Comparing electronic commerce solutions for small businesses

E-commerce is a new way of doing business. It is becoming increasingly important to everybody. The objective of this thesis is to compare various design approaches and to find out the best solution for small businesses. Some commonly used technologies in developing e-commerce systems are introduced in the first three chapters. The topics covered are from Web standards and protocols to Web planning and design, from Web servers to server side programming, and most importantly, Java technology and IBM's WebSphere. Based on these technologies, two solutions are presented: building from scratch with Java servlets and building with IBM's WebSphere. We develop an online store with each of the solutions. The last part of the thesis is a comprehensive comparison. Time, complexity, performance and cost are evaluated in this comparison. A simple conclusion is drawn afterwards with our suggestions to small businesses regarding which solution they should choose