Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Daniel A. Andresen / The Web is a shopper's paradise boasting every kind of product imaginable — plus many more that are almost unimaginable. People find it easy and secure to shop online these days thereby saving time and also have more options to choose from at their fingertips. Based on this comes MyBookStore, a neat web application designed to exclusively cater the needs of students for purchasing books online. Primary focus of this application is to ease the use of searching for a particular book by the user and also navigability within the website. A sophisticated search engine has been designed in this application which filters the products based on various user criterions. Searching and viewing the details about a book is available. This also has an administrator side through which the administrator can update the website with new products, remove any of the available products, and add new categories, subcategories and products along with updating the shipping status of orders placed. This section is majorly responsible for user accounts maintenance, product maintenance as well as orders maintenance. Major emphasis of this application is to build user interactive search techniques for simplifying user needs and to provide specific products as required by the user.

Trots att e-handeln har ökat under de senaste decennierna, är konverteringsgraden för onlinebutiker inom modesegmentet fortfarande låg. Detta kan bero på det fenomen som kallas “shopping cart abandonment”, vilket innebär att kunder lägger varor i sina virtuella varukorgar men inte sluför köpet. Det finns många anledningar till varför kunderna agerar på detta sätt. En av de vanligaste orsakerna är att det föredragna betalningsalternativet inte är tillgängligt. Eftersom alla fall av shopping cart abandonment innebär en förlorad försäljning är det viktigt för onlineföretag att arbeta mot en högre konverteringsgrad då även den minsta ökningen av slutförda köp innebär en ökad lönsamhet. Därför bör det vara av intresse för alla onlineföretag att upprätta rutiner för att se till att kunderna kommer att slutföra sina köp. Ett sätt att göra detta är att påminna kunderna via e-mejl om produkterna i den övergivna kundvagnen. Dessa mejl kallas reaktiveringsmejl och innebär i grunden att företaget skickar ett mejl till de kunder som övergivit sin virtuella varukorg. Huvudfokus i denna studie är reaktiveringsmejl med syfte att undersöka hur e-handelsföretag inom mode och textilbranschen använder reaktiveringsmejl och om de i så fall sett en ökning i konverteringsgraden. För att uppfylla syftet har två olika datainsamlingsmetoder använts. Först och främst genomfördes ett experiment bland e-handelsföretag inom det valda segmentet för att på så vis få en bild av hur vanligt det är att använda reaktiveringsmejl. Efter detta genomfördes telefonintervjuer med ett antal av dessa företag för att få en mer djupgående förståelse kring reaktiveringsmejl. Undersökningens resultat visar att användningen av dessa e-postmeddelanden inte är så vanlig, men däremot att det är ett framgångsrikt sätt att minska förekomsten av shopping cart abandonment samt öka konverteringsgraden. / Even though e-retail has increased over the last few decades, the conversion rate for online stores in the fashion segment is still relatively low. This might be due to a phenomenon called “shopping cart abandonment”, which means that online customers place products in their virtual carts but never follow through with a purchase. There are many reasons why customers balk before the very last click. One of the more common causes is that the preferred payment option is not available. However, since all cases of shopping cart abandonment mean lost sales, it is important for online companies to work towards a higher conversion rate since even the smallest increase in completed purchases results in increased profitability. Therefore, it should be of interest for all online enterprises to establish procedures to ensure that customers will complete their online purchases. One way to do this is to remind the customers via e-mail about the products in the abandoned cart, which is called reactivation e-mails, and basically means that online companies send e-mails to the customers who abandoned their virtual carts. The main focus for this thesis is reactivation e-mails, with the purpose to examine how online enterprises in the fashion and textile segment use reactivation e-mails and if they have seen an increase in their conversion rate. To fulfill the purpose, companies within the chosen segment that offer online retail to their customers, have been interviewed about the subject and the findings show that the use of these e-mails is an effective way to increase the conversion rate and decrease the occurrence of shopping cart abandonment. Two different methods for data collection have been used for this study. Firstly, an experiment was conducted among e-commerce companies within the selected segment in order to determine how common it is to use reactivation emails. Secondly, telephone interviews were conducted with several of these companies to gain a deeper understanding of reactivation emails. The results of this survey show that the use of these emails is not very common, but it is clearly a very effective way to reduce the occurrence of shopping cart abandonment. It also increases conversion rates and given the relatively low cost to implement, it should be embraced industry wide.

