A WEB BASED TRADING PLATFORM FOR GHANAIAN UNIVERSITY PRESENTATION
1. A WEB BASED TRADING
PLATFORM FOR GHANAIAN
UNIVERSITY STUDENTS
(uniSell)
CURTIS BIMPONG DONKOR
INDEX NUMBER: 11015740
PRESENTED ON:
APRIL,2015
2. INTRODUCTION
• The Web based trading platform (uniSell) project is a system
developed to solve the essential problems of timely acquisition and
delivery of educational materials by the Ghanaian university student.
• This platform is an academic ecommerce platform. With ecommerce
a buyer can not directly examine the product and must rely on the
accuracy of the system and seller (Melnik, 2002).
3. DATABASE SYSTEM
• E-commerce is the use of the Internet and the Web to transact
business. More formally, digitally enabled commercial transactions
between and among organizations and individual. (Introduction to E -
Commerce, 2006).
• This simply means obtaining information at our fingertips, without
wasting time, money and effort, and also to conduct real time
transactions in a borderless of ours. With e-Commerce transactions, it
is a Win-Win situation for the parties (both buyers and sellers)
participating in it.
4. ADVANTAGES OF E-COMMERCE
APPLICATIONS.
Catalogue flexibility and Online fast updating
Shrinks the Competition Gap
Unlimited Market Place and Business Access which Extend Customer Base
A 24 Hour Store Reduced Sale Cycle
Lower Cost of Doing Business
Eliminate Middleman
Can handle multiple user interfaces.
5. BACKGROUND
Ghanaian students required to acquire the appropriate books and other learning materials to improve
their academic work. It is the responsibility of the various university authorities to provide all the
appropriate books in the schools libraries for students to use.
At a greater or lesser extent, some universities have been successful in making this provision. On the
other hand, dynamic changes in technology, which has been consistent for the past 30 years has had a
rippling effect on the academic needs of nGhanaian university students.
CHALLENGES
• Recommended text books are mostly written by foreign authors hence they have to be acquired online
using credit cards or shipped. Ghanaians are not internationally privileged to use this online credit card
system and also, shipping will also delay or may never arrive.
Some identified challenges and others makes finding and acquiring academic items by Ghanaian student
very difficult and unrewarding. This has affected academic work progress of Ghanaian university
students and challenge me to research and design a system to help solve.
6. JUSTIFICATION
• The increase in the competition of electronic commerce with the presence of big
players like tonaton and olx among others have challenged me to come up this
project using the skills and knowledge gained through my study of information
technology to design an interactive platform with students being my priority. The
project aims to highlight on the use of technology to help better the process students
goes through in acquiring course materials.
7. OBJECTIVES
The main objective is to simplify the process of acquiring educational materials by all Ghanaian university students a
stress less effort to ensure that the acquisition and deliveryare accurate, timely and relevant for the Ghanaian university
student at all levels.The following about theweb based platform are expected to be achieved:
accept and transmit data from the other web platforms to a centralized database
Provide a database to store all the data resulting from the e-commerce activity
Provide a useful easy to use but professional user interface to interact with the database
Allow users to query the database to search and sort information in a more useful way
Prevent errors and eliminate redundancy of data
Provide accuracy information example in dates of events
Help users to generate reports faster and accurately
Provide Security of the ecommerce activity.
8. LITERATURE REVIEW
• E-commerce is the use of the Internet and the Web to transact business. More formally, digitally enabled
commercial transactions between and among organizations and individual. (Introduction to E - Commerce, 2006).
Major Types of E commerce.
• E-Commerce itself is categorized into several sections. Among the sections are Business-
• To-Business (B2B), Business-To-Consumer (B2C), and Business-To-Government (B2G)
• and Consumer-To-Consumer (C2C).
• The Growth of the Internet and theWeb
• The Growth of E-Commerce
9. CURRENT SYSTEM
• The existing system is a manual, time consuming and semi-automated. University’s libraries own
and store most of these educational materials especially books. This makes their acquisition very
monotonous and time consuming. Student has to abandon or cancel all appointment and travel in
traffic around libraries, cities and possibly ‘black markets’ in search of educational material.
• Again, the search for, the right information relating these educational materials are somehow
unfruitful. Acquiring them overseas also has its own constraints, normally reaching the buyer
most likely at the very end of the semester.
• Presently, Selling and buying educational materials exist in many forms but none of
these really looks at university students in the Ghanaian context.
10. PROPOSED SYSTEM
Is a Web based trading platform (uniSell)
Improve the accuracy, reliability, availability and speed with which educational material contents are accessed, reviewed
and transacted.
Ensure structured, logical and centralized storage of products and information for easy access by all relevant users.
Ensure security by granting users some level of authority to the system by implementing,
a. User level privileges
b. User accounts
c. Other security controls like password authentication.
Provide administrative backend facilities to help in clarifying contents before posting to help make the most positive
impact on the users the system will serve.
11. METHODOLOGY
• The project employs the use of Rational Unified Process (RUP).
• The RUP is a software engineering process that ensures the production of high quality software that meet the need
of its end users within a predictable schedule and budget.
• It involves four sequential phases and nine disciplines.
• Technology Development Tools
Database system (MySQL)
PHP
Apache
12. DESIGN
• Should be able to handle more than one user at a go and
robust enough so that the users are not in position to corrupt it
due to accidental or intentional misconduct.
• Have user interfaces and user guides understandable by
people of average computer skills. It should as well as be able
to give a user reasonable responses and have possibilities for
taking in user suggestions for improvement so that contents
and transaction is complete in line with the needs of the user.
• It should be available, reliable, usable and not costly to
maintain.
• Non Functional Requirements
System Speed
Output Presentation
System Availability
System Accessibility
User Requirements Functional Requirements
• The system should be hosted on an external domain host’s
server
• The system should be able to handle all content (data)
requirements available in the existing system.
• The system should be able to detect multiple entries and
prevent future failure occurrences.
• It should be able to back up the contents for security reasons
in case of a computer crash.
• The system must be easily scalable.
• The system should be able to update contents in the database
by either editing ordeleting the different records about
interventions.
• The system should be able to deliver accurate information
when requested.
• The system should be able to give proper access rights to
users of the system.
• The system should be able to authenticate the user and
validate the data before allowing transactions
19. REFERENCES.
• Books
• Agile Database Techniques—Effective Strategies for the Agile Software - Scott W. Ambler
• PHP and MySQL Web Development - Luke Welling and Laura Thomson
• Shelly, G, Cashman,T & Rosenblatt, H. (2003) Systems Analysis and Design, -5th edition Course Technology
• Hughes B & Cotterell M. (2002) Software Project Management. - McGraw-Hill
• Articles
• Mäkeläinen, S. I. (2006). From B2C to C2C e-commerce.
• Melnik, M., & Alm, J. (2002). the emarket place. journal of industrial economics, 192 - 198.
• Reynolds, J. (200). eCommerce: A Critical Review. International Journal of Retail and Distribution, 145 - 170.
Websites
Morrison, K. (2014, Jun 13). The growth e-commerce. Retrieved from www.adweek.com:
http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/data-growth-e-commerce-infographic/199692
(2006). In Introduction to E - Commerce (pp. 9-10). Pearson.
Amazon. (2015, January). Retrieved from Amazon: http;//www.amazon.com
Liu, H. (2015, January 18). News. Retrieved from CNET: http://www.cnet.com/news/china-opens-door-for-full-foreign-
ownership-of-e-commerce-companies/
