Online Businesses Must Understand Ecommerce Database Design Options

Data Management | Ecommerce

Do you imagine modern ecommerce website with simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code in the core? Yes, if it has only one product to sell! Astoundingly, today the majority of ecommerce stores have hundreds to thousands of products listed for online sale. Each product comes with various product attributes such as images, size, color, style, and so on. Moreover, each product requires an individual product web page. Now, what about category pages, home page, landing pages, informational pages, advertisements or presentation of different types of products, and blogs for business? These all are consisting of myriads of data on your ecommerce web store. Therefore, your ecommerce storefront has to store and process all data it contains. It is only possible with database storage system (Memory) and database management system (DBMS). Thus, if you are running or thinking of running an eCommerce store on the web, you must know your data and database management along with other e-commerce technologies, tools, and techniques to attain desired success in online selling.  

Types of Data Used in E-commerce Database Design

With some understanding regarding the data on an e-commerce site, let’s explore how many types of data consumption takes place on ecommerce storefront. Technically, data types are many on an ecommerce site, but for the sake of simplicity for comprehension, we can divide ecommerce data into two simple categories:

Data for Site Content in Ecommerce Database Design

Ecommerce site consisting of various types of content including texts, images, audios, videos, and animation on various web pages such as:

• Static to dynamic content pages including About Us, Contact Us, FAQ, Privacy Policies, Shipping/Delivery Policies, and so on
• Product pages with product attributes such as title, product descriptions (short/long), pricing, size, color, dimension, styles, weight, status of product in inventory, and so on
• Category pages with groups in top selling, featured, favorite, new, and upcoming products along with short product attributes and image galleries

 

Data for Transaction in Ecommerce Database Design

Ecommerce websites or web portals always selling something that involves money transactions. Ecommerce transactions are always consisting of various transactional data including vital user personal info, bank/financial institutional data, debit/credit card data, m-commerce data, and so on in this regard. For the sake of simplicity, we can divide these data into:

• Customer/Shopper data such as names, addresses, personal contact info (email, phone, IM IDs), product buying data/history, and so on
• Product Data including product in inventory/warehouse sold products, replenished products, out of stock products, ordered products, and so on

 

The Role of Database in Ecommerce Database Design

With the acknowledgment of data types, we have realized that ecommerce must have efficient database integrated and database design for ecommerce websites for various purposes such as:

Structuring the Stored Data

Since ecommerce data are falling in various categories and types based on their attributes, particularly the product attributes. When an ecommerce developer creates a database schema to develop site architecture, developers have to organize all data in a particular fashion/patterns. In due course, database management software including SQL and NoSQL DBMS are providing excellent tools and technologies to store structured and unstructured data in appropriate database management systems for ecommerce database design.  

Organizing Content & Products

Organizing non-product content is easy, but products with a plenty of product attributes are daunting for an effective presentation on various pages including product pages, landing pages, home pages, and in product galleries. Organizing the mix of product data with other options is a critical role of the ecommerce database design.  

Tracking Ecommerce Transactions

Tracking various ecommerce transactions for order management, shipping management, and marketing is demanding intensive processes and effective presentation of data. The database of ecommerce provides such capacities to support thousands or millions of transactions without losing performance.  

Types of Databases Used in Ecommerce Database Design

By definition, databases are storing, organizing, protecting, and delivering various kinds of data in different forms such as structured (Tabulated/SQL) and unstructured (Non-Tabulated/NoSQL/Object-oriented) data. There are dozens of different types of databases existing in software development market, but RDBMS and OODBMS/non-RDBMS database management systems are more used and growing their share in the present challenging market rapidly.  

RDBMS (Relational Database Management System)

RDBMS databases are easy to use and comprehend. It is because those are similar to widely used spreadsheets but in tabular forms. A table can connect with other tables with keys and allows changes in the data of any table without leaving any impact on other tables or data. For instance, when a loyal customer is changing her email address, the update takes place only in one row of the customer table and spare other tables like order tables. Technically, RDBMS are sufficient for most of the ecommerce categories of websites or applications and work well for content as well as transactional data. The present market share of different RDBMS providers are:

• 70%– Oracle
• 68%– MS SQL
• 50%–MySQL
• 39%– IBM DB2
• 18%–IBM Informix
• 15%–SAP Sybase ASE
• 14%–SAP Sybase IQ
• 11%– Teradata

 

