ABSTRACT

With the advent of internet, integrated systems been a welcomed development especially in the field of commerce and education. Institutions are now moving from local offline type to cloud based model where information is visible to the public irrespective of location. For readers, travelling long distances to buy books constitutes many problems like time wastage or unavailability of needed books at arrival. Also getting and keeping the office cards or contact details of books sellers is cumbersome as they may be lost to time and destroyed by long usage. Due to the numerous advantages of online technologies, we have implemented it in the development of an e-commerce website for the sale and purchase of books. This site is a web application which links customers and sellers of books. The customer can search through for a book, purchase the books and make payment online from the comfort of their homes. The system was designed using JavaScript, HTML5, and PHP programming languages for data manipulation and MySQL for data storage.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

It is quite obvious that the internet and the World Wide Web are growing faster than they were estimated in the past decades. The Internet Technology unequivocally has dramatically reduced the world into a global village where information is readily obtainable. Commerce, which is one of the essential parts of the real world activities has made its mark and found its way into the internet. It is commonly referred to as E-commerce which means electronic commerce or On-line Shopping. On-line book sales entails buying and selling of books of all sorts with the buyer making the payment through the internet or through any other computer network. This pattern of trade conducted through the internet has grown extraordinarily simultaneously with wide spread use of the internet. This new trend in fact has contributed immensely to the growth of E-business and particularly in E-education. The number of transactions grows every day, spurring and drawing innovations in the E-Library System and E-Commerce, Electronic Fund Transfer, Tupply Chain Management, On-line Transactions Processing and Internet Marketing (Christopher et al., 2014).

Sometimes people want services directly without necessarily going to a shopping malls or stores. They will want to have the same service by just accessing the internet and making their purchases. This reduces transportation cost and time can be spent instead on other important activities and its environmental friendly .The is an increase in online usage and consequently an increase in online e-commerce. There is available technology to build such sites and provide secure and reliable services to customers.

In this case, an e-commerce site for online book sales is just one of them trying to use the power of internet and technology to develop a website that that can make book purchase and sales easier. Online Book sales normally make use of the World Wide Web (www) to an extent in the transaction life cycle; it also involves shopping of the physical items requested on-line. This chapter of the project research does not only explore the background of the study, the statement of the problems, purpose of study, the significance of the study and the limitations, it also goes as far as exposing and expounding the secrets and fortunes locked up in an online book shopping.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

The process of buying books from the small scale business requires that the customers must move with cash and travel long distances which may be dangerous to their life. Furthermore, the paper and pen method of stock management in a book store which have their disadvantages. Also unavailability of some staff in the shop or unfavorable store opening and closing time leads customer to repeatedly visit a particular shop in other to get a particular book.

For the shop, loss of vital document, damage of document due to fire or rain incident, Illegal removal of receipts by fraudulent staff, conflicting, confusing and inadequate record leads to the fall of the business. In a big book shop, it takes a lot of time to search though and retrieve a particular book. Hence, it became important for computer software based system to automate stock management and eliminate the shortcoming of the manual system in place.

1.3 Aim and Objectives of the Study

The main aim of the project is to create an e-commerce site for online book sales which links book seller and buyers. To achieve the stated aim, the following specific objectives were laid out:

i. Develop a secured database for book sellers to store and manage their book sales transaction

ii. The system should allow users to search a book based on title, author and subject and makes purchases

iii. The system should display history of sales made and provide easy sorting or searching based on required criteria.

1.4 Scope of the Study

The implementation of this project is done using online technologies hence it is accessed using a though a browser using any internet enabled device. In this bookstore customer will be able to purchase books online that interested in customer profiling helps to understand and make suggestions to customer according to their mental and professional interests. Our purpose is develop a such system that will help customers in choosing a book and making payment. As all E-commerce websites this website need a cart system that will help to manage their purchase to satisfy all deliverables of customers. This website can be used for business purposes to sell a book via online. Database will contain all information about book: author name, title, year, publisher, ISBN number, brief description of book and other attributes. There also will be database where will be all taken information about customer.

There are three main users of the system, the admin, the seller and the buyer. The Administrator will have additional functionalities when compared to the seller. He can add, delete and update the book details, book categories, member information and also confirm a placed order. This application is developed using PHP programming language.

1.5 Significance of the Study

This project helps in several ways, increasing importance of e-commerce is apparent in the study conducted by researchers at the GVU (Graphics, Visualization, and Usability) Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In their summary of the findings from the eighth survey, the researchers report that “online shopping is taking off both in terms of the number of users shopping as well as the total amount people are spending via Internet based transactions". As more people become comfortable with online marketing, the profits generated by online marketers increase. This study is also significant to general public especially the voracious readers who travel long distances to inquire about books. It’s also important to scholars researching the field of electronic commerce as it will serve as a reference point to them or a beginning point for further researches.

1.6 Justification for the New System

The new system was designed to solve problem affecting the manual system in use. It was designed use online thereby relieving both buyers and sellers from much stress as experienced from the manual system of commerce. Apart from the smart analyzing and storing of information automatically and interactively using the internet, the proposed system also had some other features like.

· Accuracy in handling of data

· Fast rate of operation and excellent response time.

· Flexibility, that is to say, it can be accessed at any time

· Easy way of back up or duplicating data in diskette in case of data loss.

· Better storage and faster retrieval system.

· Accessibility from any part of the world.