Efficient Ecommerce

What is e-commerce?
E-commerce is much more than simply making money out of online stores – although it is that too.

As Wikipedia clearly indicates

The term may refer to more than just buying and selling products online. It also includes the entire online process of developing, marketing, selling, delivering, servicing and paying for products and services.
 
E-commerce is, therefore, practically everything traditional business has done since is origination in past – but even more so in almost every respect.

On the one hand, we have:
- more customer-focus;
- more tailor-made solutions;
- and more satisfied niches;

And yet on the other hand, we have:
- more globalisation;
- more automation;
- and more opportunities;

How is it possible to get so big and still act so small?
This is the miracle of e-commerce – and Amazon.com is a perfect example of how this goal can be achieved. On the web since 1995, in 2011 its revenues reached $48 billion. Although it has since diversified into many other fields, it is still best known and loved for its online stores.
For many years, the site was known for just selling books – and for anyone who loves books, this was a mighty achievement. A bookshop owner acquires a very good knowledge of their clients. Over a long and fruitful business relationship, he or she will intuitively learn what their customers are going to like. And customers value that intuition – very much. In a competitive marketplace, it can often be the difference between making that sale or not.
Anyone who knew the publishing trade – at least in 1995 – could hardly have predicted a website might one day substitute the flesh-and-blood appeal of real professionals such as the above.
And yet from personalised recommendations and instant digital downloads to private and public wish-lists of those items we would most like our family and friends to buy, there is nothing a traditional bookshop-owner can do any longer which Amazon, with its virtual intelligence, cannot.
What is even more incredible, however, is that this concentration of ingenuity and wealth has led not to a fall in book-lovers’ choices but, instead, to a more effective connection with that diversity of interests which characterises modern society.
E-commerce doesn’t just mean higher levels of customer satisfaction in matters such as prices, delivery times, almost instantaneous customer-service emails and mobile apps and purchases – it also leads, if properly implemented by businesspeople looking to get that extra edge, to a greater variety of products, services and opportunities.
We may be looking to sell books or language courses; we may want to provide deals on online credit card transfers or travel insurance; but, whatever the product or service in question, bytes and websites are not only better for the Internet-connected customer than bricks and mortar – they’re cheaper to set up, expand and grow.


How to get it right
Starting off in e-commerce can seem a little daunting.Truth be told, a lot of what it needs is already part and parcel of good business practice. All you need to remember is the following maxim from Jerry Gregoire, an ex-CIO at Dell, the computer manufacturer:
“Don’t automate broken business processes.”
If your processes fail to work efficiently in a bricks-and-mortar store, where you only have to sell to those people who live close by – people who, in any case, probably value you as a friend above all – just imagine what’s likely to happen to such processes when they’re exposed to the competitive gaze of millions of potential customers.

The secret is there is no secret…
The only secret is knowing who to ask.
Solutions exist – all you need to do is understand the options first. Once you’ve understood the options and made your bricks-and-mortar processes as resilient as possible, it’s time to contact reputable organisations which show that they are able to understand your processes – as well as engineer effective e-commerce implementations.

7 factors that lead to e-commerce success
As part of its comprehensive analysis, the study examined seven overall factors in online retail success. These range from site design and the user-friendliness to the product range, the pricing level and the payment methods offered to shipping options and delivery of goods to the customer.

Meanwhile, a report on e-commerce in India concluded:
One of the main challenges that online shops have been confronted with for a long time is the desire of Indian consumers to see and touch products before buying them. As a result, many retailers offer cash-on-delivery payment and convenient return and refund options. Nonetheless, B2C E-Commerce experienced a more than 30 % growth from 2010 to 2011 in India.

The results of the largest survey of customer satisfaction in German e-commerce, conducted by ECC Handel and Hermes, were published on the occasion of the Online Trading Congress in Bonn. More than 10,000 consumers and customers of 108 German online shops came to the conclusion: Musikhaus Thomann is better than Amazon.

PHP Web Programming and Business Benefits of PHP Development

Inception of PHP is almost two decade old, when Danish programmer Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP in 1995. Inspired by that, in year 1997, two Israeli programmers Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote the parser, creating the base for PHP 3 and also built the Zend engine which is still followed as the interpreter for PHP.

Influence Of PHP Across Web

Today, almost two decades after countless colossal modifications to codebase, more than 35% of web traffic is handled by PHP. Facts on Wikipedia say 75% of websites use PHP, which includes some giant domains such as Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Photobucket and many others. Amazingly, list doesn’t end here; world’s best blogging platform “WordPress” and other popular CMSs like Drupal and Joomla are built in php.