The shopping trolley have been frequently used in our daily life. However, the hygiene condition of cart makes people worry a lot, especially the handle brothers. Nowadays, several methods have been proposed to clean the shopping carts but considered uneconomic and inflexible. In this study, we aim to design an integrated cart washing system based on a trailer applied to medium or small supermarket. This system should be more efficient, economic, easily to operate, safer and les water consummation. The integrated cart washing system has three basic functions of washing, disinfection and drying. The system is controlled by PLC program, all steps in the cleaning process are fully automatic insider the trailer and each component are adjustable according to various shopping carts. The system only requires one person to operate and it costs 30 seconds to wash a single cart, able to wash up to 120 cart/hour. Disinfection and drying steps provide high washing quality. Moreover, water-recycling design can save part of wasted water. The modelling and assembly was designed in Autodesk Inventor 2016, the hardware design circuit-writing diagram was performed in AutoCAD, the software design of Programmable logic controller (PLC) was made in STEP 7-Micro/Win. Theoretical calculation and simulation prove the safety and possibility of our system. We concluded that this system might have commercial interests in the market.

The thesis project describes  the analysis, process and major factors in development of a simple component oriented Web Shop in ASP.NET. It addresses to the concepts used in  the application as  well  as  derivation  of  technical  design  and  development  from  the  concepts  acquired  by studying existing approaches. The report  describes  a  brief  summary of  existing  approaches  and related  technologies.  It also lays  the foundation  of  goal  oriented  approach  by  providing  an  overview  of  component  based  software engineering. The  basic  concepts for modularization  were  barrowed from  entities  identification,  object models and component models pplication’s architecture is set to be a layered app roach combining the software layered  architecture  approach  with  multi  tier  architecture  of  web  applications. Class models explaining the inner structure of each component have been provided and an overview of user interface pages is given to explain the application outer flow. The application sets out to prove the significance of component oriented approach as well as  the  support  provided for it by ASP.Net. The resulting package proves  to  have  scalable  components  that could be scaled for  or  reused in another  application or  in  a later version of the same application. / First and Final Version of our Thesis Report / SoftIn - Introducing methods and tools for software development in small and medium-sized enterprises

A very distinguished point of online marketing is that it can collect data about the consumers* shopping processes rather than the shopping results only. That is, it cannot only collect order data but also the browsing and shopping cart data. So far, the browsing records have been used to analyze the Web server traffic. However, regarding the analysis of shopping cart data, it has not been found in any marketing research yet. The purpose of this study is trying to verify the value of shopping cart data by examining whether it can improve the performance of the marketing communication decisions. According to Source-Message-Media-Receiver (SMMR) communication model, there are three important Web marketing communication decisions. These decisions are who are the target customers, what message should be communicated, and how to communicate. For each above marketing communication decision, in order to check whether the data from shopping cart can improve its performance, this research proposed an algorithm that integrates the shopping cart data into each decision process. Three hypotheses have been proposed in terms of the value of each new proposed algorithm. Three experiments have been implemented to test these hypotheses. The results reveal that the proposed algorithms can improve the performance of the marketing communications decisions. However, it is only a starting point to integrate the shopping cart data into the marketing research. As the online shopping becomes more popular, it is worthwhile to put more efforts to understand the details about the value of the online shopping cart data.

