How Microsoft Can Effectively Deliver ecommerce to the Enterprise

How Microsoft Can Effectively Deliver eCommerce to the Enterprise

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White Paper: Credera’s Microsoft Solutions Practice 2

How Microsoft Can Effectively Deliver eCommerce to the Enterprise

Contents

Introduction 3

Microsoft Commerce Server 4

SharePoint 2010 for Public Websites 6

SharePoint Commerce Services 7

When Does SharePoint Commerce Services Make Sense? 8

Conclusion 9

Reference 10 About the Authors 10 About Credera 10

White Paper: Credera’s Microsoft Solutions Practice 3

Analysts and research groups predict that by 2014 over half of all retail sales will be made online.

How Microsoft Can Effectively Deliver eCommerce to the Enterprise

Introduction

Over the last several years, the eCommerce landscape has continued to grow and evolve, continuously changing the retail marketplace. Companies have realized that the ability to market and sell online has become more and more critical in order to stay in lock step with consumer trends.

Forrester Research (www.forrester.com) reported that in 2009, roughly 43% of all retail sales within the United States either took place online or were at least influenced by an online experience (online research, comparison shopping, community forums, etc.). Forrester predicts that by the year 2014, over 53% of sales will be influenced online. This means that by 2014 over half of all retail purchases will be made or influenced by the web.

What is the reason for this trend? Well, culturally, people are becoming more and more comfortable with the concept of making online purchases. The angst and paranoia of fraud and poor customer service have given way to convenience and access to competitive pricing. This, coupled with emerging web technologies like AJAX, FLEX, and SilverLight, which are capable of providing customers with rich user-experiences, have bridged the gap in giving customers confidence in their purchases without having to physically see or touch the products they buy. So much so, that it is not rare for expensive and sensitive purchases like wedding rings and cars to be bought online.

Furthermore, with the explosion of social networking and emerging mobile and niche smart devices, consumers are becoming more sophisticated, and therefore demanding a consistent and interactive experience whether in the store, sitting at a computer, or using their mobile device. What pressures does this trend force upon a business?

Consistent branding across multiple channels, platforms, and media devices

The ability to create stickiness and innovatively drive traffic to your online channels

Leveraging social data as much as your proprietary data to drive sales

Maximize consumer reach and create a consistent user-experience

In this White Paper, we will explore how Microsoft technologies can work together to help you keep up with these trends without breaking the bank or your workforce!

How Microsoft Can Effectively Deliver eCommerce to the Enterprise 4

Microsoft Commerce Server

Microsoft has made significant strides in providing mid-market and enterprise businesses with an eCommerce platform that is robust enough to address the most critical aspects of selling online while still being both economical and quick to deploy. The latest generation of Microsoft Commerce Server was designed to meet today’s challenges.

Microsoft Commerce Server 2009

Microsoft Commerce Server is a .NET based eCommerce platform that provides businesses with many of the necessary building blocks to market and sell products online. Commerce Server contains the following high level components:

Catalog System – Provides the ability to manage and maintain product catalogs

Profiles System – Provides the ability to manage and maintain Users, Credit Cards, Addresses, and custom business entities

Order System – Provides the ability to store and process orders

Virtual Services – Allows businesses to expose critical subsystems through a Services Oriented Architecture so they can be accessed through a variety of ways Campaign Management – Leverages all other subsystems to allow companies to build marketing rules and intelligently expose advertisements and provide discounts

Reporting and Analytics – Comprehensive reporting engine that provides both eagle eye insight and granular drilldown capabilities

How Microsoft Can Effectively Deliver eCommerce to the Enterprise 5

Business Management Tools – Several functional tools that help users to perform standard operational tasks such as customer service, Marketing and Merchandising, and Managing a Product Catalog

Multichannel Commerce Foundation – A layer on top of all subsystems that allows architects and

developers to identify the channel that a user is leveraging so that the appropriate business rules and workflows are applied to their transactions

As previously described, simply having a standard eCommerce website leaves a tremendous amount of opportunity on the table for most businesses. That is why Commerce Server 2009 was specifically designed to allow businesses to leverage a single, unified eCommerce architecture through multiple channels and accessible by multiple technology platforms. In the past, 2-tier

solutions, consisting of a front end web tier and a back end database were all too common in eCommerce platforms. This architecture often required businesses to maintain multiple stacks of a solution to support different applications or channels.

2-Tier eCommerce Architecture

The architecture of Commerce Server 2009 is a true 3-tier architecture in which the core business

components have been decoupled into a true application layer. This unified architecture provides many benefits. For example, if a mobile solution, eCommerce website, or kiosks at an affiliate are all leveraging the same application layer to sell online, the user experience is seamless.

