Design and implementation of "Fotosacks" : an e-commerce web application for donating and distributing royalty free images

E-commerce is huge. One of the most applicable usage of the internet, sometimes called the world wide web, is e-commerce use. It was projected that e-commerce sales would hit above US$434billion per annum in the United States alone by the turn of the year 2014. During the same period, annual e-commerce sales in EU regions was predicted to eclipse US$250 billion. These staggering figures excluded the e-commerce sales in other parts of the world. It is on record that in 2012, 56% of internet users ordered goods or services online, and 77% of users did research on goods or services or window shopped online. This project centers on the development of an e-commerce web application for donating and distributing images by users. Users of the application are able to upload images as free donations while at the same time able to browse a catalog of images from other donors and download them for their personal use. The Project is implemented in a 3-tier approach that involves: a back-end database, a middle tier of Apache webserver/PHP, and the front-end client web-browser. There exist a wide range of what an e-commerce web app can be, depending on what implementation technologies are involved.This project embraces Open Source technologies. The scripting language is PHP version 5.4.2 and the database application is MySQL version 5.5.7 in its core foundation, while HTML 5, CSS3, jQuery and Apache web server makes up the secondary technologies employed. Because users are required to pay a yearly/monthly subscription fees in order to access the site contents, the project therefore integrates Paypal as its payment solution provider. This document discusses the whole process involved in the development of the web application, which provides image contents to, and source image contents from, paid subscribers, incorporating these primary featutures as; direct use of PHP, MySQL, HTML and Javascript, user accounts module, Admin features to add/remove user uploaded contents, Paypal payments processing solutions and few others. As a database-driven e-commerce web application, this project enable users to register, pay subscription fee and gain Access to browse through an image gallery. The users are thereby able to download any number of photo image contents for their use. Registered users are also able to sign-in to the application with their username/email address and password. The upload module allows such registered users who may be profesional or freelance photographers to upload photo images to the site as free donation. The waterfall software development process model is used as the basis for the development tasks in the project