E-Business Solutions

E-commerce

e-Business is changing the way we do business. So, what is e-Business? In simple words, e-Business is doing business electronically. In other words, E-Business enables you to conduct business anytime, anyplace, in any language or currency, through any distribution channel. Usually, this distribution channel is the Internet. Whether you need to build an old business or start a new one, Internet plays a vital role in your success as it facilitates you to reach out the masses easily.

Dreamz-i assists you in leveraging the power of ecommerce and increasing your business success. We have the ability to create solutions using a wide range of platforms that can be run remotely or locally using standard user interface on any platform or any standard browser.

We use the present-day Internet development tools. Working closely with our consultants we ensure that there is integrity in the planning and development process. With our e-business solutions we enable you to successfully thrive in the Internet world.

Having an online shopping cart (also known as an eCommerce website) has become imperative for most businesses today. eCommerce website development can be a complex process and commands attention to detail for a smooth shopping experience while maximizing the sales to visitor ratio.

We help you get your custom crafted online store/eCommerce website developed for one-time monthly payment only.

eCommerce Website Design & Development

eCommerce websites enable you to have a web based shopping cart and sell your products/services online. eCommerce has seen tremendous growth over the past few years and is all set to further see phenomenal use making it sensible to businesses to have an online equivalent for a real shopping cart. Operation and management of business over the Internet can be a complex process.
A successful eCommerce website has to go through effective designing to have maximum visitors to sales ratio. We make the complete process much simpler by effectively planning each step of your e-Commerce website development - from designing to deployment. Based upon your requirements, we analyze and develop a custom shopping cart for your business.

M-commerce

M-commerce (Mobile Commerce) is the buying and selling of goods and services through wireless handheld devices such as cellular telephone and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Known as next-generation e-commerce, m-commerce enables users to access the Internet without needing to find a place to plug in. The emerging technology behind m-commerce, which is based on the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), has made far greater strides in Europe, where mobile devices equipped with Web-ready micro-browsers are much more common than in the United States.

As content delivery over wireless devices becomes faster, more secure, and scalable, there is wide speculation that m-commerce will surpass wireline e-commerce as the method of choice for digital commerce transactions. The industries affected by m-commerce include:

• Financial services, which includes mobile banking (when customers use their handheld devices to access their accounts and pay their bills) as well as brokerage services, in which stock quotes can be displayed and trading conducted from the same handheld device
• Telecommunications, in which service changes, bill payment and account reviews can all be conducted from the same handheld device
• Service/retail, as consumers are given the ability to place and pay for orders on-the-fly
• Information services, which include the delivery of financial news, sports figures and traffic updates to a single mobile device

Products & Services Available

Mobile Ticketing
Tickets can be sent to mobile phones using a variety of technologies including bCODE and NFC. Users are then able to use their tickets immediately by presenting their phones at the venue. Recently, WiMAX-enabled dashtop mobile payment platforms made a debut, ID on kiosk keypads at the entrance of ballparks, airports, train stations instead of physical tickets, but this dashtop mobile equipment will take some years to get commercially implemented.
The travel industry is realizing the potential benefits of m-commerce, and is working on technologies that will eventually equal the ratio of bCode and NFC, update customers on flight status, notify them when this information changes and will offer to make new arrangements based on preset user preferences requiring no input from the user. Therefore, a customer’s entire trip can be scheduled and maintained using a mobile device.
Mobile ticketing for airports, ballparks, and train stations, for example, will not only streamline unexpected metropolitan traffic surges, but also help users remotely secure parking spots (even while in their vehicles) and greatly facilitate mass surveillance at transport hubs.

Content Purchase & Delivery
Currently, mobile content purchase and delivery mainly consists of the sale of ring-tones, wallpapers, and games for mobile phones. The convergence of mobile phones, mp3 players and video players into a single device will result in an increase in the purchase and delivery of full-length music tracks and video. Download speeds, if increased to 4G levels,will make it possible to buy a movie on a mobile device in a couple of seconds, while on the go. A new online shopping trend of "booking on the web for pickup later in stores" is evolving into a new concept: Just In Time(JIT) pickup for mobile shopping behind the wheel. This JIT pickup for mobile shopping indicates a "real-time bridge between virtual world and real world".

Location Based Services
Unlike a home PC, the location of the mobile phone user is an important piece of information used during mobile commerce transactions. Knowing the location of the user allows for location based services such as:

• local maps
• local offers
• local weather
• people tracking and monitoring

Information Services
A wide variety of information services can be delivered to mobile phone users in much the same way as it is delivered to PCs. These services include:

• news services
• stock data
• sports results
• financial records
• traffic data and information

Particularly, more customized traffic information, based on Users' travel patterns, will be multicast on a differentiated basis, instead of broadcasting the same news and data to all Users. This type of multicasting will be suited for more bandwidth-intensive mobile equipment.

