project-proposal-2024

SkyMarket - Advanced E-Commerce Platform

Abstract

SkyMarket is a cutting edge e-commerce platform designed to provide users with a seamless and intuitive shopping experience. With a focus on advanced features and innovative technologies, SkyMarket aims to revolutionise online shopping, offering a wide range of products and services to meet the diverse needs of customers. Ensuring the availability, scalability and security of the SkyMarket platform is paramount. Availability guarantees that the platform is always accessible to users, allowing them to shop whenever they want, without any interruptions. Scalability ensures that the platform can handle a large number of users and products, without any performance degradation. Security ensures that the platform is protected from any malicious attacks, ensuring the safety of user data and transactions. By prioritising these quality attributes, SkyMarket aims to provide a reliable and secure shopping experience to users, ensuring that they can shop with confidence.

Author

Name: Shanon Lakshan Chandrasekara

Student number: 45805055

Functionality

SkyMarket presents a comprehensive suite of features meticulously crafted to deliver a robust and cohesive online shopping platform. SkyMarket will offer a streamlined and intuitive user experience. Users can seamlessly access the platform from any device and effortlessly navigate through a diverse selection of products. SkyMarket ensures essential functionality, allowing users to browse products, add them to their cart, and securely complete purchases with confidence. Additionally, users can conveniently manage their orders, view their purchase history, and track the status of their shipments in real-time. Leveraging sophisticated recommendation algorithms, SkyMarket delivers personalised product suggestions tailored to each user’s browsing and purchase history, enhancing the overall shopping experience. SkyMarket incorporates advanced search capabilities, empowering users to swiftly locate desired products based on their preferences. With a focus on security, the platform ensures secure payment processing, safeguarding user transactions and instilling trust.

Scope

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of SkyMarket will focus on delivering essential functionality to provide users with a basic yet functional online shopping experience. The MVP will include the following core features:

  1. User Registration and Authentication: Users will be able to create an account, log in securely, and manage their profile information.
  2. Product Catalog: A basic product catalog will be available for users to browse and view available items.
  3. Product Detail Pages: Each product will have a dedicated detail page displaying essential information such as product description, price, images, and availability.
  4. Add to Cart: Users will be able to add products to their shopping cart and view the items they have selected for purchase.
  5. Checkout Process: A simplified checkout process will allow users to review their cart, enter shipping and payment information, and complete their purchase.
  6. Order Management: After completing a purchase, users will receive confirmation of their order and be able to view their order history and track the status of their shipments.
  7. Basic Search Functionality: A basic search feature will enable users to search for products by name or category, helping them find specific items more easily.
  8. Responsive Design: The platform will be designed with responsive web design principles to ensure a consistent and user-friendly experience across desktop and mobile devices.

The MVP of SkyMarket will focus on delivering essential functionality to establish a foundational e-commerce platform. SkyMarket will follow a Microservices architecture.

Quality Attributes

  1. Availability: Availability refers to the ability of the SkyMarket platform to be accessible to users whenever they need it, without any interruptions or downtime. Ensuring high availability is crucial for an e-commerce platform like SkyMarket because any downtime or unavailability can result in lost sales and dissatisfied customers. Availability is measured by the percentage of time the platform is operational and accessible to users. SkyMarket aims to achieve high availability to provide users with a reliable shopping experience.
  2. Scalability: Scalability refers to the ability of the SkyMarket platform to handle increasing user traffic and accommodate growing product inventory without sacrificing performance or user experience. Scalability is essential for SkyMarket to support the growth of the user base and product catalog over time. Without scalability the platform may experience performance issues, slow response times, and reduced reliability. Scalability is measurable by measuring the platform’s performance under increasing load and ensuring that it can handle a large number of users and products without any degradation in performance.
  3. Security: Security refers to the measures implemented to protect user data, payment information, and transactional integrity on the SkyMarket platform. Security is paramount for an e-commerce platform to build trust with users and safeguard sensitive information from unauthorised access, data breaches and cyber attacks. Security is measured by evaluating the platform’s adherence to security best practices, encryption standards, and compliance with industry regulations. SkyMarket aims to provide a secure shopping environment for users to ensure the safety of their data and transactions.

Evaluation

To evaluate the MVP of SkyMarket, we will employ a structured approach that covers all functionality and quality attributes outlined in the project scope.

  1. Functional Testing: Each feature will undergo functional testing to ensure it meets the specified requirements. Test cases will be designed to validate user registration, product browsing, cart management, checkout process, order management, and search functionality. This testing will verify that the MVP delivers essential e-commerce functionality as intended.
  2. Performance Testing: Performance testing will be carried out to assess the availability and scalability of the SkyMarket platform. Load testing will be performed to measure the platform’s response time and resource utilisation under increasing user traffic. Stress testing will be conducted to determine the platform’s capacity to handle peak loads and maintain availability. These tests will ensure that the platform can scale to accommodate growing demand and maintain high availability.