This document provides an overview of electronic commerce and discusses its various components. It describes the six layers that make up the architectural framework for electronic commerce: 1) applications services, 2) brokerage and data management, 3) interface and support layers, 4) secure messaging and document interchange, 5) middleware services, and 6) network infrastructure. Each layer is discussed in one to two paragraphs to explain its purpose and role in enabling electronic commerce.

1. Submitted By:
Sangeeta Singh
Bachelor of Computer Application
Electronic Commerce

2. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I am thankful to Dezyne E’cole College to help in making this project on E-Commerce. A special thanks to Ms. Jyoti Phulwani to guide us step by step in the making of this project report.
Thanking you
Sangeeta Singh
Bachelor of Computer Applications
III Year

3. CONTENTS
1. Chapter 1: Introduction
2. Chapter 2: Electronic Commerce and the World Wide Web
3. Chapter 3: Architectural Framework for Electronic Commerce
4. Chapter 4: Technology Behind the Web
5. Chapter 5: Network Security and Firewalls
6. Chapter6: Electronic Commerce Companies
7. Chapter 7: Pictorial Representation: E-Buying Methodology
8. Chapter 8: Conclusion

4. Chapter1
Introduction
Every individual of company that wants to make money and become the next Microsoft needs to understand the market potential, business implication and technological foundations of electronic commerce. But what is electronic commerce everybody is talking about. How does it affect the organization way of doing business? What sort of technical and business skills are needed to be successful?
Companies and consumers are discovering that global networking and other technological innovations are powerful assets if used as competitive weapons in their day to day activities. E- commerce is associated with the buying and selling of information, products and services via computer network today.
Consumer desires are very hard to predict pin point or decipher in electronic markets whose shape, structure and population are still in early stages. Needs envisioned include entertainment on demand including 500 channel T.V., video on demand, games on demand, electronic retailing via catalogues and Kiosks and home shopping networks.
In future, viewers will decide what they want to see and when they want to participate and successful market places are expected to those that cater to consumer’s loneliness, boredom, education and career. In highly competitive society, where neighbours seldom talk to one another, these outlets give consumer someone to talk after going home.
Let’s take a look at the changing conditions in the “new economy” with respect to the retail industry. Consumers are pushing retailers to the wall demanding lower prices, better quality, and a large section of in-season goods. Retailers are scrambling to fill the order. They are slashing back-office cost reducing profit-margins, reducing cycle times, buying more wisely and making huge investment in technology. They are revamping distribution channels to make sure that warehouses costs are down by reducing their average inventory levels and coordinating the consumer demand and supply pattern.
In the push to reduce prices more and more retailers are turning to overseas suppliers in part because of cheaper labour costs. Retail are the immediate line of fire and had to do the cost cutting. They put the pressure on the manufacturer and then to the supplier end of the pipeline. Electronic commerce is forcing companies to rethink the existing ways of doing target marketing; relationship marketing and even event marketing. Adaptation would include moving towards computerised “paperless” operations to, reduce trading costs and facilitate the adoption of new business process. Japanese approach JIT (Just in Time) system, total quality control and quality circles are focused now for delivery of goods through electronic commerce.

5. Chapter2
Electronic commerce and the World Wide Web
We have broadly defined electronic commerce as a modem business methodology that address the desire of firms, consumers and management to cut costs while improving the quality of goods & inversing the speed of services. The need for electronic commerce stems from the demand within business government to make bustles use of computing, that is, better apply computer technology to improve business process and information exchange both within an enterprise and across organizations. In short, electronic commerce appears to be an integration force that representing the digital converge of twenty- first century business application and computing technologies.
Electronic commerce application emphasis the generation and exploitation of new business opportunity and to use the popular buzzword” generate business value”. For instance, when buyer-seller transaction occur in the electronic market place, information is access, observe, arrange and sold in different ways in fact, the information about a product of service is separated from the physical product or services and has become important on it own.in some case, the information can become as crucial as his actual product of services. In term of its effects on a company’s in short, information ways business transaction are creating new ways of doing business and even new type of business.
Electronic commerce application are quite varied. In its most common from. E-commerce is also used to donate the paperless exchange of business information using EDI, electronic mail (e- mail), electronic bulletin boards, electronic funds transfer (EFT) and other similar technologies. These technologies are normally applied in high-payoff areas, recognizing that paper handling activities usually increases expenses without adding valve. On the other hand, the electronic commerce is used to describe a new online approach to perform traditional functions such as payments and funds transfer, order entry and processing, invoicing, inventory management, cargo tracking, electronic catalogues and point- of-sale data gathering, more recently, companies have realized that the advertising, marketing and customer support functions are also part of electronic commerce application domain. The business function act as initiators to the entire order management cycle that incorporates the more established notions of electronic commerce as an umbrella concept to integration a wide range of new and old applications.

