A web application for ordering university textbooks online through a clean and accessible interface, designed as an integrated system to simplify the process of buying necessary textbooks.
Education & Ecommerce
The bookstore website only allows accounts to be registered using university provided emails. Upon registration this allows the bookstore account to be linked to the students account at the university. This integration greatly simplifies the experience by allowing the bookstore to know which courses the student is currently enrolled in, and add textbook costs directly to the student’s tuition upon purchase.
As the bookstore account is linked to the students university account, the online storefront is able to retrieve the information of currently enrolled courses. The bookstore allows the student to browse for textbooks specifically for their current course enrolment. This feature greatly reduces the time students spend looking for textbooks as well as preventing the possibility purchasing the wrong textbooks by mistake.
The online bookstore allows students to quickly find any textbook they may be looking for. Students are able to search for books using a partial book name, course name, or even by simply providing a partial course identification number. In addition, students can sort the bookstore catalogue by all books, books for their courses, or books for a specified course.
Students are given the option to place orders for either the physical or digital version of a textbook. When purchasing the digital version of a textbook, the textbook PDF file will be delivered to the student’s email address within 30 minutes. Alternatively, when placing an order for a physical copy of a textbook, students are able to select a time and date to pick up their order from the university bookstore storefront. As bookstore accounts are linked to university accounts, all student purchases are directly added to their tuition costs in order to greatly simplify the buying process. Students are able to cancel orders and view past orders through the bookstore website. Since this software was designed during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the system is build to remain operational and contactless if any similar situation were to occur.
A management interface is available to university faculty and staff providing the ability to cancel or confirm active orders, view all archived orders, as well as view the order profile for specified students.
All user sessions are securely authenticated to ensure the accounts and data of all students are protected and only accessible by them. An secure authentication system is very important to have in place especially for a platform that is connected to the students financial accounts at the university.
The university bookstore manages data using MySQL integration. Utilizing a database connection pool system, the bookstore ensures multiple database requests can be efficiently executed simultaneously and prevent the system from being overwhelmed.
Many universities rely on a third-party company to provide the software for an online bookstore, and often manage the hosting the web application. This means the third-party company will have access to all user information that passes through the system, breaching the privacy of all students who use the system. In addition, the bookstores dependability is tied to the dependability of the third-party company itself. This university bookstore web application is designed to be directly implemented and hosted by the university, with no reliance on any third-party. By integrating the bookstore directly into university servers, the privacy and integrity of student information can be maintained.
Developer Portfolio
By Mazen M.