Scope and Limitations of an Online Ordering System

Chapter 1: Scope and Limitations of an Online Ordering System The researchers aim to develop an electronic-based ordering for Ralen Trading since they are still using a manual system in their transactions, payments and even in generating reports. The system will consist of some significant modules in order to satisfy the company’s needs as well as the customers’. The system will provide a security module which will have three level of access such as Administrators, Members and Guests. Administrator is fully responsible for monitoring and maintaining the website since they have access on some modules which are hidden on guests and even members such as Product Management, Sales and Inventory, Reports, Order Management and others. At first, the system will only have one (1) administrator who has the authority to add more administrators by filling up the form which is available only in the Admin module. This form will need some information of the personnel such as full name, contact number, username, and password. In case of suspicious acts of the newly added Administrators, the main Admin has power to deactivate them. 17 As for the Members, the system will provide an area wherein they can view and manage their orders. They can also request for tracking status provided that they purchased an item. Unlike the members, the guest can only browse the website but no transactions can be held unless they would register. Registration can be easily done by filling up the form with their personal information such as First Name, Last Name, Address ( Street, City/State, Province, Country), Contact Numbers (mobile or telephone). Log in information must also fill up by providing a preferred username and password. Username and Password may contain letters and numbers with 4-15 characters long. An email address is also required. Once the details have been validated, a confirmation message will be sent to the user’s email for verification purposes. A user must click the link provided by the sent email. It will then redirect the user to the log-in page. The Log-in page can be found in the homepage and in a separate page. The registered users must be verified first in order to log-in successfully. Otherwise, they will prompted by an error message. Both members and guest can browse the store. This store is sorted according to the category which is called a Product Catalog. This is where the consumers select their orders. It is packed with basic contents such as Product image, price, short description and a button for “More info”. In case they are looking for a specific product, a search

section is provided. Once the consumer clicks the “More info” button, it will redirect them to a page for an elaborate description and more sample photos of the product they choose together with an “Add to cart” button. 18 Ordering can be done just by clicking the “Add to Cart” button. The system automatically adds the item to the consumer’s Shopping Cart as long as the product is available. If not, a message will be prompted. A Shopping Cart can be viewed in the right column of the home and store page or in a separate page wherein the consumer must input the quantity of the product. A default quantity is one (1). The Shopping Cart contains the summary of the orders such as Product Name, quantity, price, shipping fee and the total cost. For members, they have an option to save their orders in their Wish List page. If the customer still wants to browse for more items, a link is provided at the bottom of Shopping Cart page. This will not delete the items they have added to the cart, unless they would restart their computer/device. If they choose to purchase the item, a “Checkout” link is provided. For guests, they will be readdressed to a registration form. The system does not allow non-members to proceed to the payment transaction in order to avoid repetition of information in case they would purchase another item. For members, their payment will be processed through PayZa. They must have an account in PayZa which requires a Credit Card in order to send money successfully. 19 If the customer wants to cancel the ordered items, they can easily remove a specific product off their Shopping Cart or simply click “Empty Cart”. If they’ve already in the Checkout Page, a “cancel” button is still available as long as their payment has not been processed by PayZa. Once the payment transaction is successfully completed, an email provided by PayZa will be sent to the customer’s email address which contains the Tracking ID. This ID will then allow the member to monitor the status of their purchased order in the Tracking Section of the website just by entering this information. For questions regarding the transactions, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) is available which consist of questions with respective answers. For further inquiries, the users might as well use the Contact Us page to privately ask the Administrator regarding a specific concern. This is open to all the site viewers. A reply from Admin may take hours or days during office hours.

