E-commerce—Microsoft Commerce Server

Supporting a pay-for-content online video service requires an e-commerce solution to support sales of digital goods and online service delivery, user profiling, and content targeting. The service also requires open interfaces to integrate with the solutions supporting the digital content

management, digital rights management, and digital content delivery business functions.

Microsoft Commerce Server (http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/) meets these

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and catalogs, content inventories, end-user profiles, pay-for-content orders, and content marketing. Key functionalities include:

 Catalogs: Products, variations, virtual catalogs, virtual properties, multiple

languages and currencies, powerful full-text and property-based search

 Inventory: Searching, back-ordering, out-of-stock items

 Profiles: Personalization, user targeting, organizations, purchase orders

 Orders: Pipeline architecture, order splitting, multiple shopping carts

 Marketing: Content targeting, up-sell and cross-sell capabilities, advertisements,

e-mail campaigns, discounts, coupons

Commerce Server Concepts

Important concepts within Commerce Server are those of the Product Family, Attributes, Variants, Categories, and Relationships. Clearly defining the product taxonomy is important so that it can be mapped into Commerce Server to help drive the user experience.

For example, a commercial offering such as premium footage of a football match can be

described as a Product Family. This Product Family has many Attributes such as: duration, release date, expiration date, title, and content rating. However, it is quite possible that there are many Variants in this Product Family: a high-bit rate download to own (DTO) variant, a low-bit rate stream only version, and more. Variants are defined by having additional Attributes that allow it to vary within the Product Family (for example, bit rate, format, digital rights, etc.). If the Variant Attributes are commercially significant, then it is likely that pricing is set at the Variant level. For example, the download-to-own version in HD quality costs more than streaming a low-bit rate version.

Categories are also important to group (relate) products together. For example, subscription tiers could easily be implemented by creating three categories: Gold, Silver, and Bronze. Products are then associated with a single category or multiple categories, defining the product relationships. By interrogating the Customer Profile (another Commerce Server subsystem), the system can determine which category of products is to be made available to the consumer. Of course, a product associated with the Gold category will also be associated with the Silver and Bronze categories, but it may also be associated with a Football Genre Category.

Other relationships might include cross-sells and up-sells. Commerce Server allows a Product to be related to as many other Products as necessary, and each Relationship can be given a type: for example, up-sell (buy the season subscription instead of a single piece of content), cross-sell, goes well with, and competes with. It is then down to the User Experience to express and traverse these Commerce Server Relationships in the best and commercially sensible way.

There are many additional concepts in Commerce Server such as Virtual Catalogs and the Content Selection Framework. Virtual Catalogs are catalogs defined through rules such as: ―all products in the Bronze category apply a discount of 10 percent.‖ This allows the Content Selection Framework to pick up on customer Profile properties such as ―Annual Bronze Subscriber‖ and connect them to the ―Preferred Bronze Subscriber‖ Virtual Catalog.

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It is typical for a Product (a content offering) to be related to other Products through a variety of relationships. For example, an episode may be part of a Commerce Server Category that groups all the episodes together. But it may be useful to establish relationships to other Products such as ―next episode,‖ and ―previous episode.‖

Defining commercial offerings

Expressing commercial rules in Commerce Server can be achieved through many ways. For example, it may be done explicitly by creating an Attribute called ―Available for Preview On‖ and another called ―Available to Purchase On.‖ These attributes would allow the Business Logic and Presentation to make the product discoverable, pre-viewable, and pre-orderable, but not available to purchase and download. Another example might be to create a Product Family and only create Variants that you are able to deliver. For example, creating a Product Family ―Premier League Final‖ and only creating a HD download-to-own Variant are explicit in that no other Variant exists and so it is not available as an LD stream.

Depending on the nature of the proposition, it is likely that there will be transactions with the end consumer. This may be related to paying for content, purchasing a subscription, or even related merchandise. The Commerce Server Orders subsystem supports commercial transactions. Commerce Server offers API and Web Service level interfaces into its systems, allowing these customer transactions (interactions) to be delivered to the CRM system or messages sent to reporting systems to enable them to drive activity from marketing through to BI and reporting— both internally and externally. Commerce Server can also handle multiple languages and

currencies.

