Ecommerce Blog

If your ecommerce site has (or is thinking of adding) user generated content (UGC) like product reviews, questions and answers, forums, knowledge bases, photos, video, blogs, comments and social tags, here are 9 things to keep in mind:

1. What’s Right for You?

Just because Amazon is doing user-submitted video and photos or product tagging doesn’t mean it’s right for your business. It’s important to consider what makes sense for the types of products you’re selling, your customer behavior and even sales volume. If Amazon’s ratio of purchases to traditional product reviews (slide 31) is 1,300 to 1, imagine how high it would be for video and photo, which take a lot more time and computer savvy from customers than text reviews.

2. “Everything in Moderation”

To protect your brand integrity, you really do have to moderate everything – whether product reviews, video, photos or comments. Make sure you have the resources and processes to moderate in a timely manner.

3. Privacy

Customers want to have confidence that you respect their privacy as an aggregator of their contributed content.

4. Content Ownership

Think carefully whether you or your customer owns content. Keep in mind some third party platforms like customer reviews and even web analytics may actually own contributed content. You may not be able to take it with you if you switch platforms, so make sure you own the content when choosing a vendor.

5. Storage

User generated content may “live” in your CMS, custom database or in variety of third party, hosted applications. Whenever possible, consolidate this content so it’s easy to access in one place.

6. In-site Search

User generated content is ideally indexed by your site search tool to appear in search results. If data exists in multiple places, this becomes more difficult. Sophisticated systems may use federated search to solve the problem.

7. SEO and Indexing

The major search engines realize the value that videos, images and reviews deliver to searchers. Google has even partnered with Bazaarvoice recently to deliver product reviews in search snippets.

Fresher content may also give your page a boost in search engines, as will more content (more text means more opportunities your page text will match a search query. Also, customers will use synonyms and misspellings that you don’t use in your product copy. But you can’t benefit from UGC unless search engines index it. Avoid using Javascript or frames to deliver content (common practice with third party platforms), as search engines will ignore it.

8. Syndication and Extended Usage

Consider whether you want your content syndicated to other sites like shopping engines and review aggregators. The benefit might be more reach, but at the expense of search engine traffic (duplicate text on multiple sites, the aggregator may rank higher because of higher trust in search engines, more links, etc).

On the flip side, you may decide to aggregate content from external sites on your page like reviews, blog posts, images and even Youtube video. Quality control and moderation are important if you go this route.

9. Profile Integration and Upload Process

It’s important the customer only need to log in once to upload content for a seamless experience.

10. Platform vs. Build In House

Because of the considerations above, you may decide an in-house build better meets your requirements for control, integration or innovation.

These tips are taken from our latest webinar: Managing online content across markets and channels: The role of PIM and CMS in ecommerce (PIM stands for Product Information Management, and CMS stands for Content Management System) with Elastic Path’s Peter Sheldon. If you missed it, you can watch the replay on-demand or peruse the slide deck below:

Original post by Linda Bustos

All enterprise ecommerce vendors test their application’s performance, but it is still a good idea to discuss the performance aspects of an ecommerce platform with the vendor before making the decision to buy. You will also need to analyze the performance test results provided by the vendor and check the reference sites to see how the system has been scaling in the real world.

After you have decided on your new ecommerce platform, despite all of this pre-purchase research, you will need to start planning your own performance testing efforts as part of your ecommerce implementation. It is not enough to rely on a vendor’s testing as there are many factors that can affect a site’s performance and all ecommerce implementations are quite different.

There are many ways in which performance characteristics of your ecommerce implementation can be different from standard vendor’s implementation:

1. Structure and Size of Data

Let’s start with the catalog data. Some retailers have less than a thousand products in their catalog, while others are keeping hundreds of thousands of items in stock. We have also seen large variations in the number of SKUs on our customers’ sites. Performance characteristics of a catalog in which each product has thousands of SKUs will be different from a catalog that contains mostly single SKU products.

