Order management and e-commerce system for a medium scaled shoe business

158 ORDER MANAGEMENT AND E-COMMERCE SYSTEM FOR A MEDIUM SCALED SHOE BUSINESS Savindi Waduge1, Nilantha Prasad2 1University of Sri Jayewardenepura, [email protected] 2University of Sri Jayewardenepura, n[email protected] Background NIERA is a shoe brand co-founded by two Entrepreneurs, Nimesh Helanka De Silva and Gimhani Erandhathi Wadugearachchi. NIERA offers modern footwear including flat sandals, casual wear and heels for women and its store is based on social media platforms, Instagram, and Facebook. Since all its products are showcased via social media posts, NIERA employs a Customer Care Assistant, who handles their social media pages, responds to direct messages of customers, and communicates daily order details to the factory warehouse. Currently the time span is roughly two to three weeks from the point where a customer makes an order and the order is delivered to the customer. The store has an Instagram follower base of more than thirty thousand and a Facebook follower base of more than ten thousand. The quality and durability of NIERA shoes has led to its popularity among many people and even among celebrities who constantly provides brand marketing to the online store. With the growing popularity and scale of the store it has become a challenge to cater to all the customer inquiries promptly which has led to a major delay in sales and occasional customer complaints. System Analysis The employees of NIERA are faced with the tedious task of managing hundreds of inquiries as they get accumulated in their social media pages each day. The Co-founders fear further increase in sales costs and a problem of work overload for employees which creates dissatisfaction and burnout. 159 Inconvenience caused due to the low response time of Customer Care Assistants to get the necessary information before making a purchase decision and loss of track and focus on customers who are genuinely interested in purchasing products are two of the problems identified in the customer’s and employee’s perspective respectively. Some of the functional requirements identified were registration and login, guest checkout, wish list, shopping cart, product, and order management. Through these requirements and by developing a shopping cart included ecommerce site for NIERA, customers can directly check all the product information online, customize shoes by themselves, add all the purchases that they’re going to purchase at one time into their shopping cart and then checkout after browsing. This greatly reduces loss of sales and reduces the burden of the employees, also customers who are too busy or reluctant to chat with/inquire from the employees can see all the information at any time and customize the shoes by themselves. System Development When designing this system, the Waterfall methodology was followed as it is easy and straightforward, logically progressing step by step, requirements of the system were well known, the project is short and relatively less complicated and it will be possible to add more features in future releases. The following is the software development environment and a list of technologies used. Programming/Scripting/Query languages ● Backend o PHP ● Query o SQL ● Web front-end o JavaScript 160 o CSS o HTML Database Management System ● MySQL Web Server Software ● Apache HTTP Server Web Development Platform ● WampServer Conclusion A simple dashboard with all the important information and functions for employees who are working as Social Media Assistants and Warehouse Managers who dispatches orders, improved customer loyalty, growth of sales and reduction of errors and customer complaints, encouragement of user feedback while developing the system which improved the quality were some of the achievements and benefits of this system. A mobile application, online payment option for customers along with the existing “pay cash on delivery” option and a chatbot to improve customer service using the online site are some of the future enhancements suggested for the application References Kyeremeh, K. (2019) ‘Overview of System Development Life Cycle Models’.