Resource Guide: E-commerce Platforms

Any company choosing an e-commerce platform is faced with a bewildering number of choices. Determining which of these solutions best fits your needs is no longer as simple as having your local Internet provider develop a Web page with navigation and some type of shopping-cart functionality.

E-commerce solutions have evolved to include core functionality for navigation, shopping cart, checkout, shipping and handling, and taxes and some level of integration to an order management system (OMS), an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, or a warehouse management system (WMS). Then there are the Web 2.0 options: rich media with audio and visual tools, customer product reviews, social networking, blogs. Newer technology also provides functionality for options such as mouse-over (move the mouse over an image and the description will display without the user's having to click on the image), drag and drop (simply drag the item to the shopping cart without leaving the current page), and one-page checkout.

Given this array of possibilities, how do you determine the best e-commerce platform for your business? Here are a few guidelines:

• Treat your search as a system selection project. Too often companies have viewed e-commerce as a separate part of their business. In reality e-commerce has become integral to multichannel marketers. Today multichannel companies report that on average 35%-45% of their business comes through the Web.

  You should view your search for an e-commerce platform the same way you would a search for a new OMS or WMS. Spend time up front to understand what the e-commerce solution should provide, determine the project team, and develop a budget and a timeline.

• Develop your vision. Before you can determine what the e-commerce platform should provide, you need to know what you want your Website to do and how you want to use it from a conceptual standpoint. The project team needs to have a clear vision of how the site should look and function, what the growth objectives are, and who the target customer is.

  To develop the conceptual vision, you'll need to involve user management from all departments, including the contact center, merchandising, and the stores in addition to marketing, IT, and online. As a management team, what is their collective vision for the Website and how it should serve the customer? How do they want your customer to view the business? If you have stores, do they want site visitors to feel as if they've entered one of them? What types of marketing efforts need to be included? How do you want to display merchandise? These are just a few of the questions that go into developing a vision for an e-commerce platform solution.

• Define your requirements. This is a natural extension of developing your vision. What do you want the site to do? What type of functionality do you want? Everybody has shopping-cart technology — is there anything in particular that you need yours to do, such as personalization or cross-selling? What sort of Web analytics features do you need?

• Determine the degree of customization and flexibility you may want. Customization may take the form of something as simple as the ability to change promotions — offering a special discount on a given day, for instance. Or you might want to be able to change elements such as site navigation. How flexible does the solution really need to be? Don't get mired in jargon and functional possibilities. Concentrate instead on how your new site will produce sales or increase inquiries that lead to sales.

• Keep integration requirements in mind. Implementing an e-commerce platform with all the bells and whistles will fall short if your OMS or ERP system can't effectively communicate with the site.

• Decide whether you want to build or buy. Building your own e-commerce platform historically provided a competitive advantage in the marketplace, as packaged e-commerce solutions were expensive and basic. Many companies viewed their online business as different from anyone else's and thought their uniqueness required a homegrown platform.

  Times have changed, however, and companies now realize that the real differentiator for their Website is the look and feel, the effectiveness of its onsite search, and its merchandising (the presentation as well as the actual goods). Today many e-commerce platforms offer similar basic features and functionalities.

  While the build solution ultimately offers custom fit and control, using resources to build basic functions such as product catalog management, merchandising features, campaign management, and shopping-cart functionality can put a company at a disadvantage because of the amount of time needed to develop the underlying technology layers for functionality and the integration points to your existing systems. It commonly takes 12-24 months to design, develop, and build an e-commerce solution from scratch. Then there's the matter of finding and keeping experienced staff to build the solution. The question arises whether your company is better off using its resources to support its core competency rather than to develop a solution that already exists.

  As the second generation of e-commerce evolves, more marketers are opting to buy packaged or custom software. Platform programs generally encompass features such as visualization (product rotation and zoom), merchandising (marketing products based on customer preference, past history, or best-sellers), and personalization (offering the customer marketing opportunities based on purchasing patterns). Vendors have built more functionality into their platforms to handle the basic online selling features for product catalog management, merchandising, campaign management, and shopping-cart functionality. Another advantage to using a packaged solution is that the vendor provides upgrades to the core functionality.

  Some vendors are incorporating Web 2.0 features into their solutions while at the same time offering integration to third-party software (best-of-breed solutions) that can handle a more in-depth customer interaction. Buying an e-commerce platform that provides all the required core functionality as well as the ability to use best-of-breed applications and custom services is generally considered the optimal solution. The goal is to achieve a balance between the e-commerce solution and the number of best-of-breed applications, since maintaining multiple applications for the long term can increase maintenance costs.