Mobile Banking
Banks and other financial institutions are exploring the use of Mobile Commerce to allow their customers to not only access account information, but also make transactions, e.g. purchasing stocks, remitting money, via mobile phones. This service is often referred to as Mobile Banking or M-Banking. More negative issues like ID theft, phishing and pharming are lurking when it comes to mobile banking, particularly done on the mobile web. Net security technology free from redundancy and paradigm shifts away from mobile web-based banking will be an optimal solution to mobile banking in the near future.

Mobile Brokerage
Stock market services offered via mobile devices have also become more popular and are known as Mobile Brokerage. They allow the subscriber to react to market developments in a timely fashion and irrespective of their physical location.

Mobile Purchase
Mobile purchase allows customers to shop online at any time in any location. Customers can browse and order products while using a cheap, secure payment method. Instead of using paper catalogues, retailers can send customers a list of products that the customer would be interested in, directly to their mobile device or consumers can visit a mobile version of a retailers ecommerce site. Additionally, retailers will also be able to track customers at all times and notify them of discounts at local stores that the customer would be interested in. New technology from companies like ShopText allow consumers to purchase products from their cell phones using text messaging and technology from companies like mPoria allow retailers to launch their own mobile commerce shopping sites.

Mobile Vouchers/Coupons/Loyalty Cards
Mobile ticketing technology can also be used for the distribution of vouchers/coupons/loyalty cards. The voucher, coupon, or loyalty card is represented by a virtual token that is sent to the mobile phone. Presenting a mobile phone with one of these tokens at the Point of sale allows the customer to receive the same benefits as another customer who has a loyalty card or other paper coupon/voucher.
In combination with pos terminals this technique can be used for distributing vouchers for top up of mobile phone accounts. Advantage of this system is reduce of cost for distribution, main disadvantage is that that you need a widely spread network of pos terminals. There are two models present in the market: voucher distribution (PIN based), where hidden recharge number (PIN) is printed on terminal and direct top up, where subsribers number is entered on terminal and recharged automatically. Mobile delivery enables:

• economy of scale
• quicker and easier delivery
• effective target marketing
• privacy-friendly data mining on consumer behaviour
• environment-friendly and resources-saving efficacy

Payment Methods

The main payment methods used to enable mobile commerce are:

• premium-rate calling numbers
• charging to the mobile telephone user's bill or
• deducting from their calling credit.
• registration of a credit card that is linked to a SIMcard.

Related Technologies

• bCODE
• Near Field Communication
• mPoria

Web Based Application

As enterprises get involved more in e-business projects, there are new dimensions to be addressed in software development. Many enterprises have host-centric or client-server applications that have been used in-house for decades. An e-business project is not merely a migration from a legacy application to a Web-enabled application. This article deals with the additional dimensions that have come into play in the era of e-business. These factors affect cost, schedules, dependencies, complexity, interfaces, resource requirements, infrastructure (both technical and business) among others. They have to be taken into consideration, before fully embarking into an e-business project, whether it is B2B or B2C.

Web Service is becoming an important approach for enterprises to implement their business applications on Internet. However, most of Web services are built based on special business function, they are isolated and do not address the information communication for integrating the business processes. In this paper, we propose a new composition framework, which comprises the web-based semantic definition for business messages, the methodology of constructing visualized integrated processes based on Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), and the strategy of vocabulary-based business rules for e- Business.

Analysis

Business Process Reengineering:
When a company has decided to sell products on the Internet through its Web site, it has also decided to do Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Selling products the traditional way is not same as selling products on the Net. One needs to do in-depth analysis of the change in business processes and the necessary infrastructure needed to sustain those business processes. The Web site can be launched with state-of-the-art technologies and a number of new customers can be attracted, but if business processes are not in place to support them, the company could be in deep trouble. Gap analysis of all the business processes is the first step in any e-business project.

User Requirements are rarely known 100%:
Traditional in-house projects had requirements defined within the organisation and could be captured 100%, by holding workshops or interviews between the users and owners of the project. If the requirements cannot be met with the available infrastructure, users could be told to live with the available ones. For example, if GUI-based clients could not be developed, users could be told to adjust themselves with text-based green screens. In the case of launching an application or Web site over the Internet, the users are customers - and their requirements are varied. It is humanly impossible to capture all the requirements of all customers or discover all of the ways of addressing them properly. If a business cannot provide at least the most desired features to its customers over the Internet, we all know that another online shop is a click away. It is a fundamental change that user requirements are rarely known 100%. It is up to the project team to get into the shoes of the users - or customers. Similarly, user acceptance testing can rarely be 100%. The search log files, Web server log files, and feedback would provide some measure of the expectations and problems of the customers. An Internet application project might sometimes be a secret because of business competition, until it is launched on a Web site for the customers. In such cases, customer feedback would arrive only after completion of the project.

