Development environment for layout design of e-commerce applications using block-based approach

E-commerce is a process of buying, selling, transferring or exchanging products or services via the Internet. It is expected that in the future, more and more business transactions will be carried out through e-commerce. The design of an e-commerce website plays a significant role in attracting potential customers to visit the site. It can also influence customer's decision to make purchase and to return to the site. Good e-commerce applications need to be developed by professional programmers and the cost is substantially high. With the advent of Web 2.0 technology, end-users are now able to create their own web content and applications such as blog, facebook and friendster. Some providers such as Google provide a mechanism for end-users to create web sites and host e-commerce applications. However, using these technologies, users can only select and customize the application according to provide templates. One of the main problems with this approach is that they do not support a flexible layout design. This implies that an end-user cannot change the layout of a selected template. This paper presents a flexible and easy to use block-based development environment for creating customized e-commerce applications. A block is a single layer software component that performs a single function. Concurrent project has developed blocks for e-commerce application. The proposed development environment is intended for non-programmer end-users to design and develop their own e-Commerce applications by selecting and positioning blocks on a page.