E-commerce has been a helpful service for both the customers and businesses. Businesses get the advantage of managing different bodies in an organizational process like finance, inventory, technology etc. Customers, on the other hand, need not to move from their locations and can purchase the goods with a click of the mouse.
E-commerce service requires careful designing of architecture so as to provide a simple, user-friendly application yet powerful enough to conduct secure data processing and transactions between various nodes. Some best considered practices which should be deployed while developing an e-commerce application are:
- E-commerce application should collaborate with the gateway provider to support multiple currencies. The intent of an e-commerce application to provide home shopping experience to global customer. So, the developing application should be designed to support not only a single valued currency but multiple currencies.
- Currency converter should be provided to facilitate customers. It is not always necessary that the visitor purchasing a product would always be well-informed with the stock exchange census. Customers should know how much they are spending for the product they are purchasing in their currency.
- Security parameters should be carefully studied and related security measures should be engaged in the application. Most common and effective security measure is the SSL certificate which ensures the authenticity of the application and to securely transfer data between browser and merchant’s server.
- Stress testing should be conducted on the application properly to ensure the stability of the application under extreme load conditions. An application crash during connecting to payment gateway while making a payment will not be a desirable event.
- Memory management of the application should be efficient enough to allocate the run-time memory without leaving any chunk of storage unused. It should also free the memory when the session expires so as to allocate it to some other thread or user trying to connect.
- It’s a big NO-NO for e-commerce applications to store the financial information of the customer. Chances are there when a hacker may intrude the safety firewall of the merchant’s server and try to access the client’s information. If such information would be present in the merchant’s database, hacker would extract that information and would use it for selfish purposes.
- Inventory updating system should be involved in the front-end of the application. It would not be appreciated if a customer purchases a product, makes all the transactions and suddenly, the administrator on the other end gets to know that the commodity is out of stock. It would not only hamper the reputation of the merchant but the company policy would also be compromised.
User interface simplicity also adds to the advantage for the application in the long run. If the application is designed with the concern of keeping a simple user interface, it’s going to earn with positive user reviews and their experience with the site. Browsing a complex site is not what a user expects while purchasing online. This depends on the technologies deployed by the software product development company.