6. Despite the changes taking place, businesses have three goals: stay competitive, improve productivity and deliver quality service. These goals are the guiding boys for firms plotting their course in the turbulent waters of electronic commerce. There are other factors that companies need to keep in mind. First, most companies have already made enormous information technology investments to automate their key internal processes such as purchasing, invoicing and other similar functions. So, some aspects of the technological infrastructure for electronic commerce are already in place. The challenge now become: How to effectively leverage this investment. Second, prices for computer hardware and network equipment continue to fall, marking information technology an appealing investment for many businesses, especially when it’s used for high-impact applications such as linking their distributed operations. However, investment without a clear idea of the electronic commerce architecture being built would be akin to driving with blinders on. As a result, companies that have decided that electronic commerce applications represent one of the best strategic investment they can make must first exert some effort to understand the technology underlying electronic commerce applications.
At first glance, it appears that messaging based technologies such as EDI and Male-Enabled applications, combined with database and information management service, form the technical foundation for effective electronic commerce solutions. No single one of these technologies can deliver the full potential of electronic commerce, however. What we require is an integrated
Electronic Commerce
Electronic Document Interchange
E-mail
Fax
Electronic Messaging
Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT)
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
Corporate Digital Library
Electronic
Publishing
Information Sharing
Collaborative Work
Marketing Advertising
Sales, Customer Support

7. architecture the likes of which has never been seen before. This integrated architecture is emerging in the form of the World Wide Web (WWW). As electronic commerce becomes more mature, we are beginning to see sophisticated applications being developed on WWW. Technically and commercially, the WWW client-server model seems poised to become a dominant technology.

8. Chapter3
Architectural framework for Electronic Commerce
The software framework necessary for building electronic commerce applications is little understood in existing literature. In general a framework is intended to define and create tools that integrate the information found in today’s closed systems and allow the development of e- commerce applications. It is important to understand that the aim of the architectural framework itself is not to build new database management systems, data repository, computer languages, software agent-based transaction monitors or communication protocols. Rather, the architecture should focus on synthesizing the diverse resources already in place in corporations to facilitate the integration of data and software for better applications.
We propound that the electronic commerce application architecture consist of six layers of functionality or services:
1) Application
2) Brokerage services, data or transaction management
3) Interface and support layers
4) Secure messaging and electronic document interchange
5) Middleware and structured document interchange
6) Network infrastructure and basic communication services
Applications Services
Customer-to-Business
Business-to-Business
Intra-organizational Brokerage and data management
Order processing-mail order houses
Payment scheme-electronic cash
Clearinghouse or virtual mall Interface layer
Interactive catalogue
Directory support function
Software agents Secure messaging
Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol
Encrypted e-mail, EDI
Remote programming (RPC) Middleware services
Structure documents (SGML, HTML)
Compound document (OLE, OpenDoc) Network infrastructure
Wireless-cellular, radio, PCS
Wire line-POTS, Coaxial, Fibre Optics

9. There Layer cooperate to provide a seamless transition between today’s computing resources and those of tomorrow by transparently integrating information access and exchange within the Context of the chosen application. As seen in above fig. electronic commerce application are based on several elegant technologies. But only when they are integrated do they provide uniquely powerful solutions.
In the ensuing discussion of each of these layers, we will not elaborate on the various aspects of the network infrastructure that transports information.
 Electronic commerce Application services
The application services layer of e-commerce will be comprised of existing and future application built on innate architecture. These distinct classes of electronic commerce application can be distinguished: customer-to business, business and intra organization
Advertising Sales Customer services
Procurement, distribution and logistics
Manufacturing
And production
Accounting, finance and management
Engineering and research
Customer-oriented Electronic commerce
Customers
Internal publishing
Private commerce
Classic EDI
Global Suppliers