Figure 1: Microsoft Commerce Server 2009

This architecture allows a business to effectively share resources that are common to different channels and applications while providing the capability to create unique business logic and other customizations where necessary.

Although Commerce Server provides an excellent framework for selling products online, it is up to the business to creatively and innovatively present this functionality to consumers using compelling and dynamic Graphical User Interfaces that are easy to maintain. This need can be effectively met using SharePoint

technologies. Data Tier UI/Business Logic UI/Business Logic UI/Business Logic PC

PC TabletTablet MobileMobile

Data Tier Data Tier

In te g ra ti o n In te g ra ti o n

Data Tier

Business Logic

PC TabletTablet MobileMobile

How Microsoft Can Effectively Deliver eCommerce to the Enterprise 6

Content management, mobile web rendering, multi-language support, and enterprise search make SharePoint 2010 an ideal tool for public website.

.development

An ideal eCommerce solution would be one that could combine SharePoint 2010 and CS 2009 R2, two best-of-breed solutions, into a single unified platform.

SharePoint 2010 for Public Websites

SharePoint, Microsoft’s fastest growing product, is a comprehensive platform for collaboration, document management, web content management, and enterprise search. In a recent Gartner report on horizontal portals, SharePoint ranked highest on both “Ability to Execute” and “Completeness of Vision”. In short, it is one of the easiest products to work with and offers the richest features among its many competitors in this space.

Gartner Portal Matrix

SharePoint 2010 has several features that can help build powerful and robust public websites. The cornerstone of SharePoint is its capability to deliver robust content management. Through its out-of-the-box ability to author content, provide version control capabilities, incorporate workflow, and schedule deployments, SharePoint public websites are designed to be dynamic and current. Not only can businesses build complex content on the fly, they

can pre-build content and schedule when it is to be displayed and removed from a public website.

With the growing trend of content being delivered to mobile devices, a business needs to decide how customers will consume its content. Customers will either view content in a mobile-friendly version, or have to browse standard websites through small mobile browser windows.

SharePoint 2010 provides a rich framework that automatically renders mobile friendly versions of most SharePoint content, making this sometimes daunting capability much easier to deliver to the marketplace.

Customizing a site to support localization and multiple languages can also be difficult, time consuming, and very expensive. With SharePoint 2010, support for

localization and multiple languages is built-in. The only work required is to ensure that translations are compelling across all languages and website styles, and that branding culturally matches your targeted markets.

How Microsoft Can Effectively Deliver eCommerce to the Enterprise 7

SharePoint Commerce Services is a fully functional eCommerce website that integrates with Commerce Server and leverages key features of SharePoint 2010. With the depth and breadth of information available

online, the ability to search through content is absolutely critical. Oftentimes, end-users forego traditional

navigation and trust robust search to deliver relevant and contextual search results. Standard to SharePoint 2010 is the enterprise searching capability that is modeled after the Bing® search engine. For even more robust and rich search capabilities, businesses can employ FAST Search for SharePoint.

Content Management, Mobile Web Rendering, Multi-Language Support, and Enterprise Search make SharePoint 2010 an ideal tool for building robust websites.

SharePoint Commerce Services

SharePoint Commerce Services is the combination of SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 R2. By bringing these two market-leading products together to leverage their best features means that quickly providing enterprise commerce functionality to the marketplace is now a possibility.

SharePoint Commerce Services is a collection of web parts, site templates, and SharePoint features that provide a fully functional public eCommerce website that can integrate with any Commerce Server 2009 instance.

By combining SharePoint 2010 and CS2009, Microsoft has created an impressively robust enterprise-level

eCommerce solution with quick go-to-market capabilities. The following are the key benefits that SharePoint

Commerce Services provides.

Ecommerce Content Management

Expanding upon SharePoint 2010’s content management capabilities, SharePoint Commerce Services allows for robust authoring of eCommerce related content. An example of eCommerce related content would be highly merchandised pages for a specific product, series of products, or marketing promotions. With 30 built-in and customizable Commerce Server web parts, creating compelling ecommerce content is relatively simple.

Enterprise Search

Out-of-the-box, Commerce Server provides the ability to search its in-house product catalog. SharePoint, on the other hand, does an excellent job of providing search capabilities for web content from both internal and external data sources.

SharePoint Commerce Services combines these two mechanisms to provide a truly enterprise search platform. For example, if a user were to search for the keyword “mountain bikes”, not only would he/she be returned a list of likely products, but also a series of web pages, FAQs, Reviews, Videos, etc., all related to “mountain bikes”, thus

boosting his/her confidence and knowledge about a potential buy.

