Ecommerce coursework by May Hnit Oo Khin

1. www.myemusic.com (URL after hosting)
localhost/mayhnitemusic
(while testing with localhost)
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3. There are seven sections in our report. In introduction section, we will explain some background
information of eMusic. In our research session, we will describe about our research of other similar
ecommerce websites based on the problems and key issues these websites faced or are facing. Key issues
such as security issues, delivery issues, business issues, cultural issues, geographic issues, economic and
financial issues, ethical, legal and regulatory issues will be described in details in this section.
For session 3, we will fully demonstrate the screen shots of our designed web pages for front end
interactivities, staff interface and blog.
In next session, We will show how we establish the strong customer relationships by utilizing
many CRM programs such as FAQs, On-Demand CRM software, etc and by using both online marketing
methods (banner swapping, email advertising, search engine optimization, etc) and offline marketing
methods (advertising in newspaper, magazines, etc). We will perform these things by targeting some
value proposition such as high quality, brilliant service, fair price, utility value and informational value.
Another important thing for selling products online is security. So, in session 5, we also want to
describe our solutions (partnering with VeriSign, using firewalls, Intrusion Detection System, Message
Digest and defining security policy for staff) to protect against some security issues like theft of
customer’s identity and attacks from outsiders.
In session 6, we will report the estimated budget for implementing eMusic website and for
operating well. It will include web development costs, costs for making accessible our website via
internet, web security costs, marketing costs, hardware costs and modification costs.
Finally, we will describe our perspectives about implementing eMusic website and about this
report in our conclusion section.
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4. We have to implement online music and film products selling website for eMusic Company.
Therefore, we want to describe some background information about this company. eMusic website is
Business-to-Customer (B2C) type of ecommerce website developed by “Customized Media Soloutions”.
eMusic is a splendid online shopping destination for those who are enthusiastic in the world of music. A
wide range of magnificent music albums under diverse genres such as rap, pop, country, rock, etc are
provided to amuse the customers. eMusic is also a right spot for the visitors who are looking for MP3
players, MP4 players, PDAs, etc. Customer support services such as blogs and reviews about music
albums and film products are also offered by eMusic.
eMusic is established by five entrepreneurs in January, 2012. Since internet has become popular,
they got the idea to sell their products online which way is different from traditional selling method. This
is because it has many benefits for company such as reaching worldwide, reducing overtime costs given
to staff, opening 24/7, improving consumer service and relationship, having the ability to notify up to date
products more easily. It can be beneficial not only for company but also for customers. Customers can
shop at any time from any place where internet is available, reduce transaction costs, download
digitalized items without delay and compare different items easily.
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5. We have learnt that several ecommerce companies met with a great failure because they did not
take notice of some key issues and problems while implementing and operating their websites. Therefore,
we made research of other similar ecommerce websites and found that there are seven key issues.
For all ecommerce companies, security issues are the most prominent issues which threaten
them. Since personal information of online shoppers has to be passed via internet, there are more
possibilities for phishers, con artists, scammers and fraud to stalk this information. They can steal bank
account passwords and credit card information, leading to the risks for both customers and company.
Moreover, online customers are also concerned about identity theft. If criminals or unauthorized people
can access the personal information of customers, they will sell this information to other people or
companies and cause many risks of fraud. There are some examples which show security problems faced
by some ecommerce websites. The websites of Premier Bank, three Florida Bank, Wakulla Bank were
hacked and customers’ PINs, credit card information and other personal data are stolen in 2006.
Delivery issues as well as logistic issues also make many ecommerce websites fail. If the
customers do not satisfy support service of a company or if delivery is delayed for something or if return
policy is not described clearly, no one will purchase products from this company. We can derive this
lesson from expensive failures of “Kozomo.com” which offered on-demand deliveries for renting movies
to customers’ doors but had the problems in collecting the return of the goods back. Another example is
“Furniture.com” which had the difficulties in delivering the heavy and large furniture because of high
delivery cost. Therefore, we should consider cost effective delivery method for our film products.
