How did  you build the object libraries so they are able to function with ASP?

I can’t take any credit for that one, it was all down to Microsoft!  Active Server Pages makes extensive use of COM technology, so all we do in the book is use Visual Basic to build COM objects that can be called directly from ASP.

What should all good E-Commerce sites have?

You’ll have to read the book to find out!  Seriously though, there are a few things that you simple have to have.  You need a logical structure to base your product catalog on, and you need highly intuitive tools to let visitors find stuff in that catalog.  Most people visiting an e-commerce site have a pretty clear idea of what they’re looking for so ideally you want to let them find the product or products as quickly as possible. 

How did you create an online community in the website?

As the case study in the book is about building a coffee machine and consumables e-tailer, we wanted to build a community around people interested in coffee.  The main focus of the community in the book is based on a discussion paradigm.  To do this, we took some components from “Doug Dean Software & Consulting” and used them to provide tools for visitors to chat with other visitors about coffee.  We also created a mailing list using Microsoft’s bCentral ListBot and alluded to that fact that original content submitted by visitors and business partners of the company would also help build the community.

How have you managed to make it possible to recommend products to customers?

In the book we use a pretty straightforward method of creating a matrix such that if you’re looking at one product, you can scan down the matrix to find other products that people may be interested in.  We build that manually in the book, but the ideal here is to get something close to what Amazon have managed to do with their recommendations.  Their system works on similar principles, but they have some very smart processing tools in the background that sifts through their sales data and builds the matrix for them. 

However its done, making recommendations to customers is always a neat idea as it draws e-commerce sites away from this fairly artificial category-based structure.  This category-based structure became the convention as e-commerce storefronts were modelled on bricks-and-mortar stores and what recommendations let you do is move around the store in the path grounded in your interest and the interests of your peers.