How Microsoft Can Effectively Deliver eCommerce to the Enterprise 8

Social Integration

In this day and age, social networking and marketing is a must for most businesses. Customers are more and more relying on their peers to help understand and validate products and services in the marketplace. Integrating a third-party toolset to incorporate social features into a website can be expensive and time-consuming because of numerous points in which it needs to be weaved

throughout the website (e.g., product reviews and ratings, comments, user registration, blogs, wikis, tag clouds, moderating, social feeds, etc.). SharePoint Commerce Services leverages SharePoint’s robust “Communities” capability to increase collaboration and sharing of personal experiences and knowledge in key aspects throughout an eCommerce site.

Unified Platform

Leveraging the power of the .NET framework and SQL Server, SharePoint Commerce Services, SharePoint 2010, and Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 is built entirely on a proven and mainstream technology stack. Having an enterprise solution or series of products that leverage the same technologies has many benefits including: ease of integration, ability to leverage common infrastructure, simpler licensing structure, simplified maintenance, and many more. One key benefit from a unified Microsoft architecture is that these mainstream technologies have a vast development community. This makes staffing and finding support resources for your solution cheaper and easier to find than a team of very specific product experts that specialize in a collection of expensive and proprietary third-party components.

When Does SharePoint Commerce Services

Make Sense?

Although SharePoint Commerce Services provides several key benefits for a business looking to accelerate its eCommerce capabilities, it does not make sense in all scenarios. The following are some factors to consider prior to leveraging SharePoint Commerce Services:

SharePoint Commerce Services is ideal for those that are already leveraging SharePoint 2010 internally and can further increase your return on your SharePoint investment

Enterprise eCommerce websites (roughly 10 million hits per month or more) or websites that sell somewhat “non-traditional” products (e.g. digital downloads, custom built cars, highly configurable products, etc.) would typically leverage third-party providers for

recommendation engines, search engines, etc. Custom .NET websites are typically better suited for websites of this size and complexity.

SharePoint public website pages tend to have a larger payload to accommodate its many robust features. Businesses that demand extremely low payloads for their public websites due to bandwidth, proximity, or other nuanced performance factors should ensure SCS will meet its needs.

Businesses that demand full “div based” layouts versus “table based” HTML layouts for search engine optimization may run into unnecessary complexity by leveraging SharePoint as it dynamically renders its page layouts using tables. The pros and cons of these two HTML markup paradigms should be evaluated accordingly.

How Microsoft Can Effectively Deliver eCommerce to the Enterprise 9

Conclusion

Microsoft is continuously striving to ensure all of it products elegantly fit together to collectively help a business, regardless of its uniqueness, to meet its business goals and vision. SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 are no exception. These two .NET, SQL Server based solutions easily integrate to leverage their most powerful features to not only provide an enterprise eCommerce solution to the marketplace, but to also provide a solution that is relatively inexpensive to purchase and can be quickly installed, configured, and deployed.

How Microsoft Can Effectively Deliver eCommerce to the Enterprise 10

References

1. Forrester Research, “More Double-Digit Growth Ahead For Online Retail In US And Western Europe”, Forrester, February 28th, 2011.

2. Jim Murphy, Gene Phifer, Ray Valdes, Eric Knipp. “Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals”. Gartner. 3 September 2010.

About the Authors

Jesus Salazar is a Senior Manager with Credera. He has over 11 years of experience delivering enterprise IT solutions for large and medium sized businesses throughout the U.S. With Credera, Jesus has served as Architect for Interstate Batteries and Architect for the refurbishment initiative of GameStop.com, the largest Microsoft Commerce Server implementation in the world. Throughout his career, Jesus has developed, architected, managed, and provided leadership to various large projects for customers such as Hairclub for Men, Yamaha, Chickasaw Indian Nation, CoBank, Interstate Batteries, Microsoft, GameStop, and others. He is a Microsoft Certified Professional and held a seat on the Office 14 Developer Advisory Council where he helped shape the features and architecture of the next generation of Microsoft Office and SharePoint. Jesus holds a M.S. degree in Engineering and Technology Management and a B.S. degree in Math and Computer Science from the Colorado School of Mines in Golden.

Joshua Grear is an Architect with Credera. He has over 11 years of experience in delivering IT solutions to companies throughout the U.S. He is a Microsoft Virtual Technical Specialist for Commerce Server and has been a part of numerous eCommerce implementations. Joshua is currently working on integrating Commerce Server with various back-end systems.

About Credera

Credera is a full-service business and technology consulting firm. Working with Fortune 1,000 companies, medium-sized businesses, government organizations, and clients across a broad range of industries, we provide the experience and commitment necessary to solve today's toughest business and technology challenges. Because it's not just about meeting expectations - it's about exceeding them. Founded in 1999, Credera is headquartered in Dallas, TX and hosts offices and staffing locations around the country, including Austin, Denver, and Seattle. For additional information, visit

www.credera.com.