Business issues can also be said as one of the most essential key issues found in some B2C dot-
com failures. If we do not carry out market research to know whether our business is viable by selling our
products online or not, we can fail like “eRegister.com” which acted as an intermediary to register for
classes.
In some ecommerce websites which sell their materials worldwide, what we can see is cultural
issues. If we aim for global EC, some cultural issues such as language, social norms, religious beliefs,
data formatting (for e.g. date format), intellectual property protection law, measurement standards are
needed to take into account. The most obvious cultural issue is language translation. Only if we can solve
this problem, a global website can be successful in providing information to all international visitors to
our website. For example, Yahoo implements yahoo.co.jp for its target visitors from Japan.
Other significant issues for global EC are geographic issues and localization. Shipping items
across international borders is the major issue. Although selling music albums online will do not have
problems as they can be offered by digital download method, delivering players may have some
problems. Nowadays, many companies practise localization approach for the design, colours and
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6. packaging of their products. This can be seen at “europcar.com” website. So, these factors should be
considered if we want to sell our products globally.
Another important issues are economic and financial issues. Customs, government tariffs,
taxation, pricing and collecting money from the online shoppers are covered under economic issues. The
first three will be different from one country to another or one state to another. A company may want to
sell the same item with different prices for different geographical areas. This will make pricing issues
gradually arise. Financial issues concerned with payment can be observed in many ecommerce companies
and many companies solve this difficulty by partnering with payment gateway such as PayPal or by using
various electronic payment systems.
Finally, what we can learn is that ethical, legal and regulatory issues are the mostly found
issues for the music selling websites. Some websites posted negative articles or comments about some
products and people. Consequently, it causes the ethical issues and disputes between people. Another big
case is breaching copyright law which included in intellectual property law. As copyrighted music can be
downloaded via some websites for free, people do not usually purchase it. We can perceive some
evidences of legal and regulatory issue. University Music Group once sued MySpace Company for
copyrighted work of artists. But, YouTube could avoid this by making licensing agreement. Therefore, we
should not ignore these issues while implementing eMusic website.
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7. There are four major colours used in our website. As our website is intended mainly for the young
people, we researched which colour is popular among them and found that black is their crazy colour.
Moreover, we also use green colour because its symbolic meaning is money and the message we want to
give is that payment via our website is secure. White and grey is used to match with black and green.
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8. We made our home page factual and attractive as it helps to get the good first impression from the
visitors. At the top of the page, we put company logo, slogan and promotion programs to make the
visitors notice our website. We also placed the important things like register button, login button, search
box where users can search the products by music album names or by player names and shopping cart at
the top right corner to be easily seen by visitors. At every page, we created navigation bar, navigation aid
to tell which page the visitor is currently viewing, navigation column and second navigation bar at the
bottom to help the visitors find the information of company, products and customer support services
easily. At the navigation column, there are sections which let the visitors search for the products
according to music genres or player types and which show customers’ testimonials and popular products
which will be arranged from top to down according to rating given by customers. Beside the navigation
column, we create five rows to display our latest music albums, players and reviews. For our members to
update their information, we put My Account tab on the navigation bar. This can only be seen when the
member is logging in. To let the visitors know which kind of payment and how we make secure our
website, we placed logos of third party companies at the bottom of the page.
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9. We used encryption method MD5 to save the passwords of our administrator. Usernames and
passwords of administrators cannot be hacked or seen in the address bar of browser as post method is
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10. used to send this information to login to company database. Moreover, we define two user levels. Level 1
is for administrators and they will have the authority to view, update, insert or delete the data and level 0
will be for customers who can only view the data on the website. When we give access to the database,
we will also check the user level and this person will be redirected to the previous page he is viewing if
he/she is not an administrator. To define a person to be an administrator, a current administrator will let
this person register and change his/her user level to administrator (user level 1) at the user info page of
administrator site. We will assign the administrators the rights to view, update, insert or delete our
product information, users’ comments, reviews about the products, user accounts, orders and delivery
information.
