Comercio is online shopping portal with tailoring options for both buyers and sellers. It provides the customer with an elegant shopping experience and it equips the seller with ample customization to establish his online store without the necessity to get involved with any of the technical complications involved in the process.
Summary of scope
- Seller’s online shop customization
- Seller inventory management
- Buyer’s cart management
- Buyer’s purchase history management
- Tailored feed for buyers
- A user rating and commenting system
- Seller shop customization
Demonstrations
Detailed Functionality
Users will frist have to register as buyers. Buyers wil be given basic functionality such as password editing, updating billing addresses, viewing their oder histories and opening a shop. Every seller upon successful activation gets a virtual store where they can personalize the layout and the content to be displayed. This store displays their products and creates a brand identity for them. Sellers have access to an admin panel which allows them to update their store details and add products or edit their details.
The most popular and highly rated products and sellers get displayed on the main store, the default page of Comercio, which serves commonly for all users. The customer home page, along with bestselling products would also display recent products, to ensure the exposure before being dismissed. This would be presented to the user in a pleasant way to ensure the friendly and comfortable environment we have determined to deliver.
Seller would be allowed to upload a logo and select appropriate background images for their shop slider. Content editing of the shop content boxes would be allowed, for features such as shop description, tagline and product category display. Seller would be required to add the categories of products he wishes to sell through his shop upon activating the feature. Only one of these mentioned categories will be used in each product registration. Total sales by the shop and number of products available is displayed in the shop page.
The website registration will be completely free of charge and service will also be advertisement free for the benefit of buyers.
Product Management
Products will be either virtual or physical. Shipments would not have to be arranged for virtual products. The available stock quantity is defined, and once the end has reached the product would be displayed as out of stock in which case seller would have to update the stock quantity.
Upon adding a new product sellers would be allowed to upload a default thumbnail image for the product and multiple images for the product gallery. Product would have to be added to one of the categories that were defined at the shop registration.
Products could be standalone products or variation products. Up to 10 variations will be made available for each physical product such as available colors, available sizes and etc. All variations would have the same price and a product of any combination of the available variations could be purchased by the seller. Stocks would be taken as one product and seller would have to update the variation values according to the availability.
Purchasing Process
- Browsing
- Every product a seller would be adding would be indexed to our main database and buyers would be able to browse through by searching for names or by categories.
- Purchasing
- Upon visiting the product page, the customers would be allowed to add the item to cart. The shipping would have been calculated and added to the cart. Products already added to cart can be removed and the prices would be readjusted. Upon clicking checkout, buyers would confirm cart and then order button. In checkout, an order will be placed and buyer would be redirected to the payment gateway to complete the payment
- Feedback
- Upon arrival of product buyer would be asked to rate the transaction and confirm that the transaction is completed. Buyers can further comment on the product page where they can voice their satisfaction or dissatisfaction
Ratings
Ratings will be implemented to ensure the reliability of the website, which depends strictly on the user base. It would be in the form of reputation points and reviews for buyers, shops and individual products.
Every buyer gets experience points on every purchase. If a seller has reported a buyer the interactions between the buyer and the seller, buyer and seller’s products and the shop would be revisited and if the seller proves to be true buyer would be reduced of experience points for false claims. Sellers will get points upon fast delivery, keeping true to money back guarantee and enabling free shipping for their products.
Buyers would be allowed to post comment on items he and she has previously purchased so that other buyers can read and get an idea about the product and the general transaction.
Conclusion
Comercio is intended to serve budding entrepreneurs and also for established retailers willing to foray into online commerce. By giving them a portal to exhibit and sell their products, this platform empowers them with the ability to control their venture into e-commerce. With the customizations available, they would be able to create their own personal brand for their products eliminating the need of creating a separate website for the purpose of marketing.
The feelings and experience of sellers as well as buyers have been taken into consideration and a limited options customizable interface has been implemented. The feed tailoring provided enables buyers to only see what he/she intends to see. The advertisement free approach further highlights the buyer requirement for a clean shopping experience.
For future work, the completion of payment API integration and further interface updates can be mentioned. The practical procedures in concerns such as shipping has to be given more thought to and the software counterparts that facilitate those have to be integrated for the completion of this project.