Stölder och snatteri är ett stort problem för fysiska butiker, dessutom marknadsutvecklingen för e-handel är avgörande för fysiska butikernas framgång och lönsamhet. Allt mer pengar investeras i säkerhetslösningar, väktare och personal Målet med den här kandidat-uppsatsen har varit att utveckla en produkt för ett modern och innovativt smart kundvagn. Den framtagna Smart kundvagnen är ett hjälpmedel som är bättre anpassad efter konsumenternas behov för att skapa trevligare upplevelse hos fysiska butiker och underlättar köpprocessen, vilket i längden kan leda till trygga och återkommande kunder. Genom att använda och utnyttja ny teknik tillsammans internetuppkoppling och nya funktioner till ett konkurrenskraftigt pris finns stora möjligheter att sälja denna produkt. Kundvagnen använder sig av bildanalys och lastcell som möjliggör att kunden inte längre behöver manuellt skanna en vara. istället identifieras varan och registreras när den placeras i kundvagnen. Prototypen har jämförts och slutsats har dragit att produkten är ett bättre alternativ än existerande produkter för ändamålet. / Thefts and shoplifting is a big problem for local stores, additionally the development of e-commerce is a deciding factor for the success of physical stores and their profitability. An increasing amount of money is being invested in security solutions, guards and other related personnel.  The goal of this Bachelors thesis has been to develop a product for a modern and innovative smart shopping cart. The resulting cart is a tool that is more suitable for the benefit of consumers and their need for a more comfortable shopping experience, it has the benefit of streamlining the shopping process which in turn could attract repeat customers.  Through the use of new technology as well as the Internet and new functions at a competitive price point there is a great opportunity to market this product. The shopping cart uses image analysis and a load cell which alleviates the need for customers to manually scan each article for purchase, instead it is identified and registered as it is placed in the shopping cart.  The prototype has been compared to other solutions and conclusions have been drawn as to the optimality of the product fulfill the purpose.

Shopping cart abandonment, eller digitalt avbrutna köp, beskrivs som problematiskt inom e-handelssektorn. I denna undersökning kartläggs svenska e-handelskonsumenters betalningspreferenser för att författaren ska kunna slutleda varför digitala köp avbryts. En informationsasymmetri råder mellan konsumenter och e-butiker som bidrar till negativa konsekvenser. Då ingen inhemsk, objektiv forskning finns att tillgå och den internationella forskning som existerar är svår att generalisera samt vid flertalet tillfällen är tidsinaktuell bör författarens forskningstillskott ses som relevant. Författaren kartlägger via en kvantitativ studie svenska konsumenters preferenser vid betalningsfasen. Resultatet leder till att konsumenternas krav vad gäller betalningsfasens utformning synliggörs. Svenska e-handelskonsumenter önskar snabba, smidiga och säkra betalningsfaser. En väl utformad betalningsfas väntas även minska den informationsasymmetri som råder mellan konsumenter och e-handlare. Tack vare en högre grad informationssymmetri väntas e-handlarnas respektive konverteringsgrader öka. / Shopping cart abandonment, i.e. discontinued digital purchases, is described as problematic in the e-commerce sector. In this report, digital consumers residing in Sweden will have their payment preferences mapped to allow the author to conclude why digital purchases are interrupted. Information asymmetry exists between consumers and e-retailers which in turn contributes to negative consequences. Since no domestic, objective research is available, and the existing international research is difficult to generalize and often dated, the author's research grant should be considered relevant. The author maps Swedish consumers preferences during the payment phase through a quantitative study. The study makes sure that the domestic consumer's preferences and demands regarding the payment phase are being made visible. Swedish consumers tend to want their payment phases to be fast, easily managed and secure. A well-designed payment phase is also expected to reduce the information asymmetry residing between consumers and e-retailers. Thanks to a more symmetric information flow, the conversion rates regarding e-retailers are expected to increase.