Comments or Suggestions are also welcome to the site’s Chat box. This is where the guest can simply connect to other visitors by entering name and message. Spam and other non-site -related messages are can still be deleted by the Administrator. 20 A user can share a specific page to their preferred social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. This will help the website in gaining more viewers as part of marketing strategy. For some information regarding the Company, the visitor may refer to the About Us page containing the Company’s historical background. The system will also include some modules that are viewable only to Administrator. These modules are mostly for managing, maintaining and monitoring website, orders, users and products. One of these modules is Products Inventory and Monitoring. This is where the Admin can view a summary of the products in-stock, out of stock. Below of the summary is a table of all Products containing the Product ID, Product Image, Product Name,Price, Number of Stocks, Category, Shipping Fee, Date Added and column for Edit and Delete buttons. To easily search for a product, filtering is available. Maintenance allows the Admin to add/update/delete products and Categories. In order to add new items in the store, the Admin must input the required text fields such as Product Name, Selling Price, Shipping Fee, Short Description, Additional Information, Product Image thumbnail and select the appropriate category. Optional fields are Original Price and additional photos. Product name must not match the other available items in store. Price and shipping fee must be in Philippine Peso. Under maintenance module also is the site configuration. This enables the Admin to update the site information such as Company Address, Tel. No., Email and Shop Description. Aside from Maintenance module, Admin Panel also includes Order Management wherein it displays a table of all orders made by the clients. This table contains the Tracking ID, Customer’s Full Name, Order Status, Total Cost, Date Added, Date Modified and a column for Action (view or edit). Administrator can easily filter the table by Status, Tracking ID, Date or by Customer’s Name. The system will also provide a Report module which contains information about the Total sales of the Company daily, monthly or yearly. It also generates a graph with

corresponding interpretation of the most purchased products. A summary of visitor counts and number of registered members are also included in this module. In order to develop the system, the researchers will use a server-side scripting language which is PHP version 5 as the front end since it is compatible to most of the servers available in the web. CSS3 will also be needed for styling purposes and HTML5 for creating forms. As for the back end, the researchers prefer MySQL 5 as it is widely used in most of the hosting sites and easy-to-use interface. The study also contains a conceptual framework in developing the system. The conceptual framework to be use is the V-Model, because it is one of the popular frameworks used in developing software. V-model is one of the many software development models which hold a pattern to be followed. The first phase in V-Model is the system requirements which cover the hardware and software. Hardware requirements represent the needed tools in running the system while the software requirements represent the applications in developing the system. Statistical treatment is used for analyzing the data collected from the survey. It will help the researchers to judge whether the null hypothesis accept or not based on the data collected. 22 The researchers have a total of forty (40) respondents. The first set of respondents consist of twenty (20) respondents will be the IT professionals to know the opinion and point of view from the expert. IT professionals must be a graduate of any computerrelated Four-year course. The second set of respondents consist of twenty (20) employees, owner and the target customer of Ralen Trading in order to know the opinion and point of views from the users and beneficiary. The customer must be eighteen to fifty (18-50) years old to secure that the customers have their PayZa account. The system also has its limitations. The system only allows payment via PayZa Technology. Thus, the customers are required to create an account in PayZa first to purchase the item/s. For Tracking System, it will not specify the exact location of the item/s being shipped. The system will not generate printout report. 23 Definition of Terms The researchers had defined some words that may encounter in the research study.

art

Accessibility

- A general term used to describe the degree to

which

a

product,

is

device,

service,

or

environment

accessible by as many people as possible.

Administrator

-

A

person

technically

responsible

for

running

advanced information systems.

- User’s that are login inside the system - A systematized collection of data that can be accessed immediately and manipulated by a data-processing system for a specificpurpose. Efficiency

- the ratio of useful work to ressources (processor and

storage) expended 24 E-commerce and

- Refers to the process of marketing, buying selling of products and services online.

Functionality

-The capacity of a computer program or application

to Robustness errors to input, Security to

provide a useful function. - The ability of a computer system to cope with during execution or the ability of an algorithm continue to operate despite abnormalities in calculations, etc. - Its objective is to establish rules and measures use against attacks over the Internet.

- a cart supplied by a shop, especially supermarkets, for use by customers inside the shop for transport of merchandise to the check-out counter during shopping.

25 User - an agent, either a human agent (end-user) or software agent, who uses a computer or network service. Can be either a Guest or Client.