Ecommerce software

This is a very simple guide to some of the issues you should consider when acquiring ecommerce software. If you have any further questions then please email us and we’ll be happy to help. Additionally, please take a look at our own ecommerce software.

Business to business electronic commerce software

B2B software covers a huge area. Originally, it existed to support electronic data interchange (EDI). With the growth of the Internet, the scope of such software has grown much wider to include XML EDI and pure EDI solutions.

The usual driver behind the purchase of business to business electronic commerce software is the type and format of document your trading partner wishes to exchange with you. If you have the luxury of setting the standard then we strongly recommend the use of XML as it provides a solution, which is both more flexible and more cost effective than traditional EDI approaches.

Business to consumer electronic commerce software

In its simplest form, B2C can be provided by a simple web site consisting of static HTML pages with some primitive scripting to create a shopping cart. Whilst this is fine for the “corner shop”, it has little relevance for serious players.

Even for smaller sites, we favour solutions built around databases running on a server for the following reasons:

·      Ease of maintenance
·      Site can be more easily built from legacy data.
·      Visual styles can be easily changed.
·      Reduces reliance on specific browser features.

With larger organisations, it is vital to consider how catalogue information will be maintained. Source data often comes from multiple providers, the web site provider taking responsibility for the final presentation of that data. In these circumstances, it is vital to have a solution, which can merge multiple data sources.

Once again, XML comes to the rescue. Whilst XML is not a solution in it’s self, there are readily available tools which support restructuring of an XML document to allow data to be aggregated from multiple sources.

Scalability is a major issue. How many ecommerce web sites to you visit which are painfully slow? This is often the result of a site receiving more visitors than it can cope with. You should carefully consider whether the solution you are choosing really could be scaled to meet not just your projected demand but way beyond it as well. Our experience is that solutions carefully built upon the Java Enterprise Edition platform offer tremendous scalability. This is simply not the case for some “popular” solutions.

Installation and Integration

Once you have decided on your software, you need to consider the issues around installing and integrating it. For the simplest web catalogue applications, it should be a matter of installing the client and giving it a few details of your account. With business to business solutions or fully integrated catalogue applications, it is somewhat more involved. There are many approaches to this, we recommend a mixture of outsourcing the installation and configuration together with training of your own personnel to manage day to day operations. If you would like more information on how we can tailor our services to meet you installation requirements then please contact us.