Today an increasing share of shopping is happening online. The purchases are often made on online stores that are in turn often managed by software called shopping cart software. Simultaneously a new shift is underway in the e-commerce market where more and more purchases are made from mobile phones. In order to take advantage of this shift companies are eager to integrate their shopping cart software into mobile applications that take full advantage of the mobile phone’s capabilities and give the mobile shopper a better experience. Depending on the shopping cart software used, the software vendor might not provide any best practices for doing the mobile integration. Without any help from the software vendor, the businesses are facing a difficult problem with many possible integration architectures to choose from. The problem is therefore, that selecting the optimal integration architecture for integrating shopping cart software into a mobile application can be challenging and complex. In this thesis we explore the domain of shopping cart software with the purpose of developing a framework for integrating shopping cart software into a mobile application. We suggest an integration architecture selection framework, which we call A Framework for Integrating Shopping Cart Software in Mobile Applications (FISCiMA). Our goal is twofold: (1) guide entities in choosing an integration architecture for shopping cart software and (2) to provide a basis for further research in the domain of integration architecture selection models. Conducted research is of qualitative type, research method is applied research and research approach is inductive reasoning. We work in five research phases: (1) Literature study, (2) Interview of our client, (3) Design of framework, (4) Evaluation and (5) Fine-tuning. Following these phases, we collect basic knowledge of shopping cart software and their mobile integration from the two first phases to design a framework in the third phase. The designed framework is then evaluated in the fourth phase and finally improved according to the feedback received from the evaluation in the fifth phase. The evaluation of FISCSiMA framework is done using a questionnaire, which is answered to by our involved body. The results of the evaluation suggest that the framework is intuitive, straightforward and flexible and simplifies the integration of shopping cart software into mobile applications. The authors suggest further work should be done to evaluate the merits of the FISCSiMA framework and research if the FISCSiMA framework could be applicable to other types of software. / Idag handlar ett ökande antal konsumenter online. Konsumenter handlar ofta på onlinebutiker som i sin tur hanteras av programvara som kallas kundvagn mjukvara. Samtidigt pågår ett nytt skifte på e-handelsmarknaden där allt fler konsumenter handlar online från sina mobiltelefoner. För att dra nytta av detta skift och ge konsumenter som handlar online via mobilen en bättre upplevelse vill företag integrera sin kundvagns mjukvara in i mobila applikationer som kan bättre utnyttja mobiltelefonens unika förmågor.Beroende på vilken kundvagns mjukvara som används finns det en risk att mjukvaruleverantören inte tillhandahåller metoder för att integrera deras kundvagns mjukvara in i mobila applikationer. Utan någon hjälp från mjukvaruleverantören står företagen inför ett svårt problem med många möjliga integration arkitekturer att välja mellan. Således är problemet att det är utmanande och komplext att välja den optimala integrations arkitekturen för att integrera kundvagns mjukvara in i en mobilapplikation.I denna avhandling utforskar vi domänen för kundvagns mjukvara med syftet att utveckla ett ramverk för att integrera kundvagns mjukvara in i mobila applikationer. Vi föreslår ett integrations arkitektur urval ramverk, som vi kallar A Framework for Integrating Shopping Cart Software in Mobile Applications (FISCiMA). Vårt mål består av två delar: (1) vägleda enheter i att välja integrationsarkitektur för kundvagns mjukvara och (2) att ge en grund för ytterligare forskning inom området integration arkitektur urval modeller.Den genomförda forskningen är av kvalitativ typ, forskningsmetoden är tillämpad forskning och forsknings inriktningen är induktiv resonemang. Vi arbetar i fem forskningsfaser: (1) Litteraturstudie, (2)Intervju av vår klient, (3) Design av ramverk, (4) ärdering och (5) Finjustering. I de första två forsknings faserna samlar vi grundläggande kunskaper om kundvagns mjukvara och deras mobila integration för att sedan designa ett ramverk i den tredje fasen. Det designade ramverket utvärderas sedan i den fjärde fasen och förbättras slutligen enligt återkopplingen från utvärderingen i den femte fasen.Utvärderingen av FISCSiMA ramverket görs med hjälp av ett frågeformulär som besvarats av vår involverade part. Resultat av utvärderingen tyder på att ramverket är intuitivt, enkelt och flexibelt och förenklar integrationen av kundvagns mjukvara in i mobila applikationer. Författarna föreslår att ytterligare arbete görs för att utvärdera meriterna av FISCSiMA ramverket och forskning görs för att se om FISCSiMA ramverket kan appliceras på andra mjukvaru kategorier.

