Comparing Electronic Commerce Solutions for Small Businesses: Finding the Best Solution

E-commerce is a new way of doing business. It is becoming increasingly important to everybody. The objective of this book is to compare various solutions and to find out the best solution for small businesses. Some commonly used technologies in developing E-commerce systems are introduced in the first three chapters. The topics covered from web standards and protocols to web planning and design, from web servers to server side programming, and most importantly, Java technology and IBM's WebSphere. Based on these technologies, two solutions are presented: building from scratch with Java servlets and building with IBM's WebSphere. We develop an online store with each of the solutions. The last part of the book is a comprehensive comparison. Time, complexity, performance and cost are evaluated in this comparison. A simple conclusion is drawn afterwards with our suggestions to small businesses which solution they should choose. This book will be especially useful to web designers, small business owners, IT analysts and programmers.