Non-RDBMS (Non-Relational Database Management System)

These are table-less (Unstructured) databases documented with object-oriented programming languages like JSON or XML and offer altogether different perspectives for the databases management systems for today. Therefore, they are also termed as documented database systems. NoSQL databases can be classified into various categories but the most basic are:

Column:

Ex: Cassandra, HBase, Accumulo, Druid, Vertica, SAP HANA  

Document:

Ex: Apache MongoDB, CouchDB, DocumentDB, ArangoDB, OrientDB, RethinkDB, Clusterpoint, Couchbase, HyperDex, IBM Domino, MarkLogic, Qizx  

Key-value:

Ex: Redis, Riak, Aerospike, ArangoDB, Couchbase, Dynamo, FairCom c-treeACE, FoundationDB, HyperDex, InfinityDB, MemcacheDB, MUMPS, Berkeley DB  

Graph:

Ex: AllegroGraph, ArangoDB, InfiniteGraph, Apache Giraph, MarkLogic, Neo4J, OrientDB, Virtuoso, Stardog  

Multi-model:

Ex: Alchemy Database, ArangoDB, CortexDB, Couchbase, FoundationDB, InfinityDB, MarkLogic, OrientDB There are many reasons for that NoSQL databases are not used alone for an ecommerce. However, with the advent of NoSQL technologies and availability of trained developers to address various issues of NoSQL in ecommerce systems, tendencies are increasing. NoSQL databases are open source and low-cost alternatives. Moreover, NoSQL is fast in loading and performance if handled on big ecommerce stores by experts. Ecommerce ecosystem is becoming complicated with the infusion or integration of various advanced technologies like location tracking, machine learning, IoT, and others. However, database experts avoid the use of NoSQL in transactional database management and go for SQL or RDBMS. The best approach for ecommerce niche is to use SQL databases for small to medium size stores with fewer complexities. Use NoSQL in combination with SQL databases for medium to large ecommerce and e-retailers operating along with brick-and-mortar chains on the web.  

Database Hosting

The databases of modern ecommerce stores are growing rapidly and require special hosting facilities to address performance and security issues for transactional and various content-based data storage, analysis, processing, and presentations. Dedicated hosting servers are a bit costly affairs for small to medium scale of ecommerce stores. Cloud hosting is a more viable option today, and many public cloud services come with better performance and security features that can avoid spending on a private cloud or dedicated the web hosting options. If you are using SQL and NoSQL in a combination for your database needs, cloud hosting for your data like DBaaS or DaaS are worth to think.  

Database Integration

Various APIs are available in the market to offer database solutions, and most of the cloud database services are heavily relying on API database integrations with ecommerce sites. Therefore, today SaaS-based ecommerce solutions like Shopify and BigCommerce are using API database options freely to connect and customize store databases. The most unfortunate thing in API database solutions is dependencies on API database solution providers. If your API is not exposing some kinds of data types/categories, you cannot access those data in your ecommerce store functionality.  

The Best Practices for Ecommerce Database Design

If you are going to design your ecommerce database using the expert ecommerce developers on hand, the following best practices may help you to achieve desired success in ecommerce database design.

• Begins with a general overview and narrow down the database fields. Thus, you can avoid frequent additions of items in later stages
• Know the pros and cons of each database you use in your ecommerce store. For instance, proprietary MS SQL databases require Windows ecosystem to thrive while NoSQL are tough to manage transactional data
• Determine the size of product catalogs and decide the type of database to integrate with your ecommerce whether those are SQL or NoSQL
• Define a number of customizations you need for your ecommerce project and select the database based on the requirements so that you can use best presentations of data in visual formats like graphs, charts, and actionable models
• Saving or hosting ecommerce site and databases on the same server or place may or may not recommended so consider various options for database locations and cloud database solutions excellent choice

   

Conclusion:

Now, we almost familiar with data and ecommerce database design solutions for the ecommerce stores working with various complexities and requirements. We know how to achieve ecommerce success using the data and databases management systems effectively to address contemporary needs and complexities of database designs for ecommerce. However, ecommerce owners alone are not sufficient to handle the data and database related intricacies. They need to have an outstanding team of the ecommerce data experts with intensive experiences in various ecommerce database design. Fortunately, Addon Solutions has a big team of ecommerce developers with tons of experiences in ecommerce database integration, customization, and maintenance using the latest technologies and trends in the market.