The number, size, and type of a product’s attributes are other parameters that can affect performance. In addition, complex promotion and pricing models may require extra database access and calculations, and have the potential to slow the system down.

When it comes to sites that use plenty of rich content (high-resolution images, video, flash), you will need to make sure they have the capacity to serve it to all customer browsers.

The personalized shopping experience is a popular trend in ecommerce, as it allows marketers to make content and products more relevant to visitors, which increases conversion rates. From a performance perspective, this type of personalized content causes additional load on the system, and this impact should be measured. Whether we like it or not, everything has its price.

2. Store Usage Patterns

On many ecommerce sites, a shopper starts from a home page and browses through category pages, or uses the product search functionality. For such sites, search & browsing requests will be prevailing activities and will generate most of the load on the application. In other stores, the shopping experience starts from the product page, or even on the checkout page, as the product selection happens in the context of another web application.

In addition, the conversion rate determines how much load you should expect from order placement transactions.

3. Caching Strategies

The best way to improve the performance of a web application is to implement a good data caching strategy. Many options are available to you, and, most likely, you will use a combination of different caching methods to achieve desirable results. Which ones you select will depend greatly upon the structure of your data, store usage patterns, and what caching strategies are supported by your ecommerce platform. You will need to decide:

• Which pages should be cached
• Whether to cache whole pages or page fragments
• Where caching should take place
• For how long you wish to cache different data
• How to invalidate the cached data

To find the right caching strategy, you will need to try different approaches and measure their impact through testing.

4. Storefront and backend integrations

It’s rare nowadays for an ecommerce system to work in isolation. Most likely, it will require a number of frontend and backend integrations in order to function. Each of them should be analyzed for performance impact.

Original post by Michael Vax

There’s a trend in ecommerce that’s exploding like a supernova in the way online stores did 10 years ago – application stores, and they’re not just for mobile phone applications. New application platforms for software, hardware and even enterprises are popping up every day, targeting business, consumers, developers and even employees. Currently, the Wireless Industry Partnership lists 68 known application stores (up from 34 only a few months ago). And analysts expect the app store boom will push Apple App Store’s market share below 30% by 2013. This does not mean Apple will slow growth, rather, there will become more competitive with more platforms and options for consumers and developers to play with.

Who’s opening app stores?

Software platforms:

• Java store
• Windows Mobile
• Android Market
• Facebook App Store
• Adobe AIR Marketplace
• Adobe Photoshop Marketplace
• Salesforce (Force.com)
• OneForty (Twitter)
• Intuit Workplace App Center
• eBay Selling Manager
• Google Apps Marketplace
• PayPal (coming soon)

Hardware platforms:

• Smartphones – (RIM (Blackberry), Apple, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Nokia etc.
• Mobile carriers – Sprint, Orange, Verizon Wireless, China Mobile etc.
• TVs – Verizon, Samsung, KT, Rallycast
• eReaders – Amazon, Sony, Samsung
• Printers – HP
• Netbooks – Intel, Acer etc.
• PC – Dell, Citrix etc.
• Home automation monitors – Control4

Enterprise app stores:

• Mobile Iron
• AppCentral
• Citrix Dazzle

What’s the purpose of an app store?

App stores exist to increase the attractiveness of the platform to end users by engaging 3rd party developers to increase platform capabilities. The more functionality developers can bring to the table, the more useful the application will be, the longer people will stay on the platform/device, etc. For example, Facebook launched its F8 platform realizing it could never internally develop as many applications that others could contribute.

By providing a marketplace for these developers, the platform enables developers to monetize their apps. An application is submitted for approval to the application store operator, and finally made available for purchase to end customers who use the applications. They make the payment back to the operator, who takes a cut of the sale.

How application stores are more complex than traditional ecommerce

Because there are 3 parties to an app store: the store operator, the developer pool and application consumers, the app store, like a marketplace, has complex requirements such as implementation, interfaces to set catalog prices, reports for sales so each developer can see its performance, approval process for submited apps, support for different devices, upgrades and versions, and multi-platform store interfaces such as a desktop app store and its mobile version.

