E Commerce Applications
Well The first article written by me almost 8 months back talked about the opportunities of E Commerce. I have later discussed various technologies that can help in creating an E Commerce application. I will come back again to a more generic topic, regarding E Commerce applications. Assuming the readers have grasped most of the technology issues discussed in the earlier articles, I assume coming back to a general topic will enhance our knowledge of E Commerce.
In this article we are going to consider some examples ( Not the very common ones of course) of E Commerce applications. Technically, whenever we talk of an E Comerce application, one needs to understand that it is basically a database application. A database which is maintained on the WWW server and not the usual LAN server. ( Common WWW servers are IIS, APACHE, UNIX, whereas common LAN servers are Novell, Unix, NT). So effectively any programmer trying to develop interactive Web based applications would eventually have to know managing a Database on the Internet..
Examples of E Commerce applications
Imagine travelling to a foreign country, especially the ones not frequently traveled by Indians. Say a country like France, Belgium or some South American Country. How do you go about collecting information on the various facilities in those countries. The internet is an excellent media to get this information, but the business community usually goes much ahead. We now have airline, railway and hotel reservations possible on the Internet. Even our own Indian Railways has a site, where in the user just has to select 2 cities, and the web site gives you a list of all trains connecting the source with the destination. Let us now take a more concrete example of a site which is very close to us, a TOURIST GUIDE FOR THE STATE OF MAHARASHTRA.
The site will have a list of all town and cities which can be classified as tourist destinations. The site will have information on how to go to these cities and the tourist attractions at these locations. The following unique features would be provided
The user can tell the start location of his city and the number of days in his itinerary. The software should provide 3 –4 different itineraries for the user.
The user can modify the itinerary and the software should try to fix it properly in the itinerary, so that the user has to travel the least and does not have to waste time in re visiting towns repeatedly.
-----Once the itinerary is finalised, the software should provide him facility to book the rooms in different hotels. Here images / videos can be downloaded for aiding in selecting the hotel room.
----Car rental and c other facilities should be provided. Public transport bookings on the Internet will not be available for some time, but current availability of railway bookings should be displayed.
PC manufactures especially the small companies are facing an onslaught from the fancied imported brands such as IBM, Compaq, Texas Instruments etc.. Usually the small sector specialises in customised service, which is not given by the bigger players. Usually this service is about giving machines of flexible configuration at competitive rates. Our proposed site for PC developers will have this basic framework.
An user can visit the site and choose the configuration for his PC. He can select the type of hard disk, RAM and other peripheral devices. In case he fails to select a major item without which the computer would fail to work, then the software will inform the user accordingly. Otherwise his configuration would be saved along with his login name.
We can make the site more efficient by allowing the user to compare quotations from different companies. Now the user has his basic configuration ready. The user can now add / edit the configuration. The user can say go in for a 4.3 GB Hard disk instead of a 2.5 GB hard disk, or increase the RAM from 32 MB to 64 MB and notice the change in the price.
Other Features that can be provided:
The author is Director with Fands Group of companies and can be reached at
sandeep@fandsindia.com