The shopping-cart has two levels of login: Site administrator and shopping-cart operator. The administrator can add and alter products and operators, as also do everything an operator can do. Operators perform daily processing of orders. Secure transfer of financial (credit card) information in compliance with the pay gateway specifications is implemented in this shopping-cart, and the security and ruggedness of this protocol has been tested thoroughly.
The system implements a clean failure mechanism, such that in the case of drastic occurrences like power failure/network breakdown, the database does not remain in an inconsistent state.
The shoppingcart (or shopping engine for the esoteric pedantics) is developed in association with Buteo Software, Ohio, US.
The web application is split into three modules - Administrator module, Employee module and Customer module.
Customer module
- Customers can browse products based on a hierarchy of categories and sub-categories. Further levels of subcategories can also be implemented, if desired.
- Each product carries an image, a description, price, a choice of colors and other attributes.
- The customer can add products to cart, selecting color, and other such attributes to uniquely identify the product, as specified by merchant.
- Customer login/registration is nearly seamless upon checkout. The process is made as neat and simple as possible, taking special care about the customer not feeling irritated with the registration process.
- Further pages detailing description of the company, its other services etc. can be added as per requirement.
Employee module
The Employee module enables employees of the organization to maintain their online product database, and to manage transactions and keep a record online.
- Categories - Add/edit categories. Place their name, description, a representative image depicting the category.
- Products - Add/edit products. Manage their name, description, image, price, as well as any other attributes required.
- Process orders - mark orders as dispatched (this process also executes a capture on the credit card transaction initiated by the customer)
Employees can also edit their own personal details.
Administrator module
Apart from what the employees can do, the administrator also has the capability to create employees.
Optional additional possibilities :
Online image manipulation (eg write your name on the product image), price ranges or price slabs, custom sales policies like preferred customers etc.
Technical features
- The shoppingcart is developed on java/jsp, and can be shipped as a standard .war file which can be deployed on any J2EE application server (like Orion, tomcat, Weblogic, Websphere etc.)
- Transactions involve immediate authorization, and a delayed capture (at the time of product dispatch). A clean Rollback is implemented for any kind of failure in transaction, including authorization failure.
- Sending mails to customers confirming orders.
- Pay gateway integration will be done according to the gateway selected by merchant.
Sample Implementation sites
Following are some sample sites at which the shoppingcart has been implemented -
Technologies used :Postgres as database (other RDBMS can be implemented easily), transactions on the database (thoroughly tested to ensure a safe credit card transaction, and rollback in case of any failure), javamail api, Java, JSP (Java Server Pages), HTML, DHTML, Javascript (JS).