Group Research Project: Designing an E-Commerce Website for a Hypothetical Retail Company

For the Group Research Project module, you are required to work in groups for Assessment 1 and Assessment 2

Both assessments are based on the following case study:

Your group has been approached by a hypothetical retail company, who would like you to design and implement an e-Commerce website for their store to sell their products to online customers.

• Decide what products your online store will sell. The choice is entirely yours – it can be anything from computers to clothes, groceries, mobile phones, footwear, and so on. Talk to you group members and agree on a line of products your website will sell.
• Plan how you will create the website as a group, using appropriate project planning methods and tools, and assign roles to each individual team member.
• Implement the website – you can write code yourself to create the website from scratch, or you can use an e-Commerce platform such as Wix, Shopify, etc. The approach you take will not affect your mark, as long as you can justify the decisions you have made about the technologies you use.
• Your website should feature a range of products (the more products the better – at least a minimum of 20 products as a guideline).
• Each product should have a photo, description and price information (note: you can use any available images – you are not going to be actually selling these products).
• A customer using your website should be able to browse products and add products to a shopping cart, change required quantities of products, or remove products they no longer want.
• A customer using your website should be able to create an account and login.
• Once the user has selected the products they want to buy, they should be able to go to a checkout page and enter additional details such as shipping address, etc.

The above are basic requirements for your group project. To gain a high mark, you are recommended to look at existing real-life e-Commerce websites and add extra features such as:

• Allowing customers to browse products by category
• Allowing customers to filter products by price, brand, etc.
• Allowing customers to complete a purchase via the checkout page
• Paying attention to the user experience – for example, how easy is it for a customer to navigate your website or compare products?
• Using attractive graphics, animations or videos to enhance the customer experience
• Allowing customers to receive offers and discount codes, sign up to a newsletter, use an online chat facility or form to contact store staff, etc.
• Adding features to be used by the company or store owner, such as tracking orders, tracking stock levels, viewing sales data and website analytics, etc.

To get a high mark, you are recommended to look at other e-Commerce websites, particularly ones you use yourself, and critically analyse which features you like about the website (or features you don’t like!) and incorporate what you consider to be the best features into your group’s website.