Multiplicity of User Interfaces:
Internet customers could be using any browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape. They might be using an old version of a browser or an old 80486 PC with Windows 3.1 or a cell phone or a PDA or Web TV. They might be using a brand new computer, but with a monitor set at an unexpected resolution. To make sure that a Web site has consistent look and feel with equal performance, the user interface (UI) and application should be flexible to handle a variety of environments. For example, the interface has to deal with various monitor resolutions to make sure that alignment of the screens or appearance of graphics are not lost. Not all browsers uniformly support scripting languages like Javascript, PHP, JSP, and ASP.

Ease of Use (GUI & BUI):
GUI navigation for an in-house application could be complicated and users could be trained. On the other hand, screens on a Web site could be intuitive and navigable by anyone. The customer could be a 70 year old grandmother sending a birthday gift to her grandson and vice versa. Ease of use and intuitive navigation are most important and hence demand more effort in design.
The era of e-business has brought the notion of BUI (Beautiful User Interface). The GUI screens for in-house applications need not be beautiful. But the screens on a Web site need to be beautiful to keep the customers happy. When rest of the business processes are same, an attractive Web site could be a unique selling point. This need has led to a rise in creative and artistic interfaces, which have budgetary implications.

Backward Compatibility:
The need to consider backward compatibility, with various operating systems, printers, and monitors, has now come to application design and development. In a B2B scenario, a partner could send purchase orders (an XML file, for example) in an older format and the application needs to deal with it appropriately. Therefore, an application has to operate well with a variety of software and hardware considerations, not just the latest version of a browser. In addition, not all browsers conform to standards which adds more difficulties.

Legal Compliance:
Web sites need to conform to the cyberlaws of countries in which business is conducted. Government regulations could force modifications to a Web site. Addressing legal requirements early in a project cycle would avoid unpleasant surprises later on.

EAI and IAI:
If there are legacy applications on various platforms, before launching an e-business enabled Web site, managers should think of integrating all of them. In established organisations, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) becomes the bottom line. The new Web applications have to be interfaced with the old applications synchronously or asynchronously depending on the business requirements and commitments. It means that new EAI products have to be bought and skilled professionals have to be inducted. If EAI is not handled carefully, it could become a big risk in an e-business project, and affect the budget, schedule, performance, etc. If two different companies are integrated in a B2B scenario across Internet, then IAI (Internet Application Integration) also needs to be taken into account.

Availability:
Applications meant for in-house use traditionally are not needed 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. A Web based application requires a 24X7 model, since another online store is a click away. Availability is addressed at a low level by hardware itself, employing back up processors and communication channels. Operating systems, built on top of hardware, address availability in their own way. Products like RDBMS or Web Application Server offer features to address availability by clustering and warm backup. Now, even applications have to be built for better availability on top of such products.

Security:
In-house applications might not implement more than user and role based security with Access Control Lists (ACLs). On the other hand an e-business application has to address many more. The application should be able to do encryption and decryption, which might need new products to be bought or upgrades of existing ones. Since encryption and decryption need processing power, depending on the volumes, bigger servers have to be installed, or there could be performance problems. Digital certificates and certification authorities also have to be considered depending on requirements. These influence the infrastructure that needs to be in place.
If in-house users have to be given access to applications through the Internet, it may be necessary to implement a virtual private network (VPN) or a secure tunnel. It should be developed so that security attacks are not possible (such as a man-in-the-middle attack).
If programs written in a scripting language hare buggy, it would be obvious to users and occasionally could crash browsers. If the user has an older version of a browser, it might not support SSL and HTTPS. Once the public gets to know a bug in an application, the message spreads fast and it might even attract the attention of the media. Depending on the criticality of the application on the Internet, security testing is required. One might also employ an external service provider to do performance and security testing.

Testing:
Testing an Internet application has many more factors to address than in an in-house project. Tests need to be done for:

• various browsers like Internet Explorer or Netscape
• versions of browsers
• resolutions of monitors
• a variety of desktop printers
• ease of use/usability to achieve intuitive navigation
• security
• scalability
• availability
• integration with various legacy applications (which could be on different platforms).

A test facility also has to be set up to work with various resolutions of monitors, printers, and browsers. Although the testing cannot be exhaustive, it should be done to a reasonable extent. Testing has to be much more than in a normal project to ensure that security and scalability problems do not arise. Testing activity alone could consume much more time and effort than in a normal in-house project.

Conclusion
There are numerous factors to be addressed in Internet-based application development, compared to normal in-house ones. These issues could arise from user interfaces, application integration, security, ease of use, scalability, and availability. Early planning to tackle these issues could bring a lot of peace to the e-business project managers