merbabupoint

E-commerce Development(ITSD325-1703A-01)

Walmart

Michael Walden

7/24/17

Wal-Mart is operational as a chain of hypermarkets that is a discount department stores, and grocery stores. It is a well know old retail center in located in America (Mohapatra, 2013, p. 99).Wal-Mart has 11,695 stores and clubs in 28 countries, under a total of 63 banners. It has traditional stores and supercenter whereby the supercenter is stocking everything i.e. it has garden center, pet shop, pharmacy, tire and lubricants, optical center and photo processing laboratory. Wal-Mart operates internationally since early 1990’s. The Wal-Mart clubs and stores are worldwide currently operating with 4263 stores and 660,000 workers in 15 countries outside the United States of America.

Wal-Mart has the following departments working with different products electronics and office, movies, music and books, home furniture and appliances, clothing, shoes and jewelry, baby and toddler, toys and video games, food, household and pets, pharmacy, health and beauty, sports, fitness and outdoors, auto and tires, photo, gifts and personalized shop, sewing, crafts and party supplies. The Wal-Mart provides home delivery services for the entire product.

The organization needs an e-commerce website, because it can help the organization in managing the wide variety of products by keeping the eye on the consumers buying habit and thus assist in making future decision amendments in proving the products. E-commerce websites will also decrease the cost of inventory management in the organization; Wal-Mart will therefore decrease the cost of managing their goods inventory that they can automate inventory management by the use of web-based management system. This will indirectly save their operational costs. E-commerce website will initiate and make it easy for the Wal-Mart to sell their products across the world i.e. the location of the store may be limited to a specific location and by adopting ecommerce it will cover larger area. The entire world would be your playground where you can you can complete all the range of the products. Wal-Mart services should stay open 24 hours, 53 weeks in a year, e-commerce website is essential to make it happen because ecommerce websites can be ran which boosts the number of orders. There will be a huge benefit to the customers since they can purchase products at whatever time they are in need. Ecommerce website will definitely bring convince and easiness to the Wal-Mart organization and many people in the world because ecommerce has become one of the preferred ways of shopping as they enjoy their online activities thus its convenience i.e. allowed to buy the product at a comfort of their home place at any given time.

Wal-Mart also need an ecommerce website to offer their wide product datasheets i.e. Customers get description and details from an online product catalog. For example in the case of customers, it is very much important to get information about the product no matter whether the time of day and day of the week. Through information, Wal-Mart customers and prospects will be making decision to purchase products or not in a very easy way.

Implementation of e-commerce website in the Wal-Mart organization requires significant key elements for its success. First the ecommerce site should have a convenient search tool. First time customer will probably is looking for one particular product and they do not want to spend the whole day doing the sifting through the list of items provided in the Wal-Mart site. Therefore filtered searches should be the most key element in the site since Wal-Mart provides a wide variety of products. The Wal-Mart website should depict simplicity as an element in that no one is should need to read a manual to be able to use the website therefore the design should be simple and straight forward. Another key element is security; since people would shop online therefore personal information should be kept confidential by the Wal-Mart organization and thus customers will want to know if at all the information is really secured. Therefore the data or information that is collected through the ecommerce website should definitely not be disclosed to any unauthorized personnel, and you should take measures to demonstrate to visitors that the website is secure and legit. Another most powerful key element is the mobile responsiveness if Wal-Mart website is not compatible to the mobile then it will be hard time to please customers to use. Also the Wal-Mart website should provide the shipping information clearly i.e. If it is free shipping or with charges. A visitor should have clear information about the shipping. The other element to consider is the number of clicks before an action is done successful; fewer clicks are equal to the better performance. A product that is buried under a whole lot of clicks is just as good as non-existent. It must be ensured that all the products can be accessed with a maximum of four clicks. No one wants to waste time being redirected to page after page. These have ensured strategy in which the stores have enjoyed in internal market (Gaspar, 2017, p. 45).

The quality of images in a Wal-Mart organization ecommerce website should be of high quality, as the ecommerce website should accommodate the organization product images. These images should be high quality and unique. Invest in good quality images and your product listing ads on Google will pop from the rest of the more traditional images.

The key Wal-Mart infrastructure components as shown on the diagram should include hardware, webserver software, and e-commerce software. The hardware include the client servers or customer computer, mobile phones, tablets etc. this are the devices which allows the customers to communicate with the organization server when connected via internet protocols. Through this connection the customer is able to do wide variety of activities including searching, buying. The web server is also needed, this is hardware device that is used to host an ecommerce website i.e. all html files, databases and image files that make up the entire content of the website are stored on the server. The web server platform completes with the appropriate software and sufficient storage capacity and computing power are required. The web server software is needed to perform fundamental services including security and identification, retrieval and sending of web pages, Web site tracking, Web site development, and web page development. Database is essential thing needed to store and retrieve information these wide variety products of Wal-Mart, it is therefore a requisite element in the ecommerce website build for the Wal-Mart organization. Ecommerce website usual targets specific group of people (Khosrow-Pour, 2018, p. 2741)

Wal-Mart should also have the application server; this is software framework that provides both facilities to create web applications and a server environment to run them. The application server is acting as a set of protocols accessible to the web developer through an API defined by the platform itself. In the ecommerce web applications, these components are usually performed in the same running environment as their web server having the main task as to support the construction of dynamic pages in the website. This application servers target much more than just web page generation instead it would help in implementation of the other essential services like fail-over, load-balancing and site clustering.

