Archive for August 2009
August 17, 2009 | 
Author In order to retain customers and to generate more revenue, for past few years ecommerce applications are providing lot of new features. These features are not compulsory to run ecommerce business but it is good to have to get more value to the business and website customers.One of the feature I came across is “Email to your friend”. This feature helps the customer to tell about a product to his/her friend. It is very useful to market our products. Mostly the mode of conveying information is through email. Some applications are allowing to send the page information to multiple recipients.
One more nice feature to have is “Email wish list to a friend”. Most of the web sites are providing wish list option where the user can park the items in the basket and can buy whenever they want. There is no guarantee that the customer will buy that product but at least he can remind himself to purchase the product and high probability of converting into business. If we extend our ideas from “Email to friend” to “Email wish list to a friend”. By this, the user can share his basket details to his/her friend. Some of the nice features to have with this option is.
- Ability to the new user to register and covert his friend’s wish list to his wish list
- Carry forward the discounts applied (on the basket) to the current user to his friend too.
- If any business has come through this, we can give some more discounts to the user who forwarded his wish list to his/her friend.
These are some thoughts but not limited to these three points. You can take these points and extend/customize this idea to generate more business.
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After creating pipeline component and registering the pipeline, whenever I run the pipeline, I used to get the following error.
“Component Execution failed for component[0x0] hr: 0×80040154\r\nProgID: TestPipeline.TestCostCalc\r\nCould not create Component TestPipeline.TestCostCalc. This may be a component registration issue.”
After some effort, I came to know the error can be encountered if we try to register the pipeline component without ProgId as class attribute. After keeping ProgId as class attribute and registrar the component, the error never turned back again.
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Avanade Technopia is similar to Microsoft tech summit at India where people from Accenture, Avanade and Microsoft came together and discussed about the latest trends in Microsoft technology. This year, I happened on 31st July and 1st August at Bangalore. I get a chance to present one of the silverlight ecommerce application implementation. This application was developed in commerce server and silverlight. If you remember my last year virtual tech days session – I have shown silverlight application demo. This time, I have shown next version of this application with new look and feel and developed after applying the best usability aspects.
The session is to showcase not only the capabilities of commerce server and silverlight but also the importance of usability aspects to be considered while developing any ecommerce application. Due to some copy right issues, I am not able to share the documents with you. The session was widely appreciated by the audience and received good feedback from them. Thanks to the event organizers for giving this opportunity.
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| Architect is client’s advocate and he is responsible to manage client’s interests and expectations. In this article, I tried to gather & recollect all my experiences and came up with the list of things an architect should consider while developing any ecommerce application (you may call them as “Ten Commandments”). While development, there may be other areas we have to focus, but I felt these are the top 10 items we should consider. |  |
- Know your Customer: Before you start developing the application, first you understand your user and what is their expectations. Your customer is the person for whom you are developing ecommerce application. Knowing & setting customer expectations is very sensitive and critical task as these factors will decide application success criteria. If you are developing e-store to their existing brick store then make sure you deliver the site which resembles their stores. Generally we take customer’s branding guidelines to create sites, this branding site will contain the colors, images, UI pattern we should follow.
- Know your Customer’s Customer: After knowing your customer, the next challenging task is knowing end users. Some times, the customer will target more than one country or regions. If your customer is targeting US users or the users from India metros then bandwidth is not a problem. What if he is targeting users from small towns from India? The other thing we have to consider is how your customer’s customer will use your application (software, hardware, etc).
- Leverage Framework: If you are doing ecommerce application for the first time, you try to develop an ecommerce framework. Don’t invent the wheel. There are multiple frameworks and tools available in the market. Commerce server is one of the Microsoft ecommerce platform which can be used to develop ecommerce applications easily. If the customer business is unique, start thinking of creating & customizing different framework for him.
- Apply Architecture Patterns & Quality standards: Trust me, most of us neglect this section. The day you receive contract, the next minute, we concentration on developing code. We don’t worry on how good to leverage existing patterns. Some companies do over architecture and push the application supportability in jeopardy and some companies doesn’t follow minimum guidelines making the application with poor extensibility & unsecure.
- Prototyping: 80% of assembly and integration test defects comes in user interface and also the client decides the application success or failure mostly on UI. I strongly recommend to create a UI prototype before we start actual development. This principle can’t be redistricted to UI but also some of the new components or functionalities we are developing as part of the application(tech proofing). For example, using WCF for third party applications and integrating them with BizTalk.
- Security: We cannot imagine an ecommerce application without security. Authentication and Authorization are compulsory but some of the applications are storing passwords and other sensitive information in plain text and using authorization hard coded in the code rather than making it as a configurable item. I strongly prefer to use some of the existing tools for authorization (Azman) and authentication (CS authorization).
- Supportability: We will take 3-6 months to develop an ecommerce application but the support team has to bear with this application throughout application life time. Before you design or develop, try to apply all abilities (scalability[scale up or scale out], extensibility, etc) so that the application can run smoothly in post production environment.
- Less Animations: Animations will attract your application users but it should not be the driving factor. Giving seamless experience will bring the user back to the site but not keeping many animations on the site. Note: Some times, keeping many animations will distract the user experience.
- Fast coding : Every client wants his application ready next day but cost, time and quality cannot be minimized. If the customer want the application ready in less time, obviously the cost will increase and quality will decrease. Stop doing fast coding, come up with use cases, design and then go to build.
- Page navigations & browser Navigations: Give more concentration on user-task analysis and come up with the navigation by which the user can able to perform the use case in minimum steps.
Hope this article might have given nice picture on the things we should consider while developing an ecommerce application. If you have any specific comments, please do drop an email.
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