Friday 23 November 2007

Transactional Web Sites

Transactional web sites are web sites where a business provides a service or goods on the Internet that the customer can buy. They collect details and payment from the customer. (A purchase is a transaction carried out between the customer and the company providing the goods or services.)

They have to be able to collect the payment – credit cards or pay pal (safer and quicker) are effective for this. Electronic transfers.

Why do databases play a vital role in these websites?
· Store customer details such as name address and payment details.
· Purchasing history
· Product information, e.g. books – genre, author, title, price, how many in stock

3 different databases that might be used by a transactional website:
· Customer detail
· Purchase history
· Stock

Information Needs of Organisations

Organisations need information to function. It used to be stored on hard copies such as paper records. This meant that people called clerks had to be employed to record them manually, for example it might be someone’s job just to copy information from one piece of paper to another one. In the past this had to be done manually because there were no computers, now it can be done automatically which is much faster.

Companies like ‘Amazon’ might need information for the following:
· What’s in stock and what they need to order.
· Customer email addresses and other customer details.

Information is vital, for example it is vital for ‘PayPal’ because if information on credit card details was lost the whole system wouldn’t work.

Information is also vital for the police because when they are investigating something they may need to look at people’s records – if the police database crashed they would not be able to check up on whether or not somebody has committed previous offences which would affect the decisions they make.

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