Once the Product Catalog has been structured and populated, other activities can begin such as using the Commerce Server Marketing system to define discounts that target either the individual line item or the entire order (for example, 20 percent off an individual item or 20 percent off each item being checked out). Commerce Server out of the box can allow you to configure the

following forms of discount:

 Simple Discount: Offer a price reduction on a product by a percentage or a monetary

amount. For example, buy an episode and receive 25 percent off the original price.

 Minimum Purchase Discount: Offer a price reduction on a minimum quantity purchase.

For example, buy two matches and receive 20 percent off each.

 Buy N, Get one Free: Offer a free gift with a minimum quantity purchase. For example, buy

two matches and receive a third one for free.

 Paired Discount: Offer a price reduction on a product if another product is purchased. For

example, buy a minimum subscription and receive 10 dollars off a premium blockbuster.

 Paired Set Discount: Offer a price reduction on an item if a certain quantity of another

item is purchased. For example, buy three matches and receive 30 percent off an annual football subscription.

 Order Discount: Offer a price reduction on the order total, if a certain amount is

purchased. For example, buy 50 dollars worth of content and receive 10 percent off the total order.

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Other strategies include creating special categories of related products, targeting the discount at that category, and allowing the consumer to add the category to the basket. As described earlier, Commerce Server is a Framework that allows individual businesses to express their products and proposition in the way they prefer and in a way they feel differentiates them in the market. The Rights and Royalties associated with video content can also be defined in Commerce Server as Products with Attributes. For example, ―The Professionals‖ is a Category and ―Series 1‖ is a Category with each episode a Product Family with Attributes such as ―Title,‖ ―Duration,‖ and ―Description.‖ The Variants of the Product family would be ―U.K. only,‖ ―Spain only,‖ etc. This catalog would drive an online video service to enable users to discover these Products and purchase them. The fulfillment of the transaction (i.e., Royalties payments) could either trigger a workflow to an existing process of manual sign-off and media delivery or to an automated download of appropriately digitally rights managed content. This workflow would be handled by

Microsoft BizTalk® Server reading out the committed orders from the Commerce Server standard

Web service interfaces and controlling the business process. Currently Rights and Royalties management systems exist outside the scope of this blueprint. However, it is more than likely that these systems will be integrated, via a tool such as BizTalk Server, to the ERP, which could export these definitions as Products into Commerce Server to support this scenario.

In summary, Commerce Server has a very flexible system for defining Product Families, Attributes, Variants, Categories, Relationships, Virtual Catalogs, and commercial rules, and through

integration with other systems, can also manage the customer transactions and royalty payments.

Integration with ERP systems

Commerce Server does not have to be the primary store for information about content offerings (―products‖). In some cases, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system such as SAP R/3 or Microsoft Dynamics may hold the primary products database. In those cases, using Microsoft

BizTalk Server (http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/) can help reduce the cost and time required for

integration with existing line-of-business (LOB) applications; Commerce Server ships with BizTalk Server adapters to simplify this.

Integration with DCM systems

In the proposed architecture, content objects are managed in SharePoint Server deployed with Microsoft Services‘ Digital Content Management offering. This is where digital content is initially loaded and prepared for distribution (see section 6.2.2.1.). As part of the e-commerce business function, the content objects are associated with content offerings in Commerce Server.

Commerce Server then manages the commercial aspects of the content offering, for example, its categorization, pricing, promotions, and which products are available to which tier of subscribers. Because the Digital Content Management system is based on SharePoint Server, and Commerce Server provides for out-of-the-box integration with SharePoint Server, integration of the DCM system and Commerce Server is straightforward (Figure 60).

84 Figure 60: Microsoft Commerce Server 2007, or ―Mojave,‖ logical architecture diagram