10.  Customer-to-business Transactions
We call this category marketplace transaction in a marketplace transaction, customers learn about products differently through electronic publishing, buy them differently using electronic cash and secure payment system, and have them delivered differently. Also how, customers allocate their loyalty may also be different.
In light of this, organization itself has to adapt to a world where the traditional concepts of brand differentiation no longer hold-where “quality” has a new meaning, where “content” may not be equated to “product”, where “distribution” may not automatically mean “physical transport”. In this new environment, brand equality can rapidly evaporate forcing firms to develop new ways of doing business.
 Business-to-Business transaction
We call this category market-link transactions. Here, business, government and other organizations Depend on computer- to=computer communication as a fast, an economical and a dependable way to conduct transactions. Small companies are also beginning to see the benefits of adopting the same methods. Business-to-business transactions include the use of EDI and electronic mail for purchasing goods and services, buying information and consulting services, submitting requests for proposals and receive proposals.
For example, the current account payable process occurs through the exchange of paper documents. Each year the trading partners exchange millions of invoices, checks, purchase orders, financial report and other transaction. Most of the documents are in electronic form at their point of origin but are printed and key-entered at the point receipt. The current manual process of printing, mailing and rekeying is costly, time- consuming and error-prone. Given this situation and faced with the need to reduce costs, small businesses are looking towards electronic commerce as a possible saviour.
 Intra Organizational Transactions
We all this category market- driven transactions. A company becomes market driven by dispersing through the firm information about its customers and competitors; by spreading strategic and tactical decision making so that all units can participate; and by continuously monitoring their customer commitment by making improved customer satisfaction an ongoing objective. To maintain the relationships that are critical to delivering superior customer value, management must pay close attention to service, both before and after sales.
 Information Brokerage and Management
The information brokerage and management layer provide service integration through the notion information brokerage the development of which is necessitated by the increasing information resource fragmentation. We use the notion of information brokerage to represent an intermediary who provides service integration between customers and information provides, given some constraint such as a low price, fast service or profit maximization for a client.

11. Information brokers, for example are rapidly becoming necessary in dealing with the voluminous amounts consumers and information on the networks. As on-line database migrate to consumer information utilities, consumers and information professionals will have to keep up the knowledge and ownership of all these systems. Who’s got what? How do you use it? What do they change? Most professionals have enough trouble keeping track of files of interest on one or two database services. Will all the complexity associated with large number of on-line databases and services bureaus, it’s impossible to expect humans to do the searching. It will have to be software programs- information brokers or software agents, to use the more popular term- that act on the searcher’s behalf. Information brokerage does more than just searching.
 Interface and support services
The third layer, interface and support services, will provide interface for electronic commerce application such as interactive catalogues and will support directory services- functions necessary for information search and access. These two concepts are very different. Interactive catalogues are the customized interface to consumer application such home shopping. An interactive catalogues is an extension of the paper-based catalogue and incorporates additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more attractive.
Directories, on the other hand, operate behind the scenes and attempt to organize the enormous amount of information and transactions generate and to facilitate electronic commerce. Directory services database make data from any server appear as a local file. A classic example of a directory is the telephone white pages, which allows us to locate people and telephone number in the case of electronic commerce, directories would play an important role in information management functions. For instance, take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stopovers with a caveat that the time between layovers be minimized. This search would require several queries to various on-line directories to find empty seats on various airline and then the availability of seats would be coordinated with the amount of time spent in the airport terminals.
 Secure messaging and structured document interchange services
The importance of the fourth layer, secure messaging, is clear. Everyone in business knows that electronic messaging is a critical business issue. Consider a familiar business scenario you hand over an urgent fax on Monday and find out on Tuesday that it’s still sitting on your fax operator’s desk. What happened? The line busy and he thought he’d try again later. Or, the number was wrong, but he forgot to let you know. Or you are in London and you need to send a spreadsheet that details a marketing plan for a product introduction strategy to a co-worker in New York. This must be done today, not tomorrow when the courier service would deliver. There is a solution to these common and frustrating problems. It’s called integrated messaging: a group of computer services that through the use of a network send, receive and combine messages, faxes and large data files. Some better known examples are electronic mail, Enhance fax and electronic data interchange.
Broadly defined, messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the clients or electronic commerce application, masking the peculiarities of the environment. Other define messaging as a framework for the total implementation of portable applications, divorcing

