ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming Problem - Design - Solution

9.2. Design

As you can gather from the "Problem" section above, implementing a custom e-commerce module can easily be a big challenge, and entire books have been devoted to this subject. With this in mind, and because of space constraints, this is the only chapter to cover this subject, so I've had to examine the feature set and select the basic and most common features that any such store must have. Although this module won't compete with sites like Amazon.com in terms of features, it will be complete enough to actually run a real, albeit small, e-store. As we've done in other chapters, we'll leverage much of the other functionality already developed, such as membership and profile management (Chapter 4), and our general DAL/BLL design, transaction management, and logging (Chapter 3). Therefore, the following list specifies the new functionality we'll implement in this chapter:

• Support for multiple store departments, used to categorize products so that they're easy to find if the catalog has a lot of items

• Products need a description with support for rich formatting, and images to graphically represent them. Because customers can't hold the product in their own hands, any written details and visual aids will help them understand the product, and may lead to a sale. A small thumbnail image will be shown in the products listing and on the product page, while a bigger image can be shown when the user clicks on the small image to zoom in.

• Products will support a discount percentage ...