Academic Work

Master’s project undertaken in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MSc Degree in Internet Systems Development at the University of Portsmouth.

Project Title:

Virtual Shopping and Payment Processing Centre

Date: December 2007

Abstract

This project is about providing economically viable business-to-consumer e-commerce capability to micro and small enterprises in middle income countries. The report outlines why these companies are not using standard e-commerce practices as used in developed countries and describes a solution involving a virtual shopping centre with product presentations submitted directly by shops. The requirements for this application are obtained through interviews with small shops and analysis of their business practices, legal obligations and restrictions. These requirements have been analysed using UML notation, with use cases and sequence diagrams, and they have lead to a full system design. The application was developed and tested.

The report concludes that, although there is a room for improvement and implementation of additional features, this application would provide added value for micro and small enterprises requiring ability to offer their products over the Internet without prior investment. As the application is build around the idea of a potentially profitable business model, for an online service provider it could represent a significant business opportunity.

This project won the School of Computing Prize for the Best Business Solution Project.

Download

Virtual Shopping and Payment Processing Centre (Volume 1, PDF, 970 KB)

Volume 2 (Appendices) and access to practical implementation are available upon request.