Chapter 10. E-Commerce Applications

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Many people prefer shopping in person or over the telephone to shopping online, but electronic commerce (e-commerce) is increasingly popular, and those who d rather go online to conduct business tend to want to do as much as possible that way. Therefore, if you re thinking about running an e-commerce Web site, it s also worth thinking about providing services other than just a shopping cart. One way to define an e-commerce site is indeed as a site devoted to selling things, but there is a larger picture to keep in mind. Just as business in general is about more than just making the sale, so too e-commerce Web sites can allow customers to do more than click Add To Cart buttons. Your Web server is capable of much more than that. You can use it to

Provide information about your company. Give the customer a sense of familiarity with your organization and help the customer become more willing to do business. You can tell visitors about your company mission, how you can benefit them, and why they should do business with you.
Make your product catalog available online, including specifications, pricing, and perhaps other information such as what the product is good for and why the customer should purchase it. Send email notifications when items arrive in inventory that match customer interests.
Sell products by enabling customers to select items and pay for them. Let customers know when out-of-stock items arrive in inventory. Allow customers to track the progress of an order.
Provide customer support, both before and after a sale. Offer an online help desk, technical support, or other general assistance. Help customers register products, return items, or resolve problems with defective items. Enable visitors to sign up for newsletters or product updates.
Provide other general information, such as a privacy policy or warranty information.
Gather customer feedback via surveys, forms, or polls. Ask your customers what they think about you or your site.

As you look through this list, you ll notice that it s not just customers who can use your Web site. For example, putting your product catalog online also benefits sales staff by making it available to them out in the field, and order-tracking capabilities can be used by help desk staff who are assisting customers.

Different e-commerce sites implement different combinations of these functions. Some sites that exist only for marketing purposes provide information about a company, its products, and services, and are designed to tell you only enough that you can call or write for more information. Or they may assist you in finding local dealers for a product. A selling site is designed for immediate sales; it provides information to help the customer come to a decision and make a purchase on the spot. Clearly, e-commerce can be a complex area, and a single chapter isn t going to be a comprehensive treatment. However, this chapter will provide some essential background information and get you going with enough material that you ll easily come up with lots of ideas for creating your own e-commerce applications. In addition, you already know many techniques you can use, because several of the activities you might engage in on your site have been touched on earlier. In Chapter 5, Writing Form-Based Applications, we wrote a product registration application. Chapter 7, Performing Searches, discussed techniques that can be applied to e-commerce situations such as product inventory searches. In Chapter 8, Session Management, we saw ways to track information as users move around your site, which can be helpful for implementing shopping carts or remembering customer preferences. Chapter 9, Security and Privacy Issues, covered use of secure connections, such as you might set up before asking customers to divulge personal information or credit card numbers.

The discussion in this chapter is framed almost entirely in terms of commercial activities, but several of the concepts described here apply in other ways. For example, shopping cart techniques aren t limited just to things that people pay for. The underlying idea is simple: allow a user to select items, and remember what s been chosen. A cart is commonly used to keep track of items that you re selling, but you can turn the concept completely around and keep track of items that you re giving away. (In this day and age, it s not impossible to imagine a Web-based interface to a non-profit food pantry operation.) The chapter also discusses how to perform transactions in MySQL that is, how to group a set of SQL statements so they succeed as a unit or else are undone if any of them fail. For example, your order fulfillment department may mark an item on an order as having been added to a customer s shipping container and at the same time decrement the inventory count for that item in your product catalog. Both operations should take place in tandem so that if one fails, the effect of the other is rolled back or reverted. This kind of problem is common in commercial applications but arises in other contexts as well. Another technique shown here that you may want to adapt for purposes other than e-commerce is a method for presenting pages generated by different scripts within a common framework so that they have a similar overall appearance.You can use this technique to produce thematic consistency for a site.

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