ASP.NET E-commerce Beginner's Guide - (Second Edition)

Author: (USA) David, (USA) Watson, Zhang Lihao
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-03-01
Features: This book comprehensively and detailedly introduces how to build an e-commerce web site, and teaches you the specific process of designing and building the site through a large number of codes and examples. You will learn to build an online product catalog with a shopping cart, create search and product recommendation features, and implement management functions, customer accounts, order processing systems, and other more content. You will also learn how to integrate products such as PayPal, DataCash, and VeriSignPayflowPro to achieve payment functions. Whenever you add a new feature to your web site, it means you will face a new challenge and learn a new theory. And this book gradually helps you understand each technology, overcome every challenge, and finally build a powerful and flexible web site. [Preface] Preface The rapid growth of retail on the Internet encourages more small and medium-sized enterprises to consider the advantages of establishing an e-commerce web site. Online transactions have many obvious advantages, but there are also many hidden pitfalls when developing a retail web site. This book provides a practical, step-by-step guide for beginners to build an e-commerce site. It guides readers through the design and construction process, helping you quickly and easily build high-quality, scalable e-commerce web sites. As you learn from this book, you will understand all the relevant technologies that connect your business to the network, and these technologies are suitable for readers worldwide, without the need for high-end Microsoft SiteServer-based web solutions. A case study is introduced throughout the book to help you continuously expand your knowledge, and the complexity of the case study being developed is also increasing. This book introduces the case study in three stages. Stage focuses on setting up the site and running it as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. Through this approach, financial problems will be reduced if the site is not used, and if it is used, it can start generating revenue quickly. By the end of this stage, you will have a functional site that you can use or flexibly adapt as needed. The revenue generated can be used to fund future development. The second stage mainly introduces how to increase revenue by improving the shopping experience and actively encouraging customers to buy more products through product recommendations. By the end of this stage, you will have a fully functional site that you can flexibly adapt as needed. In the third stage, you will have a running site that is working well. In this stage, you will increase profitability by reducing costs through automation, streamlining order processing and management, and personally handling credit card transactions. About the readers This book is aimed at web developers looking for guidance on building a complete e-commerce web site, from design to development. However, this book requires readers to: ● Have some knowledge of using ASP.NET with VB.NET. ● Have experience using Visual Basic .NET or Visual Studio .NET or later versions. ● Want to build an e-commerce web site. This book also provides valuable content for ASP3 developers, who can learn from the book's examples and experience hands-on ASP.NET development techniques. Book Description In this book, you will learn the following: ● Build an online product catalog that can be browsed and searched. ● Implement category management pages that allow you to add, modify, and delete products, categories, and departments. ● Create your own shopping cart and checkout system using ASP.NET. ● Increase sales by implementing product recommendations. ● Process payments using PayPal, DataCash, and VeriSignPayflowPro. ● Implement a customer account system. The Apress Forum is a platform for exchanging code and ideas, which can help you extend your site with new modules and modifications. Below is an overview of the content of each section of the book. Stage Chapter 1 Introduction to E-commerce Sites In this chapter, you will learn the basics of real e-commerce sites, see the importance of focusing on short-term revenue and reducing risks, and three basic methods that can make an e-commerce site start making money. Then, you will learn how to apply these principles to the three-stage plan, providing deliverable, usable sites in each stage, and continuing to expand them in the latter part of the book. Chapter 2 Building the Foundation After discussing real e-commerce, you can now decide to develop a website and look at more details for building the foundation for future work. This chapter discusses the technologies and tools to be used, and more importantly, how to use them. Chapter 3 Creating the Product Catalog: Part I After learning the three-tier architecture and implementing a part of the main page of the website in the previous chapter, you can now continue to work and create the JokePoint product catalog. Since the product catalog consists of many components, it needs to be introduced in two chapters. In this chapter, you will create a database table, create a stored procedure, and implement data access methods in the middle layer. By the end of this chapter, you will have some dynamically generated content on the web page. Chapter 4 Creating the Product Catalog: Part II In the previous chapter, you created a selectable department list for JokePoint. However, the product catalog contains much more than just a department list. In this chapter, you will add the rest of the product catalog features. Chapter 5 Search Categories In the previous chapter, you implemented a feature-rich product catalog for JokePoint. However, it lacks an important search feature. The goal of this chapter is to allow visitors to search for products on the site by entering one or more keywords. You will learn how to implement the arrangement of search results and how to browse search results by page. You will see that by integrating new components into the existing architecture, new features can be easily added to running sites. Chapter 6 Improving Performance This chapter will analyze some possibilities for improving the performance of the JokePoint project. Although it is beyond the scope of this book to introduce performance improvements for ASP.NET in a dedicated chapter, in Chapter 6, you will learn some principles that you can follow to improve the performance of your website.