The current state of app stores

Most app stores are Apple imitations, just playing catch up with the leader. Today’s app stores eally only have basic ecommerce functionality such as browsing menus, searching, ratings and reviews. Missing are the personalization, cross-sell, upsell, trial downloads, video demos etc which can really help developers with selling and consumers with discovery.

Another phenomenon is the rich get richer – apps are listed by number of downloads or by star rating. Search and browse tools favor the top ranking apps, and it’s these who continue to get the most revenues and downloads. It’s difficult for new developers to get found, and store operators need to provide more tools to help them succeed.

Today, most app stores are built in-house or by a systems integrator as an extension to the website, much like the early days of ecommerce before commercial shopping carts and ecommerce platforms became available.

How can application stores move from first generation to next generation?

Application stores need advanced ecommerce functionality, modified for the marketplace environment in order to grow store operator and developers’ revenues. They should also offer multiple ways to monetize intellectual property, such as share, rent, in-app ads, bundling and in-app payments. For example, especially on business platforms, sharing the application across multiple seats would be useful. The developer can sell a multi-user license. Developers may team up to offer bundled application packages for a discounted price. The ability to purchase additional credits or features within apps and from inside the application store is also helpful, like accessories in an ecommerce store.

App stores can also improve by offering multiple communication channels between developers, users and operators. E.g. customers should be able to contact the developer directly for support and feedback, and vice versa for remarketing.

As app stores continue to grow, SaaS (software as a service) products developed by commercial vendors will likely displace some of the in-house builds, further accelerating the adoption of app stores as they become quicker to launch and less expensive to develop.

For a deep-dive on application stores, you can catch the full replay of our webinar App store – a new way to sell software, media, and anything digital on-demand at http://elasticpath.com/webinars/apps/

Original post by Linda Bustos

iTunes became the first widely popular and successful Application Store. Since then, many other vendors have joined the gold rush. I write this blog post on the flight from Barcelona after spending a week at the Mobile World Congress, which is the biggest annual mobile exhibition and conference. This year it also included an event inside the event – Application Planet (an exhibition dedicated to mobile applications).

As I was wandering through the exhibition halls, it became apparent how popular the concept of the Application Store is.

The main goal of an App Store is to increase the attractiveness of a hardware or software platform to end users by engaging third party developers to increase platform capabilities.

Most of the current App Stores have been created either by a hardware manufacturer (Apple, Intel, Samsung, LG) or a wireless network operator (Orange, Verizon Wireless, China Mobile).

The Wireless Industry Partnership Connector Inc. (WIP) keeps track of App Stores for mobile developers and has listed 49 of them already on its web site.

However, App Stores are not limited to mobile devices. For example, Intel has created an application store for NetBooks which run on an Atom processor. According to Intel’s product manager Lucas Massuh, Intel sees the store as the main way to distribute software for NetBooks as they don’t contain a DVD drive. To make it very easy for a user to move applications from one device to another, the App Store keeps track of purchased applications and authorizes them on user devices.

Intel is planning to extend the App Store to its partners (netbooks manufacturers) and run white-labelled stores for companies like Acer. However, it looks like Acer already has plans of its own and will be offering downloadable software and e-book readers by mid-year.

Samsung has created a store for what it calls multi-device applications – programs that work on a variety of devices ranging from phones to netbooks, TVs to e-book readers. Samsung is encouraging developers to create applications that can utilize multiple devices. For example, using a phone as a remote control for a TV.

Pure software companies that want to attract developers to their platform are also joining the suite. Salesforce has created a store for applications that runs on the Salesforce cloud.

As the number of applications balloons, more specialized App Stores are appearing that cater to a specific market segment or to specific user needs. While most of the stores are targeting consumers, there are a number of new stores that focus on business and enterprise markets.

For example, MobileIron provides each corporate customer with its own customised Enterprise App Store, transforming the delivery model of enterprise applications from ‘push’ to ‘publish’.

