E-Commerce in the Clouds ? Haut Tech

E-Commerce??? Old School? Hardly.Projected sales from just US e-commerce and online retail sales are projected to reach?$226 billion?this year ? an 12% increase over 2011. In an otherwise stagnate world economy, e-commerce is booming.

The idea of online shopping goes back to 1979 when Michael Aldrich developed the concept of online shopping to enable online transaction processing between consumers and business and from business-to-business. From those primitive beginnings, the idea has expanded to the point that today, almost anything can be purchased online securely.

In the business world, e-commerce continues to be disruptive 17 years after the launch of Amazon.com. In recent years, it has been the publishing world ? newspapers, books, magazines and publishers ? who have felt the pressure of online alternatives. But they are by no means the only industry to feel the pinch of online sales. Small, independent merchants, who could have made a decent living on foot traffic in medium to large cities, increasingly depend on their online sites to supplement or even replace walk-ins. Retail startups, especially those selling speciality products and services to niche audiences, depend on their online sales. Even restaurants catering to the dinner trade feel compelled to offer reservations, menus, specials, delivery and catering services through their websites.

But, that said, the days when you simply could ask a 14 year-old down the street to code up a web site over a few weekends and start selling have gone. As more sites go up, the competition becomes ever tougher, and the importance of ?getting it right? has become ever greater. Even though the consultants who push Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will tell you your site ranking is everything, the design, user experience and functionality have never been more important in online sales. And now, with the push towards mobile devices, dynamic responsiveness to the form and functionality of the user device is becoming key.

So, if you are considering an online retail or business-to-business e-commerce site, what do you need?

• Content Management System (CMS) ? provides the application base for your site, processes and methods you can standardize for content development and publishing. CMS applications provide dynamic content management, meaning that content can be updated on-the-fly by users, workflow, and integrated systems.
• Product Catalog? ? provides a system for product management that can be customized to the product and business model of the vendor. Product catalogs are often integrated with inventory management and supply chain systems to manage product on-hand so if you have a inventory system, it is important to know if it is supported by your e-commerce site application.
• Integration with a standard, Secure Payment Processing System like Authorize.Net or PayPal.
• User Management and Tracking ? allows you to control user information, monitor usage, and personalize your customer?s user experience.
• Mobile interface ? as the number and diversity of mobile devices grows, it is increasingly important to have a dynamic interface that detects the device, form factor, limitations, and responds appropriately.
• Social Media Integration ? Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and several emerging mobile proximity services are just the tip of the social media side of retail. For consumer retail today, social media is an integral part of inbound marketing strategy and its use in business-to-business is increasing also.
• Discounts ? Developing a flexible discount system isn?t trivial. Good systems offer discounts in coupon codes by time period, product(s), user segments, limited number, and individuals or any combination of the options. One-off, home-brewed discount systems are susceptible to scheming and can cause significant loses along side your sales increase. Discount systems are critical, but the underlying logic required should not be underestimated.
• Newsletter, Email Campaign integration ? You can cobble together a tottering pyramid of several services to maintain your user base contacts, segment your audience, develop trackable emails, and reporting but you will drive yourself crazy maintaining the data and integration. Current CMS applications, built for e-commerce, have all these functions as part of the package. So, when you develop an campaign with a discount and target market, users can click through to buy quickly and cleanly and you can get full reports from one source.
• Reporting ? Without an integrated report package that can be customized to the needs of your business, the value of your e-commerce system is difficult to assess, especially when you want to tie marketing activities to actual sales. Canned reports may get you by in a small site, but if you are successful and grow, you will be left with a lot of questions that you can only answer with a lot of manual work.
• Standard Business Systems with Reliable Hosting and Maintenance ? The initial cost is higher, but a commercial CMS, made for e-commerce and used widely by the industry will continue to be valuable and maintainable for a long period of time. Commercial CMS applications also have a more professional development community and a wider base of support. You can slip by for a while with a simple system, but eventually you will end up either with a site that is hard to keep operational or high bills for upgrading and maintenance. Hosting is just as important ? a good system will be reliable and elastic ? responding to your traffic dynamically to capture all your transactions while saving you money.
• An Experienced Development Partner ? You can take on hiring individual contractors or your own team, but if your core business is not software development it can be a difficult and risky process to manage. A development partner should be experienced in the system you will use, available to collaborate with you in real time during design and development, and have a process for site development that assures the results will meet your expectations in a reasonable period of time with the least amount of effort.

When you look at this list, you begin to understand how much of project developing a business strength e-commerce site can be. It is the online equivalent of a brick and mortar location, but much more extensible and flexible if it is built properly.

So ? for an average site ? how long should this take? A experienced development partner using a commercial CMS should be able to provide an average site with these features in about eight weeks, start to finish. Of course, a great deal more can be done? after the site goes live, but that amount of effort should give you enough features to accomplish your most pressing goals.

What does it cost? Of course, the cost depends on the scope of the project, but as a long-term investment that will provide a sales platform for many years to come ? it should be reasonable and manageable if you can get it done in a reasonable period of time and start making it productive right away.

Scio has been providing development services for online applications and SaaS for over eight years. Scio is a Sitefinity Partner. We leverage Sitefinity ?in our e-commerce projects because it has an unmatched set of features, it integrates with a wide range of business applications and services, it lowers the effort required to develop rich sites, and helps to get our customers to where they can sell their products online ? sooner. Scio specializes in the development of Internet-based applications using .NET technology. We offer a full range of custom development services, but when it comes to an e-commerce sites, we recommend Sitefinity.

We are promoting our Sitefinity services because we believe it is an excellent way to help our customers see a positive return on their business investment. If you would like to take advantage of our services or just know more about what we can do for you ? contact us today!

Source: http://blog.sciodev.com/2012/07/31/e-commerce-in-the-clouds/

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