I am creating an e-commerce website and in the process I picked
up certain ideas that I thought was worth sharing.
People think databases are useful for ticketing, banking and asset
tracking.
In an e-commerce website with inventory management, search
functionality and so on database is key.
To implement a simple search bar in a website a simple SQL query
against your database keywords and conditions applied against
price or quantity or feedback can be very powerful.
There are basically few building blocks to an e-commerce portal.
1) Payment gateway integration(costs cash, PayU is 6k INR)
2) User login integration(gmail, facebook API)
3) DB backend for storing inventory and tracking orders
4) Ability to zoom images of products
5) Category wise listing and search and sort of product listings
That is all.
The payment gateway part is quite complicated as it involves
banking and money and security but that is handled by a third party.
Our complication is in managing SKU(stock keeping unit), the
order tracking(different states for courier delivery, courier progress)
and so on.
Most of the website is a common view for all in which he browses
through the inventory and places an order.
The user specific parts are his delivery address, his order IDs,
his credentials like mobile number, mail ID etc.
I think it is not very complicated to do all that.
And you might want to have a page for sellers as well.
-Girish
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Gayatri Hitech
http://gayatri-hitech.com
