Customer Reviews

The Complete E-Commerce Book, Second Edition: Design, Build & Maintain a Successful Web-based Business

5 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

Back when I was first doing an e-commerce web site (you remember, that was the days when we walked three miles to school, uphill both directions) this book would have saved me days of effort. It is an introductory level book. That is to say, it will get you started, but by the time you have a working site, you will have learned a lot more than in your specialized areas than is covered here. This book provides the basic introduction. Do you want a shopping cart type application or perhaps an auction? What about peer-to-peer file sharing or perhaps a blog? This book will talk about these initial decisions that have to be made before you start thinking about the guts of implementing them. After these decisions are made you'll need more detailed books on the specific area where you are going.

The one thing I would like to see added to a new edition would be specific software recommendations, i.e. what two or three shopping cart solutions would she recommend.

I was very disappointed with this book.

One thing that I hate about the book is that it has ads in the back. The ads are for seven other books. I expect to see ads in magazines, but when I pay for a book I don't want advertising.

More importantly, the writing is awkward and hard to understand. For example, here's how she describes relational databases:

"A relational database is a collection of 'data items' that are organized as a set of linked tables from which data can be accessed or reassembled in many different ways without need to reorganize the database tables (a table is referred to as a 'relation')."

Huh?! That description is confusing and much of it is wrong. How can data be "reassembled"? What does she mean by "without need to reorganize the database tables"? Database tables can have foreign keys or referential integrity, but they are not "linked". Each table is its own independent entity.

She continues, "The columns in all of the tables must depend upon a single key column with values that don't repeat." That's not true either. It's very common to have a table with multiple keys or no keys whatsoever.

The author explains that "SQL is a declarative language, which means that the user specifies what he or she wants and then the RDBMS query planner figures out how to get it." But that's not what "declarative language" means at all.

I tried to work my way through the poor writing and typos, but after a while I lost confidence that the information in the book was accurate and I put it down.

If you are from planet Mars, you still wouldn't find this book useful. The dumbest person I know, knows more than is in this book. There is no code. It doesn't tell you exactly how to do anything. It just blah blah's on and on about useless info. Design, Build, and Maintain a website title? It doesn't cover any of the technical side of this like the title says. Save you money and pay someone to start your online business for you. It took a whole book to tell you this????? Save your money.

After browsing thru all the chapters, i got the impression that the author is only buzzword-compliant and cannot go into any detail in any subject area. She must have read a lot on ecommerce, but i doubt she ever did any "real work" with ecommerce. The writing reads like it comes from a "good" student who diligently repeats all the words a professor said in a business classroom.

Reynolds talks about many aspects of running your own commercial website. She discusses what type of servers you might need and how to configure these using RAID to maximise uptime while preserving data against hardware failure. Also mentioned is what type of net connections might be suitable and affordable. Along with how to implement security against various types of fraud attempts.

For promoting your website, email newsletters are suggested as being very economical. Though beware of email ad campaigns that can get you labelled as a spammer. Search Engine Optimisation gets a good exposition as a cheap way to promote your site in an engine's rankings.

The "Complete" in the title is slightly misleading. The book does not get into the nitty gritty of technical details about making a database, for example. Or writing webpages. Rather, it's at a higher level of design and management of these issues.

this book is very clear and informative, a bit technical in some places but still worth every dime. better than the others i've got

The dot-com bubble is about to burst again! But, that doesn't mean that e-commerce is dead--to the contrary. Author Janice Reynolds has done an outstanding job of writing the second edition of a book that provides select comparisons of various tools needed to construct, design, and run a successful e-commerce website.

Reynolds begins by examining the e-commerce phenomenon, and the challenges that it brings. Next, the author shows you how you can design a website that is brilliantly complex, employing all of the latest technology, or design a simple site without sacrificing attractiveness or efficiency. Then, she explains why the design and pre-build details are among the first steps you must take when extending an e-commerce site to the Web. The author continues by discussing that if you want to host your own servers, the best advice is to create a balanced plan with each segment working in partnership with each other. In addition, the author next discusses how power and data redundancy are a good start to ensure that your website is always available, but other types of redundancy also should be considered when building a website. She also deals with the bandwidth aspect of connectivity. Next, the author shows you how to institute an on-going program of security monitoring, maintenance, and to perform an annual security audit. Then, she shows you how to choose your basic website software: web server, log analysis, and database. The author continues by discussing specific e-commerce software. In addition, she discusses adjunct software. The author also covers how you can create a good QA plan to determine how and in what order each aspect of a website should be tested. Then, she discusses various software and online solutions to aid in your quest for the perfect, problem-free website. The author continues by examining consultant contracts, costs, types of consulting services available, when to outsource and when to do the work in-house. In addition, the author provides tips on how to choose a web-hosting service. She also examines three different methods that are used to search the Web. Next, the author offers some advice on getting the work started, developing targeted marketing strategies, monitoring the results, and continuously striving to improve your efforts. Then, she explains that in order to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, the web-based business must realize that site experience is actually more important to an online customer than product experience, and build the website and service solutions around that fact. The author continues by discussing why order processing and fulfillment is a website's last form of customer contact. Finally, she shares some thoughts on the future of e-commerce.

The author has done an excellent job of writing a book with both the entrepreneur and the non-technology executive in mind. So, at the end of the day, this book will help you ask the right questions as you move to the Web.