Backend systems tools also can be referred as authoring tools as shown on the graphical representation are used to develop the front end of an e-commerce website. A wide range of software packages can be used together to create an entire. HTML files can be created in a web authoring package. The html files created will include CSS files that are used to enhance the visual appearance of the site. Other web authoring tools would be visual studio .net the can be used to make websites that connect to integrated databases that are stored alongside them. Other web authoring tools are graphic design packages that can be used to design the skin for the user interface design. This skin can then be exported into a HTML and CSS combination that is used as the basis for developing the site.

Finally the E-commerce software can be termed as the drive engine behind the process of an cloud/online storage, it makes it possible to easily manage online inventory, adding or removing of products, compute taxes, and everything else required to manage a website and fulfill orders. Moreover it is needed to create and update the product catalog, perform product configuration, shipping cart facilities to track items selected for purchase, e-commerce transaction processing, and web traffic data analysis. E-commerce software basically simplifies intricate processes in a friendly user interface that enables people non-technical backgrounds to oversee an entire ecommerce operation. Despite the ease of use that ecommerce software brings to an online business, it is a multifaceted and complex machine; it is therefore an essential element for the Wal-Mart organization. With this E-commerce software Wal-Mart will have everything put and run in the same store place. It will simplify market for the Wal-Mart organization, provide automated shipping and taxes, easy management of products, easy customer and product management and enhance overall user experience.

The requirement of a system is the element that captures specification (Grady 1998 p.10). It takes into account possible conflicts developing an e-commerce system will require proper requirement analysis. Require analysis involves three steps which are; - elicitation of requirement, analysis of the requirement, and requirements specifications. Like all the other software development e-commerce system under go these three steps in requirement analysis.

Elicitation of requirement involves the gathering of the requirements needed for gathering the needs for the system. This process involves interviewing various stakeholders to understand what will be the functionality of the system. E-commerce and other system have this process to determine the requirement of the system.

After which the requirement will be analyzed to know their relationship and functionality of the system. Use cases may be used at this stage. E-commerce system requirement analysis is also arrived at in the same way.

Stakeholder

At requirement stage of an e-commerce system, developers or engineers should get the required system functionality from the stakeholders. Stakeholders are people who have a particular interest in or use this e-commerce system. Unlike other systems e-commerce system has numerous stakeholders who interact with it. Some of the stakeholders of an e-commerce system include; - management or executive, IT team, marketing team, sales team and customer of the company. It is important for development to interview all this stakeholders and analysis the requirement in order to formulate desired functionality of an e-commerce. Different stakeholders will have the varying requirement on the system.

Management or executive will have the interest in the system such as get real-time information such as stock sales, profit, and other management requirements. The development team should factor in this requirement in developing the system to ensure that they included. It also makes the work of executive and management easier due to automation of their work.

Other stakeholders of an e-commerce are IT team. IT team plays important role in running the ecommerce system. They ensure that e-commerce website is well interfaced with another system such as ERP. IT team post products and ensure that all the systems are running well and reflect needed information at any given time. IT team is very important to be interviewed as they interact with the system all the time. A technical faction of the system is derived from this group.

The marketing team is also important stakeholders. Like any other business, entity e-commerce does marketing for their products. Wal-Mart does their market both physically and online. The system designed should accommodate market of products

The requirement of the end-user customer of the system should be taken into consideration. Customers should be able to view and order products at their comfort. Customers’ requirement is important for development team to know the requirement of customer or front end

Major requirements

Some of the major requirement of a Wal-Mart e-commerce website may include the following;-

I. Executive should be to view transactions sales, stock and the returns from the e-commerce

II. They system should interface with another system such as ERP

III. The system should market some of the product such as informing the customer of available products, offers, and promotions.

IV. It should interface well with the sales team of the company.

V. The system should provide the user-friendly interface for end-user customers.

Developing of the requirement may come with some the problems. Some of these problems in requirement analysis are unrealistic expectations from the stakeholders, poor participation by stake holders in identifying requirements, the requirement from weak or unrelated stakeholders. Other conflicts are poorly expressed or weak requirements. To elicit system requirement of any e-commerce system such as Wal-Mart development have analysis requirements and select important and required ones.

Requirement analysis is very important for the development of an e-commerce website as it will determine the performance of the system and its functionality. Wal-Mart system is optimized to provide different functionality to various stake holders.

Reference:

Gaspar, J. E. (2017). Introduction to global business: understanding the international environment and global business functions. Boston, MA: Engage Learning.

Grill-Goodman, J. (n.d.). Five Ways Walmart is Investing in Technology. Retrieved August 01, 2017, from https://risnews.com/five-ways-walmart-investing-technology

Grady, J. O. (1998). System validation and verification. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Khosrow-Pour, M. (2018). Encyclopedia of information science and technology. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.

Mohapatra, S. (2013). E-Commerce Strategy Text and Cases. Boston, MA: Springer US.