Online Book Mart for Silekha Book Shop

Abstract

With the exponential growth of Internet usage world wide, it has become an enormously popular marketing paradigm that facilitates the customers the opportunity to browse and shop anything at their convenience and at their place 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Automation of workflows and secure payment systems leads to a better customer satisfaction, thereby increase of sales. Unlimited market place, easier business administration and lower cost of doing business are also key factors which attract more business individuals to go for Business-to-Consumer ecommerce solutions for their businesses. For the consumer, it is relatively easy to shop online at anytime in virtual internet shopping malls and have the goods delivered home directly. Silekha Book Shop is a well-known book shop and second hand book dealer which is located in Kaluthara district. The company looses many customers due to the fact that the book shop has only one branch and the sales are limited around the geographical location. The management needed to relieve the customers from traveling a long distance and to expand the sales coverage. Silekha Online Book Mart is a web based business-to-consumer ecommerce solution which satisfies these requirements. The presented system covers all aspects start from a customer visiting a shop and end by purchasing a book. It handles the functions such as maintaining an up-to-date catalogue of books, assessing the customer in the shopping process by providing accurate information and allowing him to make payments through a secure payment gateway. A shopping cart is provided to purchase books online. A customer can request for a second hand book search and purchase it when the book is available. Audio books are available to download after a successful purchase. The UML (Unified Modeling Language) is used to sketch the blueprints of the system. The evolutionary development with prototyping is used as the system development methodology and object oriented system design is used to design the system. For the system implementation NetBeans IDE 6.1 is used and JSP (Java Server Pages) and Servlets are used as the development languages of the system. Handling the database of the system is carried out using the MySQL 5.1.