1.1 Introduction
Online shopping website for gentlemen clothing is a complete multi-user website which enables consumers go through to purchase of products or services over the Internet. The system helps in buying of goods, products and services online by choosing the listed products from website (E-Commerce site). A Shopping application that typically runs on the computer where your Web site is located (the Web server), and allows your customers to do things such as viewing the product in your store catalog, adding a selected product to a basket, and placing an order for it. Online shopping application advertises some of the products for shopping .Here the customer will be able to purchase the products and the purchased products will be added to the cart. After the shopping of the products the user will confirm the purchase of the products in the cart. After confirmation the products are purchased by specifying the debit card number to the pay pal website.
As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.
1.2 Background of Study
Internet today has a great importance in a lot of people's everyday lives, not least for pleasures such as shopping. Among Swedish consumers online shopping is something frequently used, and statistics from 2016 show that nine out of ten Internet users have at some time used Internet for a purchase (E-commerce News, 2016). A huge amount of previous research focused on some fashionable industries such as clothing, cosmetics, books, electrical appliance etc, which are frequently ordered products (Young Kim, E. & Kim, Y, 2004; Bian, Q. & Forsythe, S, 2012). Compared to these types of products, online grocery shopping has not grown so big and few previous literature has been explored in this field, which arises our interests in devoting a not so developed area. The low level of consumer adoption makes it interesting to explore different factors that could affect consumers’ choices on online grocery shopping in Nigeria. What makes people prefer going to a grocery store, pushing a trolley through the crowded aisles, stand in long queues, just to later carry their groceries home themselves? Besides, when it comes to online shopping, mostly research put emphasis on Generation Y or focused on only the female (Sullivan, P. & Heitmeyer, J, 2008; Bakewell, C. & Mitchell, V, 2003; Belleau, B.,et al, 2007), however, the range of previous research target is broad and in this study, the authors aim to narrow the range of explored group. Therefore, Swedish families with children constitute the target group for this study. The characteristics of families with children would have distinct buying intention compared to other type of groups as the desired need for them would change.
Generally, higher levels of education and personal income correspond to more favorable perceptions of shopping online. Increased exposure to technology also increases the probability of developing favorable attitudes towards new shopping channels. In a December 2011 study, Equation Research surveyed 1,500 online shoppers and found that 87% of tablet owners made online transactions with their tablet devices during the early Christmas shopping season.
The metaphor of an online catalog is also used, by analogy with mail order catalogs. All types of stores have retail web sites, including those that do and do not also have physical storefronts and paper catalogs. Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce used for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. The largest of these online retailing corporations are Alibaba, Amazon, Amazon.com, and eBay.
1.3 Statement of Problems
Investigation reveals the following problems of the existing Online Shopping Website for Gentlemen Clothing;
- Lack of inadequate facilities for shopping, customers have to visit shops within the store premises to purchase an item and inadequate attention will be giving to them because of crowd due to the manual of selling clothes.
- The customers have to queue for a long period of time before getting their desired product or goods from the clothing seller, which makes shopping within the store very stressful.
- Most of the customers prefer shopping outside the clothing store, maybe where they come from they have not witness queuing to shop,
- The customers have to spend all their time just to purchase an item in the store shop which is not right, all because of the manual approach towards clothing shopping.
1.4 Aim and Objectives of the Study
The aim of the study is to design and implement an Online Shopping Website for Gentlemen Clothing. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows to design and develop an application software that will:
- Provide access to the purchase of clothing items online by interested personnel.
- Update new products like clothing items and other related items online.
- Make series of men clothing items online by the several personnel.
- Enable the end-users to find trending products and make purchases for desired item.
- Provide an automated system for the men Clothing store online shopping.
1.5 Significance of Study
This system provides an efficient way of adding almost all the features of the online shopping; the future implementation will be online help for the customers and chatting with website in charge. The importance of this study is to use object oriented development processes and techniques in the Online Shopping Website for Gentlemen Clothing.
Formal analysis and design were used to give adequate understanding to the object-oriented technique used. The major quest is to ease the problem and stress encountered in male customers clothing shopping experience and keeping records of stock list, customer lists, sales volume, and summary report.
This project will be of benefit to:
- Shopping Malls/Supermarkets.
This study will be of immense benefit to other researchers who intend to know more on this study and can also be used by non-researchers to build more on their research work. This study contributes to knowledge and could serve as a guide for other study.
1.6 Scope of Study
This project is aimed at how the companies can improve the efficiency of the services. Online Shopping is one of the applications to improve the marketing of the company’s products. This web application involves almost all the features of the online shopping; the future implementation will be online help for the customers and chatting with website in charge.
1.7 Limitations of the Study
During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:
- Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
- Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
- Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
- Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet).
1.8 Definition of Terms
E-commerce: E-commerce can be described as the using of electronic networks, such as Internet, as a distribution channel. The involved parties can be either individuals or organizations and a common sectioning to do is to differ between business-to-consumer and business-to-business (Khosrow-Pour, M. 2006).
Application Service Provider (ASP): Is defined as an enterprise that delivers application functionality and associated services across a network to multiple customers using a rental or usage-based transaction-pricing model.
E-commerce: Electronic commerce, commonly written as e-commerce, is the trading in products or services using computer networks, such as the Internet.
Electronic data interchange (EDI): Electronic data interchange (EDI) is an electronic communication method that provides standards for exchanging data via any electronic means.
Merchant: A person or company involved in wholesale trade, especially one dealing with foreign countries or supplying goods to a particular trade.
URL: Is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator and is a reference (an address) to a resource on the Internet
Shopper: A person who is shopping.
Web hosting service (WHS): Is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web.
Web server: Are computers that deliver (serves up) Web pages
Expert system: This is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert.
Research methodology: The process used to collect information and data for the purpose of making decision.
Coding: This means writing a list of instructions that will enable the computer to perform any specified operation.
MySQL: This is relational database server that is ideal for both small and large applications.
Programming: Is the process of taking an algorithm and encoding it into a notation, a programming language, so that it can be executed by computer.
Methodology: A collection of methods, practices, procedures and rules used by those who work in some field.
