A cloud-enabled platform to integrate e-commerce and back-office processes of PICadvanced

• Autor(a) principal: Lopes, Alexandre José Ferreira
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/36293
• topic: E-commerce; Digital transformation; Online store; B2B; Cloud computing; SME; Firebase; Google Cloud; Portugal; Usability test; Online payments

The digital transformation of businesses towards offering online channels extended target user audiences and offered a better buying experience, over the last years. The importance of e-commerce is such that requires companies to seek effective platforms to sell online, streamline their processes, and increase consumer satisfaction. As the demand for online channels is growing, so is the available tools and services to help business build their e-commerce platforms. PICadvanced is an SME from Aveiro, Portugal, which operates business-to-business in the telecommunications market. The company runs an online store but wishes to pursue several improvements in its e-commerce system in the medium to long term. In the preparatory study of the state of the market, we show that such innovation would not be feasible with the current system, nor with most of the tools available in the market. Therefore, a custom approach would best address this gap. The goal of this work was set to develop a custom cloud-based e-commerce system for PICadvanced, composed of an online store and back-office platform, allowing the implementation of features designed specifically for the PICadvanced context and the automation of some internal processes. The developed system contains the core features of an e-commerce system. The online store side includes product listing, shopping cart, order placement and online payments. Regarding the back-office, it is possible to manage the product catalog, see orders placed by customers and update their status. The system is implemented on a cloud-native ecosystem, using, for example, Cloud Functions and the Cloud Firestore database. The current version of the system meets the required features to be used as a minimum viable product that can be validated by users. A usability assessment of the current version of the system with participants from both PICadvanced and externals, proved the system to be intuitive and covers the essential flows. The current implementation is expected to enter production in a short time, depending on further business decisions.