To build an ecommerce web site yourself is really not such a difficult task when using the right kind of tools. You will want to build an ecommerce website using the latest technologies such as a user-friendly shopping cart, integrations with top auction sites as well as a payment gateway. Although the web site design is important, correct usage of the ecommerce marketing tools will result in many business transactions.

Here are some points to consider when getting down to building an ecommerce website.

a) Its design should facilitate easy buying of goods and services

b) Your products or services should be of value to the customers

c) Offer personal attention to all customers

d) Offer discounts and e-mail promotions to them so that they keep returning to your site

The design of your web site should mirror your business and what you want to market. The website is your interface with your customers and through it you must be able to convince them to buy your product. At the same time it should not be aggressive towards sales and scare off the visitors.

When you build an ecommerce website you need to use as many keywords (the words through which the search engines bring visitors to your online store) as possible to ensure that the search engines list your store higher when the visitors are looking for the items you sell.

With more than hundred different internet browsers currently available you need to ensure that your site is compatible to be picked up by all of them. Build an ecommerce website that is viewed in at least Internet Explorer 4.0+ and Netscape 4.0+. This is helpful in getting traffic to your site.

The images used on your site should detail your merchandise clearly. Also be sure to optimize your images for fast download; one loses a lot of customers who can’t wait endlessly for the pictures to show up.

Site navigation should be easy to understand and use. Answer any and all questions you think visitors may have in the FAQ section. Buyers hate to meander on a site if it leads nowhere, so the easier your site navigation the more sales you will have. Build an ecommerce website specially designed for your business in a cost effective way to promote your products or services.

 

Configuration of ASP.NET AJAX

When you create the project of an AJAX-enabled ASP.NET Web site, everything looks like a classic ASP.NET application at first glance. After a second look, though, you can see that the configuration file contains some changes in the form of new sections and new runtime components. In particular, the runtime components-made-to-measure HTTP modules and HTTP handlers-play a key role in the implementation of ASP.NET AJAX.

The web.config File

In ASP.NET, the web.config file stores application settings that apply to the folder where it is located and to child subfolders. Each application can have a variety of web.config files to apply different settings at different folder levels.

The web.config file is a text file written in accordance with a well-known XML schema. The standard schema file features a built-in number of sections and elements, but new sections can be added to configure custom services and components. As mentioned, ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0 is just an extension to ASP.NET, and it can be easily seen as a new service that requires its own set of extensions to the configuration syntax.

New Configuration Sections

The ASP.NET configuration file has a root element named . A particular configuration file that contains information for a custom service can optionally define new sections. All nonstandard sections used in a configuration file must be declared in the initial section. The following code snippet shows the new sections defined in the root web.config file of an ASP.NET AJAX application:



As you can see, everything goes under the section which, in turn, is a child of  . Under the section, you find another child section named . Let’s dig out the section first.

The Section

The section might contain a child section named . The child section determines how ASP.NET AJAX system scripts should be served to the client and handled. The section features two attributes: enableCaching and enableCompression. Both are Boolean values and are set to true by default:

  

The enableCaching attribute indicates whether the system script files (as well as any other linked scripts and resources) are to be cached locally or downloaded for each request. System script files are a key element of AJAX frameworks, and ASP.NET AJAX Extensions is no exception. The more the framework is rich with features, the more the size of such script files becomes large.

To keep the overall size of system script files below the threshold of a few KBs, compression is required. You can enable or disable compression through the enableCompression attribute. When the attribute is turned on, script files that are embedded as resources in an assembly and string resources are compressed.

The JBoss Seam framework provides a flexible and powerful platform for developing web applications based on J2EE. Seam integrates different technologies like AJAX, Java Server Faces (JSF), Java Persistence(JPA), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB3), Hibernate etc. It removes the need for any manual plumbing of these technologies required to build J2EE web applications. Further, with JSF emerging as a standard for the presentation layer in J2EE the developers can leverage this with the server side strength of EJB3 technology. Preference for annotations over xml decreases the development time and improves the team's productivity. They key advantages of seam include :

• Integrate JSF with EJB 3.0
• Integrated AJAX
• Business process as a first class construct
• Declarative state management
• Bijection
• Workspace management and multi-window browsing
• Prefer annotations to XML
• Easy Integration testing

In this article we look at integrating eWAY's e-commerce gateway with a seam application.However, the same methodology can be used with any e-commerce gateway working on a similar concept like eWAY. eWAY offers various modes of linking to their gateway. This article uses the Shared Payment Solution. The shared payment solution takes away the credit card validation and related security concerns from the merchant's site to eWAY itself. The merchant site just needs to 'post' the required information like the customer id and the amount to transact to eWAY. After which the control is transfered to the eWAY site, which displays the form to the user for entering credit card related information. After the transaction the final response is sent back to the merchant site denoting the status and the response message and the control is transfered back to the merchant site. The merchant site can deal with the eway response in its own way e.g. display a confirmation to the user, send emails etc.
 

The fields required by the eWAY gateway when sending a transaction request include

• ewayCustomerID (required)
• ewayTotalAmount(required)
• ewayCustomerFirstName (Optional)
• ewayCustomerLastName (Optional)
• ewayCustomerEmail (Optional)
• ewayCustomerAddress (Optional)
• ewayCustomerPostcode (Optional)
• ewayCustomerInvoiceDescription
• (Optional) ewayCustomerInvoiceRef
• (Optional)
• ewayURL (Optional)
• ewaySiteTitle (Optional)
• ewayTrxnNumber (Optional)
• eWAYoption1 (Optional)
• eWAYoption2 (Optional)
• eWAYoption3 (Optional)

The fields returned by eway upon transaction include

• ewayTrxnStatus
• ewayTrxnNumber
• eWAYresponseCode
• eWAYresponseText
• ewayTrxnReference
• eWAYoption1
• eWAYoption2
• eWAYoption3
• eWAYAuthCode
• eWAYReturnAmount

In order to integrate a seam application with eWAY we need to create two forms. The first form paymentInfo.xhtml will hold the fields which we need to send to eWAY and the second form captureeWAY.xhtml to capture the data that is sent by eWAY upon transaction completion. The paymentInfo.xhtml will post to the eway gateway url.

paymentInfo.xhtml
       

The values for the fields are bound to the Payment bean. Also note that we are setting the return url from the eWAY site using the ewayURL field.  This is the URL that the control would be returned to once eway finishes the transaction. In order to capture the data sent by the eWAY site we create bound the returned fields to our Payment bean using captureeWAY.xml file.

CaptureeWAY.xml

The last element in the xml, fires the savePaymentData() method on the Payment bean once all the returned fields are bound to the bean. Based on the ewayTrxnStatus value further actions can be taken by the merchant site depending upon the response and the requirements.