A WEB BASED TRADING PLATFORM FOR GHANAIAN

UNIVERSITY STUDENTS (uniSell)

CURTIS BIMPONG DONKOR

INDEX NUMBER: 11015740

PRESENTED ON:

APRIL, 2015

INTRODUCTION

• The Web based trading platform (uniSell) project is a system

developed to solve the essential problems of timely acquisition and

delivery of educational materials by the Ghanaian university student.

• This platform is an academic ecommerce platform. With ecommerce

a buyer can not directly examine the product and must rely on the

accuracy of the system and seller (Melnik, 2002).

DATABASE SYSTEM

• E-commerce is the use of the Internet and the Web to transact

business. More formally, digitally enabled commercial transactions

between and among organizations and individual. (Introduction to E -

Commerce, 2006).

• This simply means obtaining information at our fingertips, without

wasting time, money and effort, and also to conduct real time

transactions in a borderless of ours. With e-Commerce transactions, it

is a Win-Win situation for the parties (both buyers and sellers)

participating in it.

ADVANTAGES OF E-COMMERCE APPLICATIONS.

Catalogue flexibility and Online fast updating

Shrinks the Competition Gap

Unlimited Market Place and Business Access which Extend Customer Base

A 24 Hour Store Reduced Sale Cycle

Lower Cost of Doing Business

Eliminate Middleman

Can handle multiple user interfaces.

BACKGROUND

Ghanaian students required to acquire the appropriate books and other learning materials to improve

their academic work. It is the responsibility of the various university authorities to provide all the

appropriate books in the schools libraries for students to use.

At a greater or lesser extent, some universities have been successful in making this provision. On the

other hand, dynamic changes in technology, which has been consistent for the past 30 years has had a

rippling effect on the academic needs of nGhanaian university students.

CHALLENGES

• Recommended text books are mostly written by foreign authors hence they have to be acquired online

using credit cards or shipped. Ghanaians are not internationally privileged to use this online credit card

system and also, shipping will also delay or may never arrive.

Some identified challenges and others makes finding and acquiring academic items by Ghanaian student

very difficult and unrewarding. This has affected academic work progress of Ghanaian university

students and challenge me to research and design a system to help solve.

JUSTIFICATION

• The increase in the competition of electronic commerce with the presence of big

players like tonaton and olx among others have challenged me to come up this

project using the skills and knowledge gained through my study of information

technology to design an interactive platform with students being my priority. The

project aims to highlight on the use of technology to help better the process students

goes through in acquiring course materials.

OBJECTIVES

The main objective is to simplify the process of acquiring educational materials by all Ghanaian university students a

stress less effort to ensure that the acquisition and deliveryare accurate, timely and relevant for the Ghanaian university

student at all levels.The following about theweb based platform are expected to be achieved:

accept and transmit data from the other web platforms to a centralized database

Provide a database to store all the data resulting from the e-commerce activity

Provide a useful easy to use but professional user interface to interact with the database

Allow users to query the database to search and sort information in a more useful way

Prevent errors and eliminate redundancy of data

Provide accuracy information example in dates of events

Help users to generate reports faster and accurately

Provide Security of the ecommerce activity.

LITERATURE REVIEW

• E-commerce is the use of the Internet and the Web to transact business. More formally, digitally enabled

commercial transactions between and among organizations and individual. (Introduction to E - Commerce, 2006).

Major Types of E commerce.

• E-Commerce itself is categorized into several sections. Among the sections are Business-

• To-Business (B2B), Business-To-Consumer (B2C), and Business-To-Government (B2G)

• and Consumer-To-Consumer (C2C).

• The Growth of the Internet and the Web

• The Growth of E-Commerce

CURRENT SYSTEM

• The existing system is a manual, time consuming and semi-automated. University’s libraries own

and store most of these educational materials especially books. This makes their acquisition very

monotonous and time consuming. Student has to abandon or cancel all appointment and travel in

traffic around libraries, cities and possibly ‘black markets’ in search of educational material.