At administration site, we can add new products and other information by clicking on the add
submenu while mouse is over any tab of navigation bar.
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11. We also design to view the information by clicking on the tabs of navigation bar. For example, if
we click on the PRODUCTS tab on the navigation bar, information of our registered products will be
displayed.
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12. When mouse is over at each row of product, a pencil will appear at the right corner. When we
click at this time, we will be navigated to product edit page and we can edit or delete this product at this
page.
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13. We arranged to show the reviews of the products posted by administers of eMusic at
Blog/Reviews session. Visitors can view these reviews by clicking on the Blog/Reviews tab at top
navigation bar and also on bottom navigation bar.
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14. If a visitor clicks on continue reading button, we will redirect to the respective review where the
visitor can comment by entering in the message box we provided and rate this review by clicking on the
stars.
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15. Likewise, we designed to let the customers comment on each of our product at every product
detail page. We will display the customers’ comments at the bottom of each product so that the customers
can share their perspectives about our products.
We will allow all visitors whether they are members or not to comment and rate our products or
reviews. But, we will ask names and email addresses of those who are not members.
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16. For an ecommerce company to be successful, we should plan for attracting and retaining the
visitors to our website. The most effective and standard ways are defining online value proposition,
establishing CRM and creating marketing plan.
Online value proposition lies in the centre of every B2C company because CRM and marketing
plan have to be arranged base on the value proposition defined by the company. As value proposition can
describe what the company promises to its consumers, a new visitor can know at once whether the
products or services of this company can fulfill his/her needs by analyzing those value propositions
expressed on the website. In addition, if the company can perform in accordance with their promises, the
number of long-term customers or loyal customers can increase.
Therefore, we defined some most promising online value propositions which make us unique
from our business rivals. According to the slogan of eMusic Company “high quality, brilliant service, fair
price”, the main values created by eMusic can be observed through this slogan. Since high quality is our
glory and the customers can search and compare many alternative and wider products with high quality at
one place, they can obtain the benefit of reducing search and transaction cost. In addition, what we think
is bundling together our products and our excellent customer services such as blog/review, accurate
delivery service, secure payment method, etc can create more value than other companies. Another core
online proposition we want to provide to our customers is fair price. All our music albums can be got with
reasonable price and we also display different brands with different reasonable prices for different classes.
In addition to these core values, most of the customers want convenience and factual information about
products while shopping via ecommerce websites. Consequently, we will offer other value propositions
such as (1) utility value – which allows the customers to shop at our website conveniently and easily (we
will provide our customers with simple website design and explanations of how to shop at our website)
and (2) informational value – which will let the customers know about the latest products, reviews and
other customers' testimonials about our products.
It is vital to have loyal customers for both off-line companies and online companies in any
market. As customers are the key to our company’s success, we need to apply a business strategy called
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in order to effectively establish the sustainable customer
relationships which can add value for eMusic Company and also for the customers in many ways. There
are mainly four stages in CRM and we should prepare things or programs to carry out at each stage so that
we can fully support services to customers throughout the product life cycle.
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17. Firstly, we arranged some CRM programs for the first stage which is acquiring customer.
Promotion programs, company’s background information, information of corporate portals and
customers' testimonials about company’s products are provided for prepurchase support to arouse the
customer’s desire for purchasing our products. Moreover, web self-service program like Frequently
Asked Questions (FAQs) will be applied to help the potential customers help themselves.
Secondly, we decided to offer a convenient, factual and effective shopping atmosphere for the
second stage which supports customers during purchase. To attract and maintain customers to our
website, we need to perform based on some standards known as metrics at this stage. They might include
response time, download time, site availability and timeliness. So, we planned to respond our customers’
messages as soon as possible, speed up the download time, make our website 24/7 available and update
the website with latest information.