12. you from the architecture primitives of your system. In general, messaging product are not applications that solve problems; they are more enablers of the application that solve problems.
Messaging services offer solution for communication non-formatted (unstructured) data such as purchase orders, shipping notices and invoices. Unstructured messaging consists of fax, e-mail form based system like Lotus Notes. Structured documents messaging consists of the automated interchange of standardized and approved message between computer applications, via telecommunication lines. Example of structured document messaging include EDI.
Messaging is gaining momentum in electronic commerce and seems to have many advantages. It supports both synchronous (immediate) and asynchronous (delayed) message delivery and processing. With asynchronous messaging, when a message is sent, work continues (software doesn’t wait for a response).This allows the transfer of messages through store –and –forward methods.
The main disadvantages of messaging are the new types of applications it enables –which appear to be more complex, especially to traditional programmers-and the jungle of standards it involves. Because of the lack of standards, there is often no interoperability between different messaging vendors leading to islands of messaging. Also, security, privacy and confidentiality through data encryption and authentication techniques are important issues that need to be resolved for ensuring the legality of the message –based transactions themselves.
 Middleware services-
Middleware is a relatively new concept that emerged only recently. Like so many other innovations, it came into being out of necessity. Users in the 1970s, when vendors delivered homogeneous systems that worked, didn’t have a need for middleware. When conditions changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations couldn’t cope: The tools were inadequate, the backlog was enormous, and the pressure was overwhelming. And, the users were dissatisfied. Something was needed to solve all the interface, translation, transformation and interpretation problems that were driving application developers crazy.
With the growth of networks, client-server technology, and all other forms of communicating between/among unlike platforms, the problems of getting all the pieces to work together grew from formidable to horrendous. As the cry for distributed computing spread, users demanded interaction between dissimilar systems, networks that permitted shared resources, and applications that could be accessed by multiple software programs. In simple terms middleware is the ultimate mediator between diverse software programs that enables them talk to one another.
 Transparency
Transparency implies that users should be unaware that they are accessing multiple systems. Transparency is essential for dealing with higher-level issues than physical media and interconnection that the underlying network infrastructure is in charge of. The ideal picture is one

13. of a “Virtual” network: a collection of work-group, departmental, enterprise and interenterprise LANs that appears to the end user or client application to be a seamless and easily accessed whole.
Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing environment. This gives users and applications transparent access to data, computation, and other resources across collections of multivendor, heterogeneous systems. The strategic architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware. The key to realising the theoretical benefit of such an architecture is transparency. Users need not spend their time trying to understand where something is. Nor should application developers have to code into their applications the exact locations of resources over the network. The goal is for the applications to send a request to the middleware layer, which then satisfies the request anyway it can, using remote information.
 Transaction security and management
Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in the electronic commerce market. Security and management are essential to all layer in the electronic commerce model. Transaction integrity must be given for businesses that cannot afford any loss or inconsistency in data. For electronic commerce, middleware provides the qualities expected in the standard TP system: the so-called ACID properties (atomicity, consistency and durability).
World Wide Web (WWW) As the Architecture
Electronic commerce depends on the unspoken assumption that computers cooperate efficiently for seamless information sharing. Unfortunately, this assumption of interoperability has been supports by the realities of practical computing. Computing is still a world made up of many technical directions, product implementation and computing vendors. This diversity, white good for innovation, causes problem as the e-commerce application try to impose a certain discipline on the proliferating computers and networks. It is that the real effect of computing is all too often the prevention of data sharing due to incompatibilities- architectures, data format and communication protocols.
 What does the Web Encompass?
The web has become an umbrella for a wide range of concepts and technologies that differ market in purpose and scope. These include the global hypertext publishing concept, the universal reader concept and client- server concept.
The global hypertext publishing concept promotes the idea of seamless information world in which all on-line information can be accessed and retrieved in a consistent and simple way. To

