BINF 2321 Introduction to Information Systems Ecommerce Assignment (Assignment – D) Due Date: This assignment is due no later than next Sunday by 11:59 PM. 15 points will be deducted for each day the assignment is turned in after the due date and time. Assignment: The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize students with an actual e---commerce site and Its functionality behind the scenes. For this assignment you will be creating an actual e---commerce website and reporting on some of the functions related to the site. You can create this trial site for free (no credit card required) for 15 days, after which the account is deleted if you do not sign up. 1) Go to www.bigcommerce.com 2) Once on the home page, under “no credit card required” enter in your store name, this can be anything you want; when I was testing it, I named my store after my dog! 3) After you enter in a store name, click on “Start your free trial” 4) On the next page enter the appropriate information; you may not want to use your actual phone number as you may get a call from someone in their sales department! and for your e---mail you can simply use your UIW e---mail address. 5) Select “Create my store now” 6) You now have an e---commerce store that you can begin to legitimately sell items. 7) It may ask you to customize your site, go ahead and play around with this. It’s pretty easy. 7) When you’re done customizing, go ahead and add a product to sell. Under products select --- add a product. 8) For the purpose of this assignment let’s call this product “BINF2321”, and then add a price to it and the category you would like it to reside in. (You must call at least one product “BINF2321” as this is what I will be looking for on your site!) 9) It may ask you for a Weight for your new product, just make one up. 10) Under the shipping section you have the option to offer free shipping on your product. You can turn this on or off – this is up to you, this is YOUR store. 11) When you are complete with your options, click SAVE. This should successfully add a product to your new store. 12) Go ahead and click on the images & videos tab, then add a photo of your new product. This can be any appropriate photo. 13) Under customers (assuming you had some) you would be able to see information such as name, address, phone number & e-mail address. (How many sites have this information on you?) 14) Look through the options under Analytics, this is really interesting. I found the “Abandoned Cart” section under Analytics, I always wondered how they found me when I elected not to purchase something at the last minute! 15) On the top right corner, click on “Setup & Tools” 16) Click on payments. 17) Stripe is the credit card merchant Big Commerce uses to accept credit cards. Want to start taking credit cards on your site right now? Simply turn on the function under Stripe or Pay Pal. You can do some additional research on Stripe at www.stripe.com, they typically Charge 2.9% of the sale + 30 cents for each transaction with no monthly fees. 18) Lastly look under the Marketing tab then select e---mail marketing. 19) Under this section, there are 4 Email integration providers. I would like you to perform research all four of these companies listed. Visit their websites, research the web. What do these sites help with? What information do these companies provide? Why would an on---line business use them? Do these companies send spam e---mail? Why or why not? Do they have a policy on spamming? Is there anything interesting in the news about any of these companies? I would like you to write a minimum of 1 page paper (each company) containing information on each of the 4 companies. 20) When complete, upload this paper into Blackboard. 21) In a Word document, place the hyperlink to your new ecommerce site and upload it to blackboard as well. 22) That’s it! When complete, take a little time and look around your new site it’s actually pretty cool. Make sure and look at “Showcase” on their home page. These are other legitimate companies that are using Bigcommerce.com for their business.