Design for Online sanctuary for Innovations
eCom101- How to build an
ecommerce website
In partial fulfillment of the course
Creativity, Innovation, Knowledge Network and
Entrepreneurship (CINE)
Submitted to
Instructor: Prof. Anil Gupta
Teaching Associates: Miss. Anamika Dey
by
Kondreddy Rahul (PGP-13165)
Date: 1st March 2015
INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT,
AHMEDABAD
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Objective:
The rising Internet penetration coupled with booming of e-Commerce is allowing
a lot of businesses to grow further. Though the barriers of entry in this domain
are cheaper, you require a very little (almost none) technical expertise to show
your presence on the Internet. Currently there are many sites and open source
software that will allow you to build your own e-Commerce site.
Various phases involved in setting-up an e-Commerce website:
1. Designing a website
2. Buying and hosting the domain
Stage:1 Designing a website
There are many online as well as open source softwares available. Apart from
pre-defined web-templates, the most popular site builders are weebly.com and
wix.com. They also allow the option of hosting the website along with domain
name. But these players charge some fees (monthly) for using their design
software as well as hosting. Since hosting fees is inevitable one can reduce the
costs further by adopting open-source software in designing the site. The most
popular open-source software for designing the site is “Drupal”. There are also
some pre-defined templates which you can download and enhance according to
your website requirements. There are many modules
1.a. Installing Drupal in your system

First of all you have to install WAMP in your system (for windows OS)
http://www.wampserver.com/en/download-wampserver-32bits/

The purpose of WAMP is that it will make your system as a webserver and
you can access your website with out connecting it to the server. This will
reduce your Internet dependency. For initial phases of your website this
is sufficient.

After you have installed WAMP download drupal package from
http://drupal.org/download and unzip the directories.

Copy this folder to “C:/www/ drupal” (www is the folder created after
you have installed WAMP in your system. By default it will create “www”
folder in “Local Disk: C”
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
Run WAMP, this is done by clicking on the WAMP icon in system tray or
double click the WAMP icon on your desktop.

Open any browser any type “http://localhost/” or “127.0.0.1” (this is the
address of local server in your machine”

Click on “phpmyadmin” then click on "create new database" enter
“drupaldb” in the field provided. Click on “Create” button. (this will create
a database with name drupaldb)

Now go to the site “http://localhost/drupal” and follow the on screen
prompts to install drupal.

Enter these values in the boxes
o Database type: mysql
o Database name: drupaldb
o Database username: root
o Database password: (keep it blank)
o Save configuration
A successful completion of above steps implies that drupal is running in your
system and all the settings are properly configured.

To access any website you need to have an admin account. Admin is
basically the owner of the site who have all privileges to edit the site.
Enter the following values when asked
o Username: admin
o Enter your email: your email-id
o Press “create”
o It is completely fine even if you get this message, this is because of
some default configurations in your system

"warning: mail() [function.mail]: Failed to connect to mailserver at
"localhost" port 25, verify your "SMTP" and "smtp_port" setting in php.ini
or use ini_set() in C:\wamp\www\drupal\includes\common.inc on line
1970
Ignore the message. Enter and confirm your password (You have to
remember this password, failure in remembering this password means
you have to build a new site). Save the information.
If you have successfully finished this step means you have crossed the main
hurdle.
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Step:1.b Building a website- Adding modules
As I mentioned earlier everything in Drupal is predefined. There are many
templates available in drupal that will suffice your purpose of creating a website.
Ubercart is one such template. The following steps will explain to you how to add
Ubercart into your system. A successful installation of Ubercart implies your ecommerce site is ready.

Download the Ubercart module from
https://www.drupal.org/project/ubercart

The next steps are generic to install any module in Drupal. Go to the
drupal site, in the module section click on “Install New Module”

Click on Choose file. Select “.zip” as extension and select the “Ubercart.zip”
file you download in the above step
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
Now you have to enable the modules to notice the changes. Click on
update manager and click on “Newly Enabled Module”

Browse for Ubercart and “Add a tick mark next to it”
Step 1.c. Adding Products to the store catalogue

https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/setting-online-shoppingcart-drupal-and-ubercart

“Setting up our client's Store Catalog and Menu” section in the previous
mentioned link explains the process in detail
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Step 2: Buying domains and hosting on a server
Once you are done with the site the next step involved is to make your website
available to everyone on the earth. To identify your website with a name, you
have to buy a domain name (e.g., www.cine.com). There are many Domain
Naming Sites; domain4net.com is one such site. You can pay yearly fees or
monthly fees to renew that name.
The Final step involved is uploading your Drupal code on a server. Currently you
have website in your system and your system may not be power-on all the time.
Hence you have to buy a server space and upload your drupal there. Webfaction
is one server site. You can buy space depending on the size of drupal folder and
upload this on webfaction.com.
Once the uploading is done your site is ready and your customers can buy
products online.
References:
1. https://www.drupal.org/node/114493
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