The corporate IT department publishes approved internal and external applications, noting whether they are supported and/or reimbursed, and defining access based on the user role or IT policy.

Employees then browse their Enterprise App Store through the MyPhone@Work portal and select the applications best suited for them.

A similar model is used by AppCentral which brings together the efficiency of a self-service App Store with the power of IT controls.

Applications of Application Stores

Application Stores create an opportunity for a new business model when it comes to selling software and its components. Let’s say Developer A has a great idea for a new game. To get his super game to the market fast, he wants to use an existing game engine created by Developer B. Currently, the only way for a game developer to distribute his or her game with a 3rd party game engine is to license it upfront.

Intel plans to start a developer-to-developer application store with an innovative revenue sharing model. When Developer A’s game is sold, Intel will give Developer B an agreed upon percentage of the revenue. There is no risk for Developer A as he is not paying the licensing fee upfront and the application store takes care of all hassles associated with revenue sharing and payments.

Another ecommerce opportunity is “in-app” sales. In-app ecommerce refers to an application that sells additional content or services from inside the application. For example, a developer can release a free version of a game and allow users to upgrade to the paid version from inside the application, or buy additional virtual goods which can be used in the game.

Another example is an application that sells content. In Barcelona, I visited the booth of a Japanese company that sells Japanese Namga (Comic Books) on a variety of cell phones. The user installs the application on a mobile phone and uses it to purchase new comics which are immediately downloaded to the mobile device. e-book stores use the same approach.

The Application Store as a Marketplace

In essence, an App Store is a Marketplace for selling applications or content produced by a number of vendors.

There are substantial differences between an App Store and a regular ecommerce system.

A standard ecommerce system provides interfaces to two different types of users – shoppers and store operators. Application Stores have a third category of users – vendors. This means that an Application Store’s system needs to support interfaces for creating and managing vendors’ accounts as well as give the vendors their own interface to manage their products, prices, and generate reports.

The vendor interface needs to be simple and straightforward, as developers want to spend their time writing software or creating content instead of operating an ecommerce site. For example, Samsung, who plans to operate its App Store in 50 countries, makes it very simple for developers to set up product prices across multiple stores and currencies. A developer only needs to select a pricing tier for his or her application and this automatically determines prices in all currencies across all Samsung stores.

There is also an essential difference in managing shoppers’ accounts. In the Application Store, order history means “what the user owns” instead of “what the user has purchased”. Thus, the store should allow a user to reinstall applications on a new computer or phone as well as make sure that the user has access to application upgrades.

Another interesting distinction from a standard ecommerce system is that most App Stores don’t have a web storefront. Like iTunes, the App Store has two types of applications: a store application for PCs, and another for mobile devices.

Some App Stores do have a web storefront that customers can use to look for an application. When a shopper finds the application he or she wants to buy, they are asked to enter either an email address or a phone number, and a link to complete the purchase is sent to their phones via an email or SMS message.

As we discussed above, the main goal of an Application Store is to attract developers, and the main goal of developers is to maximize revenue by selling more applications. Most of the current Application Stores are built internally by companies that operate them, and do not have advanced ecommerce features that have become common in modern ecommerce platforms.

Functionally, most App Stores are very similar to iTunes. The selling process is based on a simple product search, category browsing, and user ratings. This works well for the small number of applications which have made it to the top of the charts. The rest of the vendors bring in less than optimal revenue from their less popular applications.

The Future of App Stores

I believe that a second generation of App Store systems will arrive soon from established ecommerce vendors which will adopt more sophisticated ecommerce techniques like bundling, SEO, cross-sell/up-sell, promotions, and tier pricing to increase revenues for store operators and developers.

Please join me on March 30th for this month’s webinar App Store – a new way to sell software, media, and anything digital where we will further explore this new fast growing trend in ecommerce.

Original post by Michael Vax

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Original post by Robert Scoble

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Original post by Robert Scoble

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Original post by Joyce Kim