Another stage is customer fulfillment which is mainly concerned with delivery of orders. As this
stage plays the main role to retain the loyalty of customer, it is needed to deliver the orders timely. If the
delivery is delayed in case of something, we will also notify the customers about the progress of order
fulfillment. Moreover, we will clearly describe the return policy to improve customer trust and loyalty.
The last stage, customer continuance support, can make to increase the customer satisfaction.
For the postpurchase service, we will supply our customers with our valuable services and information to
make the customers revisit our website frequently and to establish the strong relationships with them.
Therefore, we will send the individual customer emails by considering his/her interest or purchase pattern.
So, we will use free customer-centric intelligence application such as On-Demand CRM software which
can perform contact management and send mails to individual customer automatically.
Finally, we created marketing plan based on value propositions and CRM described above.
Firstly, we should consider the type of customers we will target. As our products are music albums and
film products, most of the visitors to our website will be between the age of 18 and 40. To make our
target customers notice our website and retain the customer loyalty, we can use both offline and online
marketing methods.
Offline marketing method is the traditional way of marketing before evolving internet. We can
advertise our website in magazines, newspapers, journals, television and pamphlets. Another offline
marketing method is advertising with billboards. In addition to these methods, we can advertise our
website at the music corner of the supermarkets. By using offline marketing method, the most obvious
benefit we can gain is reaching to the mass of people who make their purchase offline and then, we can
persuade them to buy online. But, the drawback of using this traditional method is high cost. If we
advertise in media, we will have to advertise in different media for several days to make the people notice
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18. our advertisement. Despite the high cost, we will advertise in some magazines and newspapers for
drawing the interests of people who usually buy the products offline and for the purpose of mass
marketing.
We will also use some online marketing methods to attract and retain the interests of consumers.
The first method we will use is banner swapping which is the least expensive way of marketing. We
agree to show a banner of Accessory World Company which sells accessories for players at our eMusic
website and vice versa. Email advertising is also regarded as the best online marketing way because of
its low cost and reaching a wide range of targeted audiences. We will use contact management software to
search consumers with the most profit potential and then to send mails automatically for performing one-
to-one marketing.
Another way to increase our sales is using classified ads which can be seen in columns or boxes
on some online newspapers, portals, etc. Since researchers found that these ads are more read by the
visitors than banners and posting regular-size ad is free, we decided to use this marketing method. Search
Engine Optimization is the cost-effective marketing way to attract new potential customers because
most Web users can find our website through search engines. To place our website URL at the top of
Google search engine’s display, we will use AdWords which is the method provided by Google for online
advertisers.
We think word-of-mouth marketing will be more effective than any other methods as people are
influenced by environmental variables such as friends, family members and colleagues. Therefore, we
will advertise in social networks such as facebook and blog on our eMusic website. At the same time,
we will do special online promotions and show customers’ testimonials on our website to get both new
and regular customers’ attention. We will also promote our sales by affiliate marketing. So, we will put
our logo on their websites and we will give them 3% commissions on everything we sell to the customers
who are referred by them.
To conclude, we prepared many things to get a total success in attracting and retaining potential
customers to our website because customer loyalty can strengthen our company's market position.
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20. Security issues also play the main role in implementing eMusic website. Therefore, we want to
explain some security issues that we considered for eMusic website and what things we will do to protect
these security risks.
Nowadays, the numbers of cybercrimes are rising and many companies are losing money because
of such security issues and attacks, for instance, virus, phishing, zombies, unauthorized access by insiders
and outsiders, theft of proprietary data, theft of customer’s identity, DOS attack, etc. As the survival of
ecommerce companies depends on the confidence and trust of the potential customers, we must make our
customers believe that we can absolutely protect their personal information.
