Empowering the CIO with an ecommerce evaluation

An ecommerce solution for a B2B enterprise shouldn’t be chosen as light-heartedly as a mainstream radio station: a CIO actively forges an organisation’s path. Implementing an ecommerce solution comes with a hefty budget. The budget would likely be better spent on targeted projects, implementations, and pieces of functionality that resolve a business logic rather than on a solution filled with functionality of which your organisation will only use a fraction.

An ecommerce solution must correspond to the needs of your business and fulfill some basic requirements so that you get the best out of it, such as:

Scalability

Customer-facing applications should never be sluggish or unresponsive. Otherwise you’ll only irritate and confuse your customers, damaging your business and your reputation. It’s important for your ecommerce solution to scale along with your business. This aspect should be addressed right from the beginning; it’s not something you can easily add later on.

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Product catalog

How easy is it for your customers to navigate your webshop and find your products? A simple, structured product navigation with attribute filtering and search can go a long way in simplifying your customers’ journey through your webshop. Additionally, a product catalog that reflects your business is essential to simplify your organisation’s management of it. Duplicate content, products in incorrect categories, wrong product codes, and random irrelevant information are just some of the things you can avoid to improve your webshop’s value to your customers. Check that your ecommerce shop has the capacity to serve your unexpected needs in the future, especially with product maintenance.

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Business user control

Confirm whether your ecommerce solution is capable of supporting category/product managers, data quality teams, merchandising and marketing departments, and other business owners. It’s also important that your ecommerce solution is ready to serve internal merchandisers with product discounts, order management, and fulfillment. Check whether business users can maintain content in the webshop constantly, as needed, without deployments. Make sure business users have enough confidence in the system (e.g. through publication workflows) that they don’t believe they’ll break the webshop with their edits and work.

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Search

First of all, your ecommerce solution must be ready to fulfill a customer’s search needs. But can you also learn from the customer’s search behavior? Does your internal search engine support filtering by product attributes? Can your search engine handle typos and spelling mistakes and still deliver relevant results? What search are you integrating with your webshop, and is it catalog-aware as well?

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Agility

A webshop that can keep up with your organisation’s agility and your needs is important in the long run. If your webshop takes forever to fulfill your customer requirements, the potential revenue loss would be unimaginable. Your development initiatives should align with customer demand in such a way that you can deliver requirements to them and consequently outcompete your rivals. Examples that help your webshop achieve agility are continuous deployment, continuous delivery, continuous integration and automation, which are necessary to deliver quality to your customers.

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Reporting & analytics

Business intelligence and reporting are integral to building a solid customer-focused strategy. A reporting dashboard can give business users the ability to determine next steps and see what value they acquire from customer behavior. Data gathered by your ecommerce solution should be ready to be displayed and managed within the solution itself or with an application that allows business users to investigate it. Understanding purchase behavior and its drivers is an important aspect of business intelligence, and an ecommerce solution capable of delivering ad hoc reports allows users to find answers quickly if needed.

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Standards & technology

It often happens that unique and effective applications in your business were coded by software developers to fit a specific purpose. While this is great, it’s unfortunate when those applications rely on outdated frameworks or less-known languages, or are unusable by your current development staff. In addition, forcing your developers to learn an outdated technology stack will reduce their experience with state-of-the-art approaches to software development and architecture. For your business to achieve resilience, it must adapt to your evolving ecosystem (e.g. customer needs, practices to streamline deployments, and methodologies to simplify workflows).

To us, technology plays an important role: legacy systems were often built as huge monolithic solutions with static pieces of functionality that later became unmaintainable and inflexible. As your business changes, take precautions so that your solution adapts too; otherwise you will invariably accumulate major technical debt in overcoming these unnecessary challenges, and you will be forced to replace the whole software every few years.

