The Shopkeeper Perspective

Although the term "shopkeeper" is a bit old-fashioned to apply to retail Web sites, it is used here to capture the variety of different perspectives held by those people tasked with building, maintaining, running, and updating a retail Web site. For the purposes of this discussion, there are three distinct roles associated with a retail Web site:

Business Managers. Business managers are the decision makers for retail Web sites. They decide when a product is going to be sold for a reduced price, or that a new product is going to be offered. They decide when a "free shipping" promotion is going to begin and end. They negotiate ad campaigns with advertisers, and are responsible for making sure that the ads appear on the Web site as called for in the negotiated contracts.
Site Administrators. Site administrators represent a broad category of people that are tasked with keeping the site up and running from day to day. This includes the database administrators who are responsible for maintaining the databases that support the Web site, as well as the system administrators who are responsible for maintaining the servers upon which the Web servers and database servers are running.

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