El presente trabajo de investigación propone una solución innovadora, enfocada en prevenir posibles problemas físicos de los clientes causados por la sobre carga de peso al momento de realizar las compras. Asimismo, el carrito de compras es un producto multifuncional que no existe en el mercado peruano. Con la finalidad de validar la viabilidad del proyecto se realizó una exhaustiva investigación de fuentes primarias y secundarias, en la cual se identificó que la pandemia provocada por la COVID-19 incrementó la demanda de productos de primera necesidad en los mercados, supermercados y diversos centros de abasto. Este hallazgo fue fundamental para definir quiénes son y donde se encuentra nuestro público objetivo. En este sentido, el proyecto propone la creación, fabricación y comercialización de carritos de compras que estarán a la venta mediante canales presenciales y virtuales. Por lo tanto, los productos estarán orientados, principalmente, a satisfacer el problema planteado de los hogares de los sectores socioeconómicos A y B de Lima Metropolitana. / The present research work proposes an innovative solution, focused on preventing possible physical problems of customers caused by overweight when making purchases. Likewise, the shopping cart is a multifunctional product that does not exist in the Peruvian market. In order to validate the viability of the project, an exhaustive investigation of primary and secondary sources was carried out, in which it was identified that the pandemic caused by COVID-19 increased the demand for essential products in markets, supermarkets and various centers. This finding was fundamental in defining who and where our target audience is. In this sense, the project proposes the creation, manufacture and marketing of shopping carts that will be for sale through face-to-face and virtual channels. Therefore, the products will be oriented, mainly, to satisfy the problem posed by the households of the socioeconomic sectors A and B of Metropolitan Lima. / Trabajo de investigación

Samhället blir allt mer digitaliserat för var dag som går och med denna utveckling har e-handeln under de senaste decennierna kontinuerligt vuxit sig större.   I den växande e-handeln existerar det dock ett problem som leder till stora monetära förluster för aktörer i detaljhandeln. Enligt aktuell statistik överger över två tredjedelar av alla kunder i e-handeln sina fyllda varukorgar utan att avsluta sina köp. Anledningarna bakom detta pekar i vissa fall på känslor som uppstår hos användare på grund av hur webbutiker är uppbyggda och fungerar.   Denna studie har med bakomliggande problemområde som anledning därför undersökt hur design skulle kunna tillämpas för att öka slutförandet av köp i webbutiker.   För att besvara denna fråga har en kvalitativ undersökning gjorts där intervjuer konstruerade efter tidigare forskning inom området och forskningsfrågan utfördes med personer som frekvent använder webbutiker och som även vid något tillfälle har lagt produkter i sin varukorg för att sedan lämna webbutiken utan att slutföra sitt köp.   Resultaten från dessa intervjuer och den efterföljande analysen hittade de två användningsområdena ”Navigationssystem” och ”Kassa och varukorg” och tillhörande designriktlinjer som ska tillämpas i användningsområdena för att öka slutförandet av köp i webbutiker. Slutligen gestaltades även designförslag för att visualisera dessa användningsområden och designriktlinjer. / Society is becoming increasingly more digitized and with this development e-commerce has seen continuous growth these past decades.   Within the growing e-commerce there is a however a big problem that has led to and continues to lead to significant monetary losses. According to current statistics over two thirds of customers online abandon their shopping carts without completing their purchases. In some cases, the reasons for this points to different emotions felt by customers which are created by how webshops are built and how they work.   Due to this problem this study has researched how one could apply design to increase the completion of purchases in online stores.   To answer this question a qualitative study was carried out in which interviews based on the research question and previous relevent research were conducted with people who frequently use online stores and who at some point have abandoned their shopping cart without completing their purchase.   The result of these interviews and the subsequent analysis was the finding of the two areas ”Navigation system” and ”Checkout and shopping cart” in which design can be used to increase the completion of purchases and design guidelines that are to be applied when designing these areas with the purpose of reducing shopping cart abandonment.    Lastly, design mockups where created to visualize these areas with the design guidelines applied.