Ecommerce website framework

The following are some of the standard components of e-commerce websites. If you are evaluating open source packages or SAAS products for your e-commerce website needs then this can be a good checklist.

• Store Front
  • Home Page – Almost all the clients I worked with have always wanted their home page to be as unique as it can be. Some of the key features for home page are slideshow, displaying special offer items, displaying special categories and email signup for coupon codes. Evaluate the framework or SAAS for your home page requirements. List your requirements and then check if the framework offers the features you are looking for. This is the proper evaluation strategy not the other way round.
  • Category Page – Category page can be called the 2^nd home page of the site. Most of the e-commerce sites I have worked on have almost similar layout and features for home page and category page. Category page usually displays special offer items, sub categories and featured products.
  • Product Page – This is where complete details of a product is displayed. Make sure that the product page can display all the attributes of the products on this page. Make sure that the framework you are planning to use will allow all types of products not just apparel or electronics items. The framework must be as generic as possible when it comes to product details and also highly customizable.
  • Site Analytics – To track the users behaviour on the website we need site analytics software like Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst and others. This module will provide insight into users behaviours and track key metrics like bounce rate, conversion ratio, etc. List the key metrics and events to track and then check if the site analytics component supports your requirements.
  • Search – In the sites I have worked so far, one of the metrics we track is how a user landed on a product page or category page. Majority of the users land on the product page and category page using search instead of navigation. Let the search support wide range of options from searching based on Item Number, Offer Code, Color, Size, Standards, Rating etc. The search should also have a built-in sort options. Popular search engines to integrate with your site are Endeca, EazyAsk, Google Site Search
  • Review and Rating Service – This is one area that is targeted by spammers. Some users who are utterly dissatisfied with the site’s service use foul words in their review. There are several 3^rd party tools to help filter spam reviews and reviews with foul words. To build credibility it is better to mark reviews by users who purchased the product from your website with special labels. Provide options to rate products easily. Popular product in this space to integrate is Power Reviews
  • Recommendation Engine – Cross-selling and upselling are very important features in product detail page and category page. Find out if the built-in rule engine in the framework can support your cross selling and upselling requirements. Track the metrics for landing on the product page by cross-selling and upselling clicks. One of the main reasons for using recommendation engine is to provide more personalization for the visitors. Popular products in this space are Certona and Rich Relevance
  • Payment Gateways – Find out the list of payment gateways and payment methods you want to support. Paypal is almost a must of all new sites to build credibility. One of the key things to remember is to see if the payment gateway provides a developer account and dummy credit card numbers to test even on production site. Most of the payment gateways have a developer account to use. The payment gateways must support multiple currencies if you are planning on international businesses. Find out the security options offered by payment gateway such as exact address match, text message confirmation etc. One of the key optios to look for in payment gateways is to do recurring billing automatically or an easy pay option to enable customers to pay without re-entering full payment information. Popular payment gateways are Authorize.NET and Paypal
  • Shopping Cart – 3^rd party shopping carts are becoming popular. For new sites to build credibility Google Checkout may be a good option.
  • Affiliate Portal – This is a good option if you want to hire resellers for your website products or provide your vendors their own portal on your website. This may be a feature needed late in the game for some sites but if you have this requirements in your road map then evaluate this feature.
  • Social Media Integration – To create a buzz on the internet your website needs to support posting images, pages, etc on popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, LinkedIn, Google + and others. Popular plug-ins for this are ShareThis and AddThis.
• Back Office
  • Content Management System – e-commerce websites will have some static content pages to be created like Privacy policy, Terms of Use, Shipping Policies, FAQ’s, Refund Policies, etc. One of the key requirements for CMS is to support multi-lingual contents. Another major requirement is to support SEO features like adding HTML tags on product detail pages like meta description, meta keywords etc. Nice to features for CMS are supporting structured data (by Google), other search engines like Bing, Yahoo etc. Popular CMS systems are Ektron, SiteCore, Umbraco
  • Media Management – Images and Videos are omnipresent on website. They are also often one of the causes for the slow performance of the websites. Scene 7 from Adobe, http://imageresizing.net/ are some of the good options to render images faster on your site and to resize images on the fly. One of the important points to remember is that a product images displayed on the desktop version of the website can be 4MB but if the same image is displayed in mobile version of the website the size of the image should be as small as possible but with best quality. Mobile devices that work on data plan have limited data size to download so please evaluate such limitations. One of the key challenges with videos are that they should be displayable on all browsers on all devices. It is better to integrate Youtube, Vimeo or BrightCove for this. These services can process an input video file be it in any format and convert them into multiple formats for display on various browsers and devices using their container.
  • Sales Order Management – If you already have backend system that maintains product catalog and inventory then evaluate the integration between the website and your backend system. Decide the workflow of your sales order system and then evaluate the framework.
  • CDN Support – When your site gets huge visitors the first thing your IT team might look for is to increase servers on load balancer to improve the website speed. The truth is a web page will be slow mostly because of the huge images, javascript files and other files that are downloaded and not because of the code executed. To offset this problem Content Delivery Network service can be integrated to your website. CDN will cache all the images, css files, javascript files in your website on multiple servers in their network and serve these files to the customers from the near by edge server instead of the user downloading it from your server. Some of the companies that provide this service are Akamai, Level 3, Microsoft (on Azure). If you are planning on using SAAS e-commerce applications they should have built-in cdn support.
  • User Account Management – Most of the sites require user to register in order to place order and pay for it. One of the popular options is to support login accounts of Facebook, Google, Yahoo. Janrain is a popular framework that supports widely used login providers. Find out how to filter spam users, activate users, deactivate users. Some identity providers may not provide full information of the users like their phone number etc so evaluate the providers carefully.
  • Product and Categories Management – SKU creation and management is often a challenge when it comes to integrating website with backend ERP systems. Evaluate the restrictions and workaround in sku creation carefully.
  • Inventory Management – If you already have an inventory management system then focus on the integration with your backend ERP application. If you need an inventory management system then check if the framework offers this module. One of the nice to have features for inventory management system is to have purchase order management module in it.
  • Offer Management – Find out different types of offers that can be created. Coupon code generation, Gift Certificates both internal and external are some of the key features of offer management.
  • Loyalty and Rewards Program – Decide the loyalty and rewards program for your website and evaluate the framework as per your requirements. Some of the standard rewards are referral of new users, points based purchase, etc.
  • A/B Testing – When you wanted to launch a new feature but at the same time if you want to test that for a minimal number of users visiting your website say 10% of your users, to use the new feature and track their experience then A/B testing is the way to go. Some of the products that provide this service are Visual Web Optimizer and Optimizely.
  • Vendor Management – If your site is allowing external vendors to sell their products on you website then vendor management is a nice to have feature. Evaluate the framework to see if it provides options to automatically calculate commissions and pay them, reporting vendors’ customer experience, vendor products rating and reviews.
  • Logistics – Find out the list of logistics providers such as FedEx, UPS, USPS and others that are supported by the framework.

In order to build trust on for your new website it is better to check it for PCI (Payment Card Industry data security standards) compliance. In the next article I will post a checklist for PCI standards that can be used to evaluate frameworks. I will also post strategies to build credibility for your website and also increase traffic and conversion ratio.