14. access information in this seamless world, we will need the ability to address many types of data- text files, images, sound files, animation sequences.
The universal readership concept promotes the idea that, unlike the segmented applications of the past, we can use one application a universal (or common) user interface- to real a variety of documents. This concept implies that once information is published it is accessible from any type of computer, in any country, and that any (authorized) person merely needs to use one simple program to access it. This is accomplished in the web by using a core browser or application that augmented by specialized work onto the supporting applications.
The client- server concept allows the web to grow easily without any centralized control. Anyone can publish information and anyone (as long as he or she is authorized) can read and download it. Publishing information requires a server program, and reading data requires a client browser. All the client and all the servers are connected to one another by the Internet. The various standard protocols allows all clients to communicate will all servers. In practice the web hangs on a number of essential concepts, including the following:
 The addressing scheme known as uniform resource locator (URL) marks the hypermedia world possible despite many different protocols.
 A network protocol known as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by the client browsers and servers offers performance and feature not otherwise available.
 A mark-up language (HTML), which every web client is required to understand, is used for the representation of hypertext documents containing texts, list boxes and graphics information across the net.

15. Chapter 4
Technology behind the Web
Information providers (or publishers) run programs (called servers) from which the browsers (clients) can obtain information. This program can either be Web servers that understand the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), “gateway” program that convert an existing information format, or a non- HTTP server that Web browser can access-anonymous FTP or Gopher servers.
Web servers are composed of two major parts: the hypertext transfer protocol for transmitting documents between servers and client and the hypertext markup language (HTML) format for documents. The link between HTML files and the HTTP servers is provided by the uniform resource locators (URLs).
 Uniform Resource locators
The documents that browsers display are hypertext that contains pointers to other documents. The browsers let you deal with the pointers in a transparent way-select the pointer and you are presented with the text to which it points. This pointer is implemented using a concept that is central to Web browsers: uniform resource locators (URLs). One way to think about URLs is to use the libraries and location on a shelf as a metaphor. A URL for a digital library would be a unique call number that provides the exact location of every book in the world, Including the country, city, street and library shelf location.
In practice, URLs are the string used as addresses of objects (documents, images) on the Web. Think of them as analogous to your e-mail address. Just as your address is unique may be used by any other Internet user to send you mail without knowing exactly where you are, a URLs follow a fairly consistent pattern. The first part describes the type of resource; the second part given the server housing the resource; and the third part given full fill name of the resource. URLs are universal in that they provide access to a wide range of network services which required separate applications in the past. For a new network protocol one can easily form an address as the set of parameters necessary to retrieve the object. If these parameters are encoded into a concise string, with a prefix to identity the protocols and encoding, one has a new URL scheme. Take a look at the URL formats below:
FTP: ftp://server.address/complete.file.name
Gopher: gopher://server.address:port/directory/filename
TELNET: telnet://server.address:port
HTTP: http://server.address:port/homepage.html
News: news:misc.stocks.invest
These are URLs for Internet news articles and newsgroups (the NNTP protocol) and for HTTP archives, for TELNET destinations, e-mail addresses and so on. The same can be done for names of objects in a given name space. For example, the URL of the main page for the web project happens to be: http://web.w3.org/hyptext/web.the project.html.

16. The prefix “http” in the preceding example indicates the address space and defines the interpretation of the rest of the string. The HTTP protocol is to be used, so the string contains the address of the server to be contacted and a substring to be passed to the server.
As noted earlier, different protocols use different syntaxes, but they do have a small amount in common. For example, the common URL syntax reserves the solidus (/) as a way of representing a hierarchical space, the pound label (#) as a way of printing inside the document and question mark (?) as a separator between the address of an object a query operation applied to it. Hierarchical space are useful for hypertext, where one “work” may be split up into many interlinked documents. The # allow related names to exploit the hierarchical structure and allows links to be made within the work independent of the higher parts of the URL, such as the server name.
URLs are central to the Web architecture. The fact that it is to address on object anywhere on the Internet is essential for the system to scale and for the information space to be independent of the network and server topology.