As part of our ecommerce evaluation, we reviewed solutions written in any of the following languages / frameworks:

1. Java
2. Scala
3. Node.js
4. Spring Framework
5. Spring Integration
6. Spring Security
7. Spring MVC
8. JSP
9. Ajax
10. jQuery
11. HTML5
12. PHP
13. ASP.NET
14. Python

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Integration

Ecommerce applications aren’t standalone units. Just like your business, they need the potential to integrate across various streams in order to fulfil a number of your business requirements. A highly integratable ecommerce solution (and we don’t mean installing plugins) is one that can serve business needs without limitation. As your ecommerce solution grows, integrations help to delineate pieces of functionality through conduits where information is sent, retrieved and displayed.

In fact, your ecommerce solution can easily be an arrangement of integrations that produce the expected functionality, without a standalone silo limiting your every innovation. In our evaluation, we looked for modularity in applications, specifically how and where customer data is stored, master data management of the product catalog, whether there is modularity in pricing, cart and checkout, and whether fraud detection exists. In addition, we evaluated how easy it would be to fully integrate new applications and workflows such as analytics or marketing tools.

We specifically investigated whether ecommerce solutions have an integration for/with:

1. SAP
2. PIM
3. CMS
4. Payment
5. Fraud
6. CRM
7. Social Media
8. Marketing

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Interoperability

We acknowledge the prevalence of service-oriented architecture (SOA); the Big Five operate in this way. It’s not enough that communication within applications happens in a modular way; applications must also expose useful interfaces to integrate with applications outside the initially defined enterprise architecture of an ecommerce solution. Not only should the basic modular B2C and B2B functionalities be considered, but also the solution’s ability to “converse” and transfer data back and forth with other applications that operate on the data and need it to fulfill other requirements in your business.

We reviewed whether each ecommerce solution is B2C- and/or B2B-oriented, and whether it has processes specifically catering to B2B. While there are countless B2C solutions out there, the limited capability of a B2C implementation will not survive a week in a B2B world. It was also important for us to know how well interactions take place in the user’s account and the customer’s self-service. Customer self-service is mission-critical and should be supported by your ecommerce application.

The following are aspects we considered in our evaluation:

1. Organisation Management
2. Spending Control
3. Self-service
4. Account Management
5. Account Summary
6. Quote Negotiation
7. Special pricing
8. Direct order/BOM Upload
9. Order replenishment
10. Order approval
11. Order management
12. Checkout
13. eProcurement
14. Payment
15. Inventory Management
16. Cart
17. Storefront
18. Themes
19. Internationalisation
20. Product Management
21. Search
22. Product Details
23. CMS
24. Merchandising
25. Personalisation
26. SEO
27. Store Locator
28. Fraud Engine
29. Google Shopping
30. Device Detection

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Pricing

We considered pricing as an element of ecommerce solutions. CIOs must invariably make decisions according to the budget allocated to them by senior management. Solutions that are not open source and therefore lock you in, as well as pricing models that endlessly benefit the solution provider (license fees, user account fees, consulting fees, expert services fees, setup fees, third-party fees, recurring fees, and one-time fees), are quite common these days. We reviewed ecommerce solutions to uncover the pricing outline and the full pricing structure as far as possible.

With all this in mind, the CIO needs to consider which future ecommerce trends will shape the organisation’s commitments in feature deployment and design a corresponding roadmap. The most recent trends we see in ecommerce can be grouped into these topics:

1. Localization, Personalization & CX
2. Community Building, Customer Engagement & CRM
3. Mobile Optimization
4. CRO & Data-Driven Optimizations
5. Email Marketing, Automation & AOV
6. Omni-Channel Management
7. Payment Solutions
8. Customer Lifetime Value & Referral Programs
9. Catalog Extension
10. Shipping + Fulfillment Optimization
11. Sales Tax Liability
12. Pricing scales

Therefore, you should consider not only how well your ecommerce solution fulfills the basic functionalities we’ve illustrated above, but also the cost of future implementations and what this means for your organisation’s future.