We can prevent from these attacks by using many ways. One of these solutions is implementing
application firewalls between eMusic Company’s network and the unsecure Internet so that we can
enhance the security. By implementing firewalls, we can restrict viruses, spam, application backdoors,
remote login and SMTP session hijacking which is used to access customer’s email addresses.
Apart from this, we will use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol which is mostly used protocol
for online electronic payment systems. The reason why we decided to use SSL is that it can encrypt the
transmitted data such as credit card numbers between a browser and a web server. Moreover, encryption
method such as Message Digest (MD) will be used for hiding the password of every user to login eMusic
website with his/her individual user name. This will be programmed while implementing database by
Customized Media Solutions.
Although we plan to use many encryption methods to make secure customers’ personal
information, some customers may not trust our website without having strong recommendation of other
computer security companies. There are many SSL certificate authorities which make the customers trust
in ecommerce. Among them, we will partner with VeriSign which is the most well known for the security
of ecommerce websites.
We also prepare human firewall which can restrict unauthorized people from deleting or updating
the information. We will define acceptable use policy to enhance the security of eMusic website and we
will also encourage the staff to obey this policy.
Although we utilize many prevention measures to protect against the intruders, it may have some
vulnerabilities which the intruders may find and cause many security risks. So, we should monitor our
company network so that we can know immediately if there is a suspicious activity. We can use software
namely intrusion detection systems which can take certain actions according to predefined security
policies. We will use IDS of Cisco Systems’ NetRanger. Apart from all these things, we will upgrade
both hardware and software and we will also update our security policies if it is necessary.
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22. For developing a website for eMuisc Company, we estimated the possible costs to present the
responsible persons of eMusic. The following are six main tangible costs.
Website development costs for eMusic which is dynamic website is $1500.
We will have to register domain name for our website and host it to make it accessible by the
visitors. We will register our domain name with .com extension at 101Domain, Inc which is a registrar of
VeriSign Company. Registration fee for 1 Year is $11.46, 2 Year is $22.46 and 5 Year is $54.44 and we
will choose 5 Year package.
We will acquire the web hosting service from 1and1 Company whose main business is website
hosting. The cost will be $4.99 per month for the first one year. Then, it will be $9.99 per month. As we
will host 5 years, it will cost about $539.4.
We will use firewall to protect from the intruders, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) of Cisco
Systems’ NetRanger to detect immediately if there is an unauthorized access and website security service
from VeriSign which is the most trustful third party for SSL. The cost of firewall will be $1000 and that
of IDS is $500. We will purchase Secure Site Pro package from VeriSign which will cost $995 per year.
Both offline and online marketing costs are covered under this title. We will advertise our website
in the most popular newspaper, journal and magazine once a week for about 6 months as soon as we had
hosted our website. The cost of advertising in newspaper is $360 for 6 months and that of advertising in
magazine is $1200 for 6 months. Moreover, we need to pay Search Engine Optimization fees $529 per
month. Affiliate fees can vary according to the number of customers referred by the affiliate companies
and make the purchase.
We will require at least two high performance computers for staff to enter or update or delete the
product data for the website. It will cost $600 per computer.
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23. If new contents are wanted to add into the website, we will charge based on the image size,
creation of flash animation and number of pages. The cost for pictures of about inches 3x2 is $1.5, inches
4x3 is $2 and inches 5x4 is $2.5. Adding static page will be $10 per page and adding dynamic page will
be $20.
Costs
$1500
$593.84
$2495
$2089 + affiliate fees
$1200
it depends on the new contents
Total Costs $7877.84
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24. To conclude, we considered from various point of views described above before and during
implementing eMusic website so that we can attract the customers and get their loyalty. We estimated that
total amount of $7877.84 will cost for implementing eMusic website. Moreover, there will be VeriSign
website security service cost which is $995 per year and other expenses such as electricity bill will cost
$100 per month.