17. Chapter 5
Network Security and Firewalls
The ability to conduct business on a public network has strong attraction- and the potential for big savings. Security and confidentiality are essential, however, before business can conduct financial transactions over the Internet and a lack of widespread security measures remains at this time. At present, credit card number, financial records and other important information are not encrypted and can be intercepted by any savvy Internet hacker.
The discussion of security concerns in electronic commerce can be divided into two broad types:-
1. Client-server security uses various authorization methods to makes sure that only valid user and program have access to information resources such as database. Access control mechanism must be set up to ensure that properly authentication are allowed access only to those resources that they are entitled to use. Such mechanisms include password protection, encrypted smart cards, biometrics and firewalls.
2. Data and transaction security ensures the privacy and confidentiality in electronic messages and data packets, including the authentication of remote users in network transaction for activities such as on-line payment. The goal is to defeat any attempt to assume another identity while involved with electronic mail or other forms of data communication. Preventive measures include data encryption using various cryptographic methods.
 Data and Message security
The lack of data and message security on the Internet has become a high profile problem due to increasing number of merchants trying to spur commerce on the global network. For instance, credit card number in their plain text form create a risk when transmitted across the Internet where the possibility of the number falling into the wrong hands is relatively high. Would you be willing to type in your credit card number knowing the risk? Even worse, would you expose your customers to that risk? Just the through of “sniffer” program that collect credit card number en masse is enough to keep merchants away from on-line shopping given the possible lawsuits and other liability issues. In sort, the lack of widespread e-commerce.
 Encrypted Documents and Electronic Mail
E-mail uses who desire confidentiality and sender authentication are using encryption. Encryption is simply intended to keep personal thoughts personal. Some users are already using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP); others are starting to use Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM).
E-Mail is typically encrypted for the reason that all network correspondence is open for eavesdropping. Internet e-mail is obviously far less secure than the postal system, where envelopes protect correspondence from casual snooping. A glance at the header area of any e- mail message, by contrast, will show that it has passed through a number of nodes on its way to you. Every one of these nodes present the opportunity for snooping.

18. Chapter 6
Electronic Commerce Companies

19. Chapter 7
Pictorial Representation: E-Buying Methodology
 Buying Procedure on on-line shopping website, Flipkart.
Step 1:-
Go to the link of the website, www.flipkart.com
Step2:-
Select the desired product category you want to buy.

20. Step3:-
Choose the product you want to buy.
Step4:-
On the product’s page, click on Add to WISHLIST to add more products to your recent shopping.

21. Step 5:-
Either Log-In or Sign-Up to add more products to you Wish List.
Step 6:-
To buy, click on BUY NOW button on the product’s page. Then click on PLACE ORDER
button to place your order.

22. Step 7:-
Now, it will ask, whether you are existing customer or a new customer. Choose desired
option and then click on CONTINUE.
Step 8:-
You are required to fill up all the details asked in the form, then click on SAVE AND
CONITNUE.

23. Step 9:-
Click on CONTINUE button by confirming your purchase.
Step 10:-
Select the desired PAYMENT METHOD, according to your facility.

24. Step 11:-
Fill up the details and click on PAY.

25.  Buying Procedure on on-line shopping website, Yepme.
Step 1:
Step 2:

26. Step 3:
Step 4:

27. Step 5:
Step 6:

28. Step 7:
Step 8:

29. Step 9:

30. Chapter 8
Conclusion
E-Commerce is growing tremendously. A lot of companies have joined between the period July and August.
Online retail is still a tiny spot in India’s retail market of about $500 billion a year, but it is growing at a quick pace. A study by retail consultancy Techno Park predicts India’s e-tailing market will reach $32 billion by 2020 from $2.3 billion in 2014.
Ethnic Indian clothes and casual work are favourite products but unusual products like pets-too are being offered online.
With the huge growth that e-commerce has witnessed in recent times analyzed like Devyanshu Dutta, says there is scope for more players to come in. but some also warn about the risks the space is fraught with, as only a few chances of making it big. They also see consolidation in the sector going forward.

31. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Frontiers of Electronic Commerce by Ravi Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinstone
Big E-Commerce deals stir up sector-Economic Times
www.Flipkart.com
www.Yepme.com