THE ADVANTAGES OF USING DATABASES IN E-COMMERCE

It is no secret that the e-commerce industry is changing every year. Before the invention of the internet, the “brick-and-mortar” Business model was used where customers needed to visit a physical outlet to purchase goods, but this is not the scenario nowadays. People now have the luxury of buying items from the convenience of their own homes online, and they are now taking advantage of it. In this 21st century with the ever-increasing number of people participating in electronic commerce, it is necessary to have advanced information technology to handle this e-commerce ecosystem. In 2018 alone, mobile conversions have increased by 55% and are expected to reach $175.4 billion in USD sales. Any business, store, or person actively selling products online is part of this e-commerce system. To serve the customer with a better experience and streamline their various processes, e-commerce retailers often implement a database to capture vital information strategically. A database is a collection of data that stores organized information.

The retail business completely depends on databases 24 × 7 for order processing, transactions, inventory, shipping, etc. With a database management system, each organization can attempt to be much more competitive to skyrocket the decision-making process, increasing organizational performance in achieving targeted goals.

In an e-commerce application, the main purpose of a database is to store information for retrieving product details, and customer information, track transactions, and further maintain the inventory. One of the biggest benefits of using a database for e-commerce is structuring vast amounts of shop data. When the data is organized in a proper format, it can be accessed more efficiently by e-commerce applications.

You may have often read or heard these terms related to e-commerce. But do you know what exactly these terms mean? What is that, what is the use for e-commerce, and can e-commerce run without that?

Those terms describe e-commerce systems that use databases. Then what is databases?

A database is a system that is used to organize data. The database will organize a set of data, perhaps some order transactions, based on the settings that we defined. If we talk about databases in e-commerce, data falls into two categories that is Site content and Transaction data. Site content is the display when we access website pages using a browser to search for a storefront, including content pages (FAQ, contact, about us, and shipping policies), Product pages that show details about the product (weight, color, size, price, dimension), and category pages that grouping similar products. While Transaction data is the result when users take action on a page. For example, when customer order products, they need to fulfill some transactional data like customer name, email, phone, address, and the product they want to purchase. The other example is the inventory updates like is the item is ready or out of stock or will be replenished.

How is the database used in e-commerce?

Following the definition of what a database is, the main purpose of the database itself is to store information from various kinds of information for retrieving product details, and customer information, tracking transactions, and further maintaining the inventory. Databases are often used to store much information into one group of data; an example is a storage database that is often used in buying and selling. From the database, we can find out about customer orders, product prices, and more. By using a database, web applications can ignore the actual data and focus more on the presentation and behavior of that data, which will result in the amount of code and logic in a web application being much smaller and easier to understand.

This will be more useful because most people prefer to understand something simple and not difficult so that using databases in e-commerce becomes easier. The existence of a database in the world of e-commerce also makes it easier for sellers not to get stuck in listing customers and what items are ordered by customers; the database also makes it easier for sellers to provide a unique code for each customer so they don’t make mistakes in delivering goods.

Also, one of the benefits of using a database for e-commerce is that we can compile large amounts of stored data so that when the data is properly organized in the right format, it can be accessed efficiently by e-commerce applications.

Therefore, the existence of a database in the world of e-commerce is very helpful to advance existing technology further, people find it easier to access buying and selling without having to be confused about distinguishing one customer from another, and sellers no longer need to be confused in classifying their customer list, you don’t need to be confused anymore about how to be able to distinguish a unique code between customers too. The conclusion is that the database is an alternative or the best way to implement the world of e-commerce

“Cloud database”, “Powered by PostgreSQL”, “Redundant, multi-zone NoSQL backend”, “Database-backed”.

References:

• https://www.practicalecommerce.com/How-Databases-Work-with-Ecommerce-Applications
• https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9789811245992_0015#:~:text=In%20an%20e%2Dcommerce%20application,vast%20amounts%20of%20shop%20data.