CS 442 E-Commerce
This is an introduction to e-Commerce principles, technologies and applications. This course also develops understanding of the problems and requirements of Internet business, and the corresponding solutions. Protocols to ensure secure transactions and e-commerce protocols based on encryption techniques will also be studied. Legal and ethical issues will be discussed, as well as marketing and revenue models for online businesses. Students will get hands on experience building a secure ecommerce site.
Students will be able to build a web application for ecommerce that is secure, uses best practices, Students will understand the legal and ethical issues involved in e-commerce. Students will understand infrastructure and technology options for setting up an ecommerce site, and will have experience deploying some of them. Students will be able to determine appropriate revenue models for an online business
ASHESI LEARNING GOALS ADDRESSED IN THIS COURSE:
- Ethics and Civil Engagement a. Students will learn the intricacies of doing business online, the challenges of dealing with laws of clients from different countries, dealing with minors, anticipating and preventing potential fraud, and being fair in fulfilling orders placed.
- Communications a. There will be presentation of work done to the class and hopefully to the Ashesi community and the world at large when students make their work available for all to critique, both in live presentations, as well as when posted on the WWW.
- Leadership and Teamwork a. Students will work in teams sometimes, with one product as the output. Leadership will be shown by student as they guide and help along their colleagues to grasp certain concepts.
- Curious and Skilled a. Students will be excited enough about the potential for what technology can accomplish and will be expected to push the boundaries by incorporating features that are not taught in class in the projects that they will do. Such work will be recognized for extra credit.
- Technology a. Students will become adept at using contemporary tools to develop online business solutions, and should be able to either start their own business or work in this area.
- Introduction to ecommerce
- Business Strategies: (Building an online/Web presence , Selling online: revenue models, Marketing on the Web, EDI /Improving Business to Business activities, Social networking, Mobile commerce, Online Auctions.)
- Web Technologies for E-Commerce: ( Payment Systems, Shopping Carts, Search Engines, Web Server Hardware and Software, E-commerce software, Other supporting web technologies: Use of templates ),
- Legal issues and business ethics (Fulfillment and Customer Service, Tax Issues),
- E-commerce Security (User Authentication , Sessions, Secured Protocol (SSL, OpenSLL), Encoding/Decoding Techniques (Encryption ) ),
- E-commerce Integration ( Planning for e-commerce, New technologies and their implications on e-Business)
- Web Tech review: create a basic store front, Admin can perform CRUD operations on product, provide login page, sessions review 1b. Use of MySQLi, PDO (instead of mysql)
- Templates and pagination: Basic templates, template blocks, template inheritance, conditionals, Pagination (numbered, and next, previous)
- Shopping cart & Sessions: Sessions over multiple pages, sessions and arrays, basic shopping cart 3b. Shopping cart – allow adding to cart without logging in, can continue shopping
- Error handling and logging: custom error handler, error reporting, buffering output with ob_start() etc 4b. PDF reports 4c. Reload problem
- Mini Project 1: Database, Templates, Shopping cart & Checkout, Order processing with email/SMS, Searching & Browsing, Client information management, Reports, error handing, session management, avoid reload problem,
- Form processing, Validation, regular expression parsing, Security: use of prepared statements, prevent SQL injection, XSS etc