DEEP DIVE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF E-COMMERCE TOOLS

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DEEP DIVE

COMPARATIVE

ANALYSIS OF

E-COMMERCE TOOLS

Kumar Mallampalli

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Hinduja Tech Limited

Deep Dive Comparative Analysis of E- Commerce Tools

Hinduja Tech Limited – Proprietary and Confidential Page

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1 Introduction

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2 The Challenges

As every other organization wants to increase its investment on e-commerce and significantly enhance its direct trade, the key requirements for most organizations in implementing an end-to-end e-commerce include the following:

 Enhanced security while offering more products and flexibility in pricing  Integration with other systems and plug-ins

 Search Engine Optimization  Intelligent web analytics

 Customization to business requirements and local needs  Marketing integration for unified branding

 Shorter time-to-implementation

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3 Solutions Options

3.1 Open Source E-Commerce

3.1.1 MAGENTO

Magento Enterprise provides businesses with unprecedented flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their online store. Fully supported by the Magento team of experts, Magento Enterprise is scalable and easily tailored to meet every merchant's unique technical and business requirements. To help ensure success of their online channel, Magento Enterprise customers can leverage best-in-class marketing and merchandising tools.

Magento Enterprise Screenshots

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Gift card Screen

Administration Screen

Dashboards Payment Options

Key Strengths:

 Marketing and promotions management – Marketing reminders, gift certificates etc  Secure – strong data encryption, user access based on roles and permissions  Rich merchandise suite

 Dynamic customer information management  Search with Solr

 Order editing and Google checkouts  Content staging and merging

 Multi-lingual and Multi-currency support  Tax rate support in WEEE/DEEE format in EU

 Country specific customization – Site registration, shipping destination address and billing address with ability to specify pay per method

 One click upgrades Weakness:

 Cart modification takes longer time

 System requirements of Magento are quiet extensive – Requires at least PHP 5.2.0 extended with mcrypt, PDO_MySQL and simple xml

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Some of Magento Customers:

3.1.2 ZENCART: ZEN CART ™

Zencart: Zen Cart™ is a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. The e-commerce web site design program is being developed by a group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e-commerce web design could be and should be done differently.

ZEN CART Screenshots

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Product Features

Product Tools

Key Strengths:

 Unlimited categories

 Unlimited product options, gift certificates, discounts  Fully customizable and easily installable

 Template system  Multi-lingual

 Customer reporting tools  Permission system  Multiple currencies  Multi-tax

 Multiple shipping and payment options  Multiple image per product

 Built-in override protection system Weakness:

 Administration module requires extensive training  Add on non-compatibility

3.1.3 VIRTUEMART

VirtueMart is an Open Source e-commerce solution designed to be used with Joomla (But also works with Mambo). Joomla and VirtueMart are written in PHP and made for easy to use in a PHP / MySQL environment.

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Shop Home Page Product Details

Shopping cart with PayPal

Admin: Edit Product

Key Strengths:

 Stock level control for products and item

 Ajax-powered product overview that allows to quickly add products to the cart  Manage different currencies, countries and states

 Product Availability: Shows how fast a customer could expect a delivery Weakness:

 Lacks lot of essential shopping cart features such as stock control, shipping, payment to vouchers and user group discounts etc.

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3.1.4 KONAKART

KonaKart is an affordable java based shopping cart software solution for online retailers. Konakart Screenshots

Home Page Shopping Cart

Login Screen

News Publishing

Key Strengths:

 Rich shopping experience through fast indexed search, product filter and sorting, product review and ratings display

 Internationalization: Supports multi-currency and multi-language  Up-selling and cross-selling merchandise

 Price, promotion and communication customizations based on customer groups  Supports recurrent billing in payment module

 Google base integration and SEO

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 Multi store with reward point support  Google analytics

Weakness:

 Lack of support to gift certificates and loyalty programs

 Upper limit exists for product displays and customer listing (Example: limited number of products are allowed to list and for additional products to be listed, cost adds up)

Some of KonaKart customers:

3.2 Commercial E-Commerce

3.2.1 HYBRIS

Hybris provides a complete multichannel e-commerce software solution that integrates product content, commerce operations, and the extended channel to help retailers, manufacturers, and other businesses create a unified and seamless cross-channel experience for their customers — from online, to in-store, to mobile and beyond.

