Web based Shopping System for Surasa Bookshop

Abstract

The Surasa Bookshop is a wholesale and retail outlet managed by Fast publishing (Pvt.) Ltd. The main outlet is located in the heart of Colombo with modern day publication facilities to support its retailing function where wholesale operations are run by the sales team. Apart from its main function of publishing, the facility also supports the wholesale purchases by other retailing bookshops, libraries, schools, universities and other institutions with attractive trade discounts. Currently the shop financial transactions, inventory and day-today operations are managed using a manual file system. As a result, the shop management found it difficult to manage its daily operational calculations with records, maintain integrity of data across sub functions, the risk of losing data and prone to malfunction and also possible delays and lack of controlling over information. The proposed web based shopping system will address to overcome some of the key concerns addressed above whole improving the inefficiencies of the manual system. Furthermore, web based system will open up new revenue options for the bookshop such as, online purchases. In order to overcome these challenges, it was decided to develop an E-commerce system. The bookshop management believes new system, will bring competitive advantage to the bookshop as well as tap into new markets. The entire system scope is bounded to customer management, shopping cart, order processing, stock controlling, online payment processing and backend administration. The system has been developed using the MVC architecture while Object oriented design technique has been followed in the analysis and design phase of the project. The WAMP environment has been chosen as the production platform for the entire E-Commerce application. Netbeans IDE has been used as a development tool to carry out the development work. Choice of PHP as the production environment also determines which type of database is utilized. In this case MySQL has been chosen. Once the online system is developed, it will be run through industry professionals to verify its usability and will be opened to the general public once the system functionalities and consume satisfactory is completed.