Although setup costs and other expenses for eMusic website will be high, we can get both
tangible and intangible benefits if we sell products online and we will reach break-even point after two
year. The most tangible benefit is cost reduction in transaction costs. Moreover, creating the online
storefront is easier and cheaper than the physical storefront. As we can also provide new customer
oriented services by using web technologies, we can gain more value from the customers. Another benefit
is that it can improve marketing efforts as online advertising is less expensive than offline advertising.
It is true that selling products online has many advantages. But, we should not neglect its
disadvantages, too. Some customers prefer contacting them by phone to informing them about the
products by emails. In such cases, online advertising can reduce personal contact with consumers and
decrease customers’ satisfaction. Another significant matter is security issues which threaten the
customers.
In our opinion, we should enhance the security of our website by upgrading hardware, software
and purchasing better security package from VeriSign if budget is allowed. Furthermore, we should
provide more search options on our website for searching products. But now, only searching with title of
music albums and name of film products is allowed. We should display more animated images on our
websites to make the design more attractive. It is also necessary to create better CRM and marketing plan.
If we can make such changes in the future, we will get more profits than expected.
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25. URL - http://www.bbmarketingplus.com/blog/2010/10/18/how-to-create-a-compelling-value-
proposition-do-it-yourself-in-3-steps/
URL - http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/online-value-proposition/online-value-
proposition/
URL - http://www.allthingscrm.com/cloud-computing/crm-on-demand-%E2%80%93-whats-it-all-
about.html
URL - http://www.allthingscrm.com/crm-basics/managing-your-contacts-more-efficiently-with-crm.html
URL - https://www.symantec.com/verisign/ssl-certificates/secure-site-pro/buy
URL - http://www.1and1.com/popupDomainPrices?__lf=Order-Tariff
URL - https://www.1and1.com/costs?__reuse=1336459495543&__lf=Order-Tariff
URL - http://www.ineedhits.com/pay-per-click/easy-search-advertising.aspx
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27. This is the registration page. Visitors can register by submitting their information. Only if, they
can make purchase.
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28. If a visitor clicks on the login button, he will be navigated to Login page. If username and
password entered is correct, he will be redirected to Home page, his/her name will be displayed and login
button will be changed to logout button.
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29. Links to customer support pages such as FAQs page and shopping guide page can be seen at the
bottom navigation bar. We designed these pages to help the customers to be convenient in shopping and
to let them know what other visitors usually ask to eMuisc.
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30. We take pages like About Us, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions into eMuisc
website to inform the visitors about the company information. The links to such pages can be seen on
bottom navigation bar or by clicking on Company Info tab at top navigation bar.
At contact us page, we designed to send message to the customer service department of eMusic if
the visitors want to ask about anything they want to know or if they want to cancel or update their orders.
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32. For marketing purposes, we implemented promotion page and customers’ testimonials page. The
links to both pages can be viewed at bottom navigation bar. Moreover, we used blink text “Promotion” at
the top of the page and slider bar which displays customers’ testimonials on the navigation column so that
we can market our products more.
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34. Transaction pages are the most important ones for every ecommerce website. Transaction pages
in our website are mainly concerned with shopping cart and processes to complete the purchase. When a
customer decided to purchase, he/she must login first. If he/she clicks on the buy button at the bottom of
each product displayed at home page, it will automatically add one item to the shopping cart. We
designed to display total quantity of different items and total amount of bought items at the top of the
page. The customers can also view the detail information of their added items to the cart by clicking on
the shopping cart button.
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35. Customers can also buy products by entering the required quantity and by clicking add to cart
button.
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36. At the bottom of every product detail page, other similar products will be displayed to help the
customers to buy conveniently.
If a customer clicks on the check out button at the shopping cart, he/she will need to provide
his/her required information and delivery information.
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37. After validating this information, we will show details of each purchased item, delivery fees, tax
and total cost. Here, we also designed to let the customers update the quantity of items or remove these
items.
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38. If a customer clicks on make a purchase button, thank you message will display and he/she will
be redirected to home page.
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