Above mentioned facts are enough to claim the dominancy of PHP even in the presence of killer web development technologies. But, what are the reasons, why php hits the mainstream enterprise and why it is forecasted to maintain its momentum even in the coming years.

Success of php web programming totally bets on advantages which it offers to its users. Not only PHP developers find it convenient, but even end-users claim it to be friendly. Several studies have concluded some common advantages offered by php development, and they are as follow.

Free For All “Its Open Source”

Under GPL (General Public License) PHP is freely available for use, along with its associated software’s like MySQL, Text Editors and Apache Server to reduce your overall development cost. With the aim to serve you better, php community offers technical support and is constantly sweating hard to improve the core functionalities of PHP.

Cross-Platform Compatibility

It exhibits high compatibility with all the major OS and servers for easy deployment across vivid platforms. PHP scripts can run across OS like Linux, Windows, Solaris, OpenBSD, Mac OSX and others. It also provides support for all leading servers such as Apache, IIS, iPlanet and so on.

Powers Equally – Either Small or Big Websites

Either small or giant, whatever are your business needs a php based business website can be easily developed in not time and in limited budget. Business and organizational websites, informative forums, CRM solutions, e-commerce websites, community websites, e-business and gigantic database driven sites can be easily developed using php.

Extensions to Expand Functionalities

Plethora of extensions and libraries are available across the web using which you can extend core functionalities of your website. Even custom created extensions can be included into source code of PHP.

Top Security – For Hacker Proof Website

It offers top level security that helps prevent malicious attacks. These security stages can be easily attuned in the .ini file.

Veteran Developers to Execute Your Plans

You can hire PHP programmers/developers from reputed web development company more easily than any other language programmers. Just follow simple tips to hire veteran developers and stay away from worries.

In the end, if you are in the mood to add dynamic content to your project, then use of PHP is highly recommended. It free, easy to understand and integrates almost all the functionalities as per your needs. There are tons of php developers available on the net. Please don’t hesitate to add anything if I have missed some other great PHP benefits. Feel free to share your thoughts with other readers.

Tips to Create Secure PHP Applications

PHP is one of the most popular programming languages for the web. Such languages are very helpful for the programmer but the security holes in it can create a problem. They can create problems in the development path.Below are few tips to help you avoid some common PHP security pitfalls and development bug.
1. Use of Proper Error Reporting
Error reporting can be your best friend during the development process. Error reports helps you to find spelling mistakes in your variables and also detect incorrect function usage. Always make sure that you hide all the error reporting once you decide to make the site live.
This can be done by invoking the simple function “error_reporting(0)” at the top of your application file(s).
You should always make sure to log your errors to a protected file. Which help to detect the problem when something go wrong. Therefore, This can be done with the PHP function “set_error_handler”.
2. Disable PHP’s harmful Features
PHP’s creators have always included some features to make PHP development easier. Some of these helpful features can have unintended consequences.
We can call these as “bad features” because they have allowed data validation and created a path for bugs to finding their way into scripts. One of
the first things you should do when the development process begins is
disable certain of these features. Depending on the host which you are using, these may or may not be turned off for you. If you are developing on your own computer or any local environment, they probably won’t be turned off. Some of these features have also been removed in the upcoming PHP6, but are ubiquitous in PHP4 applications and are only deprecated in PHP5 applications.
3. Validate Input
With addition to escaping characters, another good way to protect
input is to validate it. Normally you actually know what kind of data you are expecting on input.  So the simplest way to protect yourself against attacks is to make sure your users can only enter the appropriate data.
4. Watch for Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks in User Input
A web application usually accepts input from users and displays it
in some way. They can be in a wide variety of forms. When accepting input, allowing HTML can be a dangerous thing,because that allows for JavaScript to be executed in unintended ways. If even one hole is left open, JavasScript can be executed and cookies could be hijacked. This cookie data could then be used to fake a real account and give an illegal user access to the website’s data. There are a some ways you can protect your site from such attacks. One way is to disallow HTML altogether, because then there is no possible way to allow any JavaScript to execute.
5. Protecting against SQL Injection
SQL injection attacks occur when data is not checked, and the application doesn’t escape characters used in SQL strings such as single quotes (‘) or double quotes (“). If these characters are not filtered out users can disturb the system by making queries always true and which allow them to trick  login systems.
MySQLi help protect your database input. We can do it in 2 ways.
Either with the mysqli_real_escape_string function when connected to a server or with prepared statements.
Prepared statements are a method of separating SQL logic from the data being passed to it. The functions used within the MySQLi library filter the input for us when we bind variables to the prepared statement.