management, a search function, and a checkout process.

Problem Statement

As customer volume has increased and the database has become increasingly heavy, performance times have slowed down considerably. Customers are reporting that response times have gotten so bad that during weekday afternoons they are unable to access the site at all.

Resellers are selling books listed through Book Seller, Inc.'s affiliate program. Sometimes these orders take more than four weeks to ship because the books are out of stock. Resellers would like a way to check stock and allow the customer to make a purchase decision based on disclosed availability and approximate shipping date.

Current System

The current system uses a mishmash of various technologies, including an Active Server Pages (ASP) 3.0 storefront, which communicates directly to the database using inline SQL, and a third-party shopping cart and an account management system that are no longer supported.

There are also a few components that could be considered business objects, but they handle logging and some limited communication with the shopping cart. These components are written in Visual Basic 6.0 (VB6) and sit on the same physical layer as the ASP storefront.

The applications run on Windows NT and feature a SQL 6.5 database. The database is hosted on one machine, and the storefront application is spread across three machines running in a Web farm.

The inventory system is also a third-party system that relies on a DB2 database. This system was purchased two years ago and has served Book Seller, Inc. well. The SQL 6.5 database is synchronized nightly with the inventory database.

Owner

"Sales have fallen dramatically over the past six months, but customer volume has risen. Book Seller, Inc. offers the lowest prices, so I am convinced that a fast user-friendly system is all that's needed to increase sales figures. The company has disenfranchised its affiliates, and competitors are gaining market share by recruiting our resellers.

It is essential that the chosen solution be stable and proven. Because our primary investor has recently decided to pursue other ventures, the company has limited resources to complete this project. In an effort to keep other investors from jumping ship, we have informed them of our decision to upgrade the platform to support a higher customer load and better serve our affiliate program. The remaining investors will watch closely the decisions we make, so there is absolutely no room for error."

Envisioned System

Book Seller, Inc. would like to speed up the current e-commerce system and allow customers and resellers to view the current inventory count before placing an order. Customers should be able to enter multiple credit cards and ship-to addresses.

The new system must be cost effective; many of the parts that could be reused from the existing system should be.

IT Director

"About a year ago, our system was hacked from a worm that found its way into IIS, and the infiltrators were able to access our database directly. Luckily, we noticed the worm and were able to flush it out before it destroyed too much data. Needless to say, the owner found this problem unacceptable and made it clear that it must be prevented in the future solution. We would like to begin using business objects for all data access and have a tighter security scheme when accessing the database.

There is no doubt that our shopping cart is not scaling well with our business needs, and no one on my team understands the third-party cart technology. In fact, the developer who wrote the connection manager component for connecting to the shopping cart's APIs left four months ago. We must support multiple credit cards and ship-to addresses through the new shopping cart.

I have some money in the year-end budget for hardware, but I want to use it only if we have no other choice."

Inventory Manager

"We have had great success with our current inventory management system. I sometimes hear complaints about customers placing orders for inventory that is not on hand. The inventory database is usually correct, so the problem seems to be in the storefront database. If we sell out of a product during the day, the storefront database doesn't recognize that there's no more stock to be sold."

Account Manager

"I'm constantly receiving calls from affiliates complaining about our inability to provide current inventory and price changes. I send out an electronic document (in Word format) every two weeks that includes the current inventory and wholesale price of each of the top 100 sellers in the appropriate categories."