Invitation to Computer Science 5th Edition

1
Invitation to Computer Science 5th Edition

• Chapter 14
• Electronic Commerce and Databases

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Objectives

• In this chapter, you will learn about
• E-commerce
• Databases

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Introduction

• E-commerce world
• Financial transactions are conducted by
  electronic means
• E-business
• Orders are processed, credit is verified,
  transactions are completed, debits are issued,
  shipping is alerted, and inventory is reduced,
  all electronically

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E-Commerce

• Do you want to
• Broaden your customer base?
• Recapture customers you are losing to competitors
  with online stores?
• Better serve your existing customer base?
• Better integrate departments/functions within
  your existing business?

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The Vision Thing

• Risks involved with moving into e-commerce
• Will you just move your in-store customers online
  and achieve no overall gain?
• When you expose yourself to online competition,
  will you have something unique to offer?
• Does your existing customer base need or want
  anything that you dont or cant provide in your
  traditional business environment?
• Are the employees in your Shipping and Accounting
  departments in agreement with this idea?

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The Vision Thing (continued)

• Costs involved
• Do you have all the necessary hardware
  (computers), software, and infrastructure
  (network connectivity) to host a business Web
  site?
• Do you have the personnel and skills you need to
  build and maintain a Web site?
• Do you know the potential costs of diverting
  resources away from your existing traditional
  business?

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Decisions, Decisions

• First major decision
• Choose between in-house development and
  outsourcing
• Are you going to use your existing staff to
  develop this e-business
• Will you lease space on someone elses commercial
  Web server

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Anatomy of a Transaction

• Goals
• Draw potential customers to your site
• Keep them there
• Set up optimum conditions for them to complete a
  purchase

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Figure 14.1 A Typical Online Transaction in Nine
Steps
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Step 1 Getting There

• How does your potential customer learn your URL?
• Conventional advertising
• Obvious domain name
• Search engine
• Portal

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Step 2 Do I Know You?

• Cookie
• Small text file that Web server sends to users
  browser that gets stored on the users hard drive
• Stateless
• No information about the exchange is permanently
  retained by the server

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Step 3 Committing to an Online Purchase

• Encryption
• Encodes data to be transmitted into a scrambled
  form
• Authentication
• Process of verifying the identity of the receiver
  of the data
• Spoofing
• Practice of impersonating a legitimate site for
  the purposes of stealing money or stealing
  identity

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Steps 4 and 5 Payment Processing
Figure 14.2 Secure Site Assurance
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Steps 69 Order Fulfillment

• Step 6
• Once customers credit is approved, order entry
  system must alert inventory system
• Step 7
• Contact shipping system
• Step 8
• Shipping system works with the shipping company
• Step 9
• Pick up and deliver the purchase to the customer

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Designing Your Web Site

• Taxonomy
• How information is classified and organized so
  customers can easily find what they want
• Site map or a navigation bar
• Can provide a high-level overview of your site
  architecture
• CRM (customer relationship management) strategy
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Build customer relationships
• Bring people back to your Web site time and time
  again

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Behind the Scenes

• Middleware
• Software that allows separate, existing programs
  to communicate and work together seamlessly
• Disaster recovery strategy
• What are your plans for backing up critical data?
  
• What is your plan to keep your online business
  open even when your server fails?
• What will you do if a hacker breaks into your Web
  site and steals customer information?

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Databases

• Bit
• Most basic unit of data
• Combined into groups of eight called bytes
• Fields
• Group of bytes
• Record
• Collection of related fields

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Databases (continued)

• Data file
• Stores related records
• Database
• Made up of related files

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Figure 14.3 Data Organization Hierarchy
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Figure 14.4 Records and Fields in a Single File
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Figure 14.5 One Record in the Rugs-For-You
Employees File
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Database Management Systems

• Manage the files in a database
• Entity
• Fundamental distinguishable component
• Attribute
• Category of information
• Primary key
• Attribute or combination of attributes that
  uniquely identifies a tuple

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Figure 14.6 Employees Table for Rugs-For-You
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Database Management Systems (continued)

• Query languages
• Enable user or another application program to
  query the database, in order to retrieve
  information
• Composite primary key
• Needed to identify a tuple uniquely
• Foreign key
• Key from another table that refers to a specific
  key, usually the primary key

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Figure 14.7 Insurance Policies Table for
Rugs-For-You
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Figure 14.8 Three Entities in the Rugs-For-You
Database
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Other Considerations

• Performance issues
• Affect the users satisfaction with a database
  management system
• To significantly reduce access time
• Create additional records to be stored along with
  the file
• Distributed databases
• Allow the physical data to reside at separate and
  independent locations that are electronically
  networked together

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Summary

• E-business
• Every part of a financial transaction is handled
  electronically
• Opening an online store
• Requires a significant amount of planning
• Database
• Allows data items to be stored, extracted,
  sorted, and manipulated
• Relational database model
• Conceptual model of a file as a two-dimensional
  table