E-Commerce Search Engine Project in PHP or ASP.NET – SRS Document
Project Domain / Category:
Web Application
Abstract/Introduction:
Since the arrival of smartphones and large penetration of the internet, E-Commerce has gained a lot of attraction in Pakistan and the trend of online shopping has really kicked off. The number of online shoppers has been increasing with each passing day.
E-commerce provides faster product finding and buying process as compared to physically visiting the shops and looking for the products. Moreover, the introduction of online payment systems has made shopping more secure and haste-free.
The key goal of online shoppers is to buy the product at the lowest possible price to save their money. However, the dilemma that online shoppers have to face is to search the required product and compare the price of a product at different e-commerce platforms. This is a very hectic and time-consuming process since in Pakistan; we don’t seem to think of any such platform which allows the shoppers to compare the prices of online products.
The shoppers have to manually visit each e-commerce website one by one to search for a product and compare the prices.
Project Overview:
Our purpose in this project is to replace the existing manual searching of online products with an automated process. We want to develop a web-based search engine for different most popular e-commerce websites operating in Pakistan.
The proposed search engine takes the product name from the shopper and searches its availability on different e-commerce sites. It uses the Web Scrapping technique to extract the product details such as the Manufacturer, Price and Payment method, etc.
The search engine then consolidates this information and displays the result to the user. As a start, we are going to consider only 4 to 5 e-commerce which is to be included in the search.
Main Users:
Online Shoppers
Functional Requirements:
- The system will allow the user to search for a specific product.
- The system will allow the user to search the product using a different criterion such as which e-commerce sites to be included in the search, minimum/maximum price, minimum/maximum product ratings, payment method and the link to that website to redirect the user to the product page of the e-commerce website.
- The system will be able to compare the prices of the products and show them to the user.
- For the prices given in different currencies, the system will show the prices in the currency selected by the user. For example, if at any site, the price of a product is given in dollars ($) but the default currency or the currency selected by the user at the time of search was Pakistani rupees (PKR), the system must convert the Dollar into PKR using the latest exchange rates (taken by some reliable source) before showing the results to the user.
- As a result, the system will show the product details such as manufacturer, product image, product rating and other product descriptions in a user-friendly interface.
- The system also allows the user to save the favorite searches using any technique such as cookies, online accounts, etc.
Important Project Information:
- The requirements given above are just a few most important ones. The student can add more requirements after discussing it with the supervisor.
- To properly implement this project, you need to be aware of different web scraping techniques and tools which act as the backbone of the search engine.
- The implementation of the search engine requires a very careful analysis of the interface design of the selected e-commerce websites to extract the required information and display it to the user.
- As a beginning, we are going to add only a few most popular e-commerce websites which are to be made part of the search such as Kaymu.pk.
Development Language:
- C# or Python (most preferably)
- SQL/MySQL
- PHP or ASP.NET
Note: For using any other language/tools, you must discuss with your supervisor first.
You can use any of the following PHP Frameworks For developing this Web Development Project
1. Laravel
2. Phalcon
3. Fat-Free Framework
4. CodeIgniter
5. Laminas Project
6. CakePHP
7. FuelPHP
8. Slim
9. PHPixie
10. Symfony
11. Yii