• Again, the search for, the right information relating these educational materials are somehow

unfruitful. Acquiring them overseas also has its own constraints, normally reaching the buyer

most likely at the very end of the semester.

• Presently, Selling and buying educational materials exist in many forms but none of

these really looks at university students in the Ghanaian context.

PROPOSED SYSTEM

Is a Web based trading platform (uniSell)

Improve the accuracy, reliability, availability and speed with which educational material contents are accessed, reviewed

and transacted.

Ensure structured, logical and centralized storage of products and information for easy access by all relevant users.

Ensure security by granting users some level of authority to the system by implementing,

a. User level privileges

b. User accounts

c. Other security controls like password authentication.

Provide administrative backend facilities to help in clarifying contents before posting to help make the most positive

impact on the users the system will serve.

METHODOLOGY

• The project employs the use of Rational Unified Process (RUP).

• The RUP is a software engineering process that ensures the production of high quality software that meet the need

of its end users within a predictable schedule and budget.

• It involves four sequential phases and nine disciplines.

• Technology Development Tools

Database system (MySQL)

PHP

Apache

DESIGN

• Should be able to handle more than one user at a go and

robust enough so that the users are not in position to corrupt it

due to accidental or intentional misconduct.

• Have user interfaces and user guides understandable by

people of average computer skills. It should as well as be able

to give a user reasonable responses and have possibilities for

taking in user suggestions for improvement so that contents

and transaction is complete in line with the needs of the user.

• It should be available, reliable, usable and not costly to

maintain.

• Non Functional Requirements

System Speed

Output Presentation

System Availability

System Accessibility

User Requirements Functional Requirements

• The system should be hosted on an external domain host’s

server

• The system should be able to handle all content (data)

requirements available in the existing system.

• The system should be able to detect multiple entries and

prevent future failure occurrences.

• It should be able to back up the contents for security reasons

in case of a computer crash.

• The system must be easily scalable.

• The system should be able to update contents in the database

by either editing ordeleting the different records about

interventions.

• The system should be able to deliver accurate information

when requested.

• The system should be able to give proper access rights to

users of the system.

• The system should be able to authenticate the user and

validate the data before allowing transactions

CONTEXT DIAGRAM OF THE PROPOSE SYSTEM

USE CASE OF THE PROPOSED SYSTEM

SEQUENCE DIAGRAM FOR uniSellADMINISTRATOR

SEQUENCE DIAGRAM FOR uniSellREGISTERED USER

SEQUENCE DIAGRAM FOR uniSellUNREGISTERED USER

ANALYSIS CLASS DIAGRAM

REFERENCES.

• Books

• Agile Database Techniques—Effective Strategies for the Agile Software - Scott W. Ambler

• PHP and MySQL Web Development - Luke Welling and Laura Thomson

• Shelly, G, Cashman, T & Rosenblatt, H. (2003) Systems Analysis and Design, -5th edition Course Technology

• Hughes B & Cotterell M. (2002) Software Project Management. - McGraw-Hill

• Articles

• Mäkeläinen, S. I. (2006). From B2C to C2C e-commerce.

• Melnik, M., & Alm, J. (2002). the emarket place. journal of industrial economics, 192 - 198.

• Reynolds, J. (200). eCommerce: A Critical Review. International Journal of Retail and Distribution, 145 - 170.

WebsitesMorrison, K. (2014, Jun 13). The growth e-commerce. Retrieved from www.adweek.com: http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/data-growth-e-commerce-infographic/199692(2006). In Introduction to E - Commerce (pp. 9-10). Pearson.Amazon. (2015, January). Retrieved from Amazon: http;//www.amazon.comLiu, H. (2015, January 18). News. Retrieved from CNET: http://www.cnet.com/news/china-opens-door-for-full-foreign-ownership-of-e-commerce-companies/