Help with my graduation project

[Mark Lau]

My graduation project is basically a web-based e-commerce site.
The following is a brief description of the project.
1. Customer registration.
2. A customer can update their profile any time.
3. Search or browse the catalogue, display the search results in separate pages, for example 20 per page.
4. e-mail confirmation of successful registration or transaction.
5. Help a customer to recover or reset his/her password
6. Bill the customer to their credit card.
I am going to use Servlet, JSP, Java Beans, MySQL database and Tomcat web server. And the project will be deployed on a Sun work station running Solaris 8.
Originally, I thought I could just finish the project as a proof of my capibility of doing such kind of project. But my adviser wants me to make my project different from what we already have out there. For example, put something new in it or try to fix any problems that such e-commerce site might have.
This is tough for me, because (1) I don't know of anything new that I can put into the project, (2) I don't know of any problems that such e-commerce site might have.
Can you people give me a hint? Tell me how to make this project sort of novelish? Thanks a lot.

[Matthew Phillips]

I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but this is what I am doing on my graduation project. Instead of creating an e-commerce site (which are dropping like flies anyway) try to come up a different application that could benefit from web technologies. My view of the internet is that it is better as an information resource that a store front, so I am creating a website that will help people find information on my chosen topic. It incorporates html, jsp, servlets, javabeans, and a back end database.

[Laurie Haischer]

An additional attribute that could be included in this type of app :
personalization - the customer is "remembered" when logging in again by greeting them with their name and showing them a list of what they looked at previously. Amazon has this.
More security to take care of bad data or unwanted input from someone visiting the site.
Performance tuning.
Just some ideas.