Given that most r eaders will know all too well how many little things crop up when starting a conventional business, it should come as no surprise to find that an online venture is no different in this respect. The trick, as with many things in life and in software, is to break down your bigger problems into smaller, more manageable chunks, and deal with each chunk on its own. So while the available literature on e-commerce is extensive to say the least, we are going to look at a simple and effective way to start on the road to building a successful online business.

While there are by necessity many similarities between conventional and virtual enterprises since both have fundamentally the same goals, the differences can be devastating. Let's say, for example, you have set up a conventional business, for argument's sake, a bakery, and after one week you find that the new oven is not powerful enough to bake your bread quickly. As upsetting as it may be, you will probably have to go and buy another one. And while that problem has a painful solution, it is at least obvious.

This is where a conventional enterprise and a computer-based enterprise can vary greatly because, if instead of an incorrect oven specification, the virtual enterprise application accidentally utilized differing parameters (say, units of measurement) in some of its code, then it is entirely possible you could lose a $125 million Mars exploration vehicle just like NASA did in the late nineties. The loss of the Mars orbiter has hopefully highlighted areas where NASA's processes need to be looked at again, but the point of this is that the fault was not immediately obvious until it was too late. For those of us without a few hundred million dollars in lessons to be learned, a little planning should help ensure our more modest efforts don't suffer the same fate.

Before we dive into anything more specific, let's take a closer look at what the term e-commerce means, just to ensure we are all reading off the same page.

We define e-commerce as commercial transactions occurring over computer networks, facilitated by electronic applications.

Granted, this definition is pretty vague, but given the huge number of different businesses interacting over a variety of platforms and technologies all over the globe, it serves as a good basis for our purpose. In this instance, commercial transactions can be taken to mean anything from buying and selling to marketing and distributing, and electronic applications means, in this instance, your osCommerce website.

Taking our lead from this definition, we can start looking at what needs to be done in order to join the world of e-commerce. Accordingly, the rest of this chapter looks at how the example application, a specialist computer bookstore called Contechst Books, was developed. It is recommended that you follow all the steps mentioned here in order to be at the same stage of development in your own site as the demonstration site, by the end of the book.