Oracle

The Complete E-Commerce Book: Design, Build, and Maintain a Successful Web-Based Business

Format: Paperback
Author: Janice Reynolds
ReleaseDate: April, 2004
Publisher: CMP Books
Rating:

has the auther ever built a single e-commerce site?
She must have read a lot on ecommerce, but i doubt she ever did any "real work" with ecommerce. After browsing thru all the chapters, i got the impression that the author is only buzzword-compliant and cannot go into any detail in any subject area. The writing reads like it comes from a "good" student who diligently repeats all the words a professor said in a business classroom.

high level design and management of a web business
She discusses what type of servers you might need and how to configure these using RAID to maximise uptime while preserving data against hardware failure. Reynolds talks about many aspects of running your own commercial website. Also mentioned is what type of net connections might be suitable and affordable. Along with how to implement security against various types of fraud attempts.

For promoting your website, email newsletters are suggested as being very economical. Though beware of email ad campaigns that can get you labelled as a spammer. Search Engine Optimisation gets a good exposition as a cheap way to promote your site in an engine's rankings.

The "Complete" in the title is slightly misleading. The book does not get into the nitty gritty of technical details about making a database, for example. Or writing webpages. Rather, it's at a higher level of design and management of these issues.

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY THE COMPLATE E-COMMERCE BOOK
Author Janice Reynolds has done an outstanding job of writing the second edition of a book that provides select comparisons of various tools needed to construct, design, and run a successful e-commerce website. The dot-com bubble is about to burst again! But, that doesn't mean that e-commerce is dead--to the contrary.

Reynolds begins by examining the e-commerce phenomenon, and the challenges that it brings. Next, the author shows you how you can design a website that is brilliantly complex, employing all of the latest technology, or design a simple site without sacrificing attractiveness or efficiency. Then, she explains why the design and pre-build details are among the first steps you must take when extending an e-commerce site to the Web. The author continues by discussing that if you want to host your own servers, the best advice is to create a balanced plan with each segment working in partnership with each other. In addition, the author next discusses how power and data redundancy are a good start to ensure that your website is always available, but other types of redundancy also should be considered when building a website. She also deals with the bandwidth aspect of connectivity. Next, the author shows you how to institute an on-going program of security monitoring, maintenance, and to perform an annual security audit. Then, she shows you how to choose your basic website software: web server, log analysis, and database. The author continues by discussing specific e-commerce software. In addition, she discusses adjunct software. The author also covers how you can create a good QA plan to determine how and in what order each aspect of a website should be tested. Then, she discusses various software and online solutions to aid in your quest for the perfect, problem-free website. The author continues by examining consultant contracts, costs, types of consulting services available, when to outsource and when to do the work in-house. In addition, the author provides tips on how to choose a web-hosting service. She also examines three different methods that are used to search the Web. Next, the author offers some advice on getting the work started, developing targeted marketing strategies, monitoring the results, and continuously striving to improve your efforts. Then, she explains that in order to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, the web-based business must realize that site experience is actually more important to an online customer than product experience, and build the website and service solutions around that fact. The author continues by discussing why order processing and fulfillment is a website's last form of customer contact. Finally, she shares some thoughts on the future of e-commerce.

The author has done an excellent job of writing a book with both the entrepreneur and the non-technology executive in mind. So, at the end of the day, this book will help you ask the right questions as you move to the Web.
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