Hybris Screenshots

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Multi-channel Campaign

Product Merchandise

Key Strengths:

 Strong product content management tools  Catalogue management

 Enterprise integration

 Globalization and internationalization capabilities  PIM powered commerce

 Light weight technology stack  Fast and flexible

 Multi brand site

 Problem free administration ability

 Integrates functions such as payment solutions, customer loyalty elements, search and navigation options and full marketing tools

 Customer-specific visuals, catalogues, products and prices and pre-configured order lists

 Mapping a wide range of distribution models, companies, business processes, administrators, user groups and user rights, therefore facilitating hierarchical purchasing and approvals processes  Procurement integration and quotation module

Weakness:

 Scores low in security (for cloud based offerings)

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Some of Hybris Customers:

3.2.2 MICROSOFT COMMERCE SERVER

Commerce Server 2009 is a new, production-ready, out-of-the-box, contemporary web site that allows businesses to get their stores live and merchandise moving more quickly. New page templating features mean organizations can change the look and feel of a site just by pointing and clicking.

Key Strengths:

 Shopping cart management  Taxation

 Personalization and templating options  Transaction management

 Settlement and product visualization

 Integration with SharePoint server 2010, FAST search and Biz Talk server

 Customizable, live services for integrated B2C shopping experiences with web parts

 Multi channel integrations with kiosks, mobile devices, POS systems, interactive TV and gaming systems

Weakness:

 Poor technical architecture

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3.2.3 ATG

ATG Commerce is a comprehensive, highly scalable e-commerce platform and application solution that automates and personalizes the online buying experience to increase conversions and order value, and ensure customer loyalty. It’s flexible, component-based e-commerce software architecture enables one to easily implement best-in-class e-commerce sites.

Key Strengths:

 Complete multi channel e-commerce suite with strong personalization  Shopping cart management

 Product catalogue

 Rich Internet Application (RIA) capabilities

 Multi site, multi language and multi currency support  Search merchandise feature

 Multiple deployment choice  Facebook and Twitter integrations  iPhone mobile store application

 Online community for customer, partner and product support Weakness:

 High cost

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4 Recommendation

Companies should select e-commerce platforms that are adaptable to specific business needs, flexible enough to accommodate various legacy systems and also scalable enough to meet new requirements or technology upgrades. Considering the above mentioned must-have features, the three existing e-commerce platforms that win over the rest with their comprehensive functionalities are - Hybris, Magento and ATG.

Hybris: If you are looking for a strong product content management and multi-national e-commerce site that can be established in a shorter time frame at a lower cost, then Hybris would be the best bet. This product will allow one to localize the product content, pricing and promotions with its multi-currency, language, tax, regulations and other features. This product will also enable you to analyze customer profiles based on target segment or personalized behaviour pattern. However, some of the reference accounts have reported trouble in integration and implementation.

Magento: If you want to quickly ramp up your multi-channel strategy with customizations, to meet growing online demand for a wide product range, then Magento is the right choice. One can create user-friendly e-commerce websites using Magento and get around the site for adding things to cart, wish lists or improve navigation. One can also integrate price, product and stock level information to the website. Magento allows one to internationalize the product easily, send newsletters, include Google site integrations, RSS feeds and also provides strong analytics support. However for future scalability, understanding of enterprise level customization for business needs is required.

ATG: If you want to mainly focus on strong personalization, merchandizing, targeting and customer interaction then ATG should be your choice of e-commerce platform. However, ATG is priced slightly higher. It is also not easier to implement multi-language and multi-currency capabilities using ATG. It also doesn’t have exhaustive product content management features.

MS Commerce Server: MS Commerce Server is also a good product, provided it is implemented as a part of the overall Microsoft suite. Extensive knowledge of MS product ecosystem including BizTalk and SharePoint are required for the implementation. Overall, it is a big challenge to implement MS Commerce Server as compared to other products both in terms of price and technical features. Also strong in-house Microsoft expertise is required for both implementation as well as the periodic maintenance of the website.

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5 Annexure

5.1 Overall Product Comparison Chart

Legend:

- Supported

- Partially Supported

- Not Supported

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DEEP DIVE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF E-COMMERCE TOOLS

DEEP DIVE

COMPARATIVE

ANALYSIS OF

E-COMMERCE TOOLS

Kumar Mallampalli

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Table of Contents

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1 Introduction

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2 The Challenges

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3 Solutions Options

3.1 Open Source E-Commerce

3.1.1 MAGENTO

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3.1.2 ZENCART: ZEN CART ™

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3.1.3 VIRTUEMART

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3.1.4 KONAKART

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3.2 Commercial E-Commerce

3.2.1 HYBRIS

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3.2.2 MICROSOFT COMMERCE SERVER

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3.2.3 ATG

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4 Recommendation

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5 Annexure

5.1 Overall Product Comparison Chart

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