B O L T
BOLT: Streamlining Oracle Commerce
Implementation and Development
Amplifi Commerce
BOLT: Streamlining Oracle Commerce
Implementation and Development
The process of developing and deploying eCommerce solu-tions has long been a source of frustration for retailers, B2B organizations and other businesses looking to sell online. As digital commerce has matured and grown in importance, ecommerce site development has gained a reputation for being too costly and taking far too long to build and deploy. Organizations of every size have struggled to adapt pre-pack-aged, inflexible eCommerce platforms to their unique busi-ness needs, quickly finding themselves embarking on costly upgrades to more robust systems or cobbling together and attempting to support and maintain an unstable platform of their own making.
While many companies have attempted to streamline eCommerce platform development processes using accel-erators or sample stores, these solutions are usually fea-ture limited and lack the ability to scale to meet the long term needs of growing brands, while customization costs quickly add up, negating any perceived cost advantage. Amplifi Commerce has addressed these challenges with BOLT, the first Rapid Deployment Platform for Oracle Com-merce. BOLT provides highly optimized tools and process-es which simplify day-to-day tasks, eliminating numerous common friction points in the development process that slow development and increase costs.
The Oracle Commerce platform, based on the integration of Oracle ATG and Endeca, is a recognized global leader in ecommerce, supporting multiple business models, lan-guages and multisite implementations. The platform ranks
as the most widely chosen ecommerce platform solution among top retailers, representing over a third of the top 500 retail ecommerce sites as ranked by a respected ecom-merce research firm.
The platform’s strengths – its comprehensive feature set, global reach, modular integrations and independence from third-party requirements, combine to make Oracle Com-merce one of the most complete eComCom-merce solutions available. Conversely, its weaknesses are well-document-ed. It is costly to implement and deploy, its documentation is obtuse, and it can be complex to configure and maintain. With these limiters top of mind, Amplifi Commerce envi-sioned and built BOLT for Oracle Commerce to address and overcome these challenges.
BOLT proves its value by delivering a 50 percent average reduction in initial implementation and ongoing technical maintenance, saving time and money. Customers enjoy full visibility into the project lifecycle with real-time updates and lightning fast push button deployments to all environ-ments — all with a platform truly optimized for SEO
and digital performance marketing from the outset. To top it all off, BOLT is built with a fully responsive user interface, allowing your organization to present a first-class eCommerce presence to any device.
BOLT ADDRESSES COMMON ORACLE COMMERCE RE-QUIREMENTS ACROSS FOUR KEY PILLARS:
• Responsive User Experience: An out of the
box, fully Responsive User Interface (UI) pre-built with SEO best practices and digital perfor-mance marketing in mind.
• Best-In-Class Integrations: Common in-tegrations with proven industry leading part-ners come built-in and pre-tested for best in class eCommerce functionality.
• Rapid Development Framework: Tools and
pro-cesses designed to simplify developer tasks and dramatically increase productivity for environ-ment setup, data synchronization, module test-ing/upgrades, etc.
• A Modern Deployment Architecture: Allows
for push-button deployments to public or pri-vate cloud environments for rapid scaling.
RESPONSIVE USER EXPERIENCE
Looking to the year ahead, mobile commerce is forecasted to account for up to 40% of all ecommerce transactions in 2015 according to several recent research studies.
Consumers have clearly become more comfortable with shopping from mobile devices and a rapid shift has taken place in ecommerce. Desktop no longer accounts for the lions share of commerce in our more fragmented dynamic, multi-screen world that now includes tablets and smart-phones grabbing an ever larger share of ecommerce reve-nue from the traditional computer screen.
Online research and shopping behavior is evolving in an al-ways connected, multi-screen world. With larger screens for smartphones and tablets becoming ubiquitous, con-sumers are not happy with a reduced functionality mobile experience and brands that do not adapt and offer fully functional ecommerce experiences, regardless of screen, will quickly fall behind.
We must consider the consistency of the user experience across devices and how this can impact a brands organic search presence in the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Google has been one of the louder voices calling for re-sponsive design, and has even gone as far as beginning to enforce mobile SEO best practices, penalizing companies in their index for not following their recommendations. A recent example of this direction is visible in Google search results pages on mobile devices that are now displaying ‘mobile friendly’ messaging next to search results for sites that are following Google’s basic best practices for mobile. Google strongly recommends a single URL approach per page, so the notion of separate mobile and desktop URLs (and even adaptive approaches), no longer meet Google’s mobile best practices. Those sites that continue to feature m.dot URLs to direct users to mobile versions of a page from a desktop result may soon be penalized as well. Goo-gle is now calling these types of redirects from desktop to mobile versions of a page ‘faulty redirects.’
Finally, we need to look at our own operations around de-velopment and testing for a responsive site. Dede-velopment of a single code base for the front-end of an application has clear benefits. In many cases, this task of redeveloping the
front-end from mobile is too daunting for most retailers. The cost of maintaining a single code base verses multiple code bases allows you to move faster over time because you are making a change in one place instead of multiple places. Additionally, the vast majority of test cases should be automated as they are in BOLT. However, for the items that cannot be automated, making this process as simple as possible is critical. Testers can simply drag the window size to test each of the different versions having to have numerous browsers setup for testing.
BEST-IN-CLASS INTEGRATIONS
Oracle Commerce integrations are commonly “made-to-order”, a process that often inflates integration costs and significantly increases time to market. That said, bundled integrations are nothing new to the Oracle Commerce uni-verse. In fact, these bundles make up the bulk of the “ac-celerator” products available in the market today. BOLT de-livers not only best-in-class integrations, but the design of the BOLT platform means these integrations are regularly tested (by automated and human means) and ongoing en-hancements are made available platform-wide and avail-able to all BOLT customers.
RAPID DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK
BOLT provides a rapid development framework built specifically for Oracle Commerce, allowing developers to work quickly through automation of day-to-day tasks (for example, data synchronization between machines). These bottlenecks, which often block developers and create dramatic time losses, are simplified or
• Automate menial tasks through modern infrastructure-as-code (DevOps) techniques.
• Isolate key performance bottlenecks in the standard deployment topology using virtualization, allowing them to be monitored, tuned, and scaled at different intervals.
• Radically reduce the cost and complexity to deploy and scale the solution both initially and over time.
• Allow the solution to be push-button deployed to a public or private cloud environment
mand-line-based tooling. This tooling has been wrapped around the entire BOLT platform. It carries through from development to production, connecting all of the dots and providing for a single command-and-control center for each project.
There is potential high opportunity cost when working with the platform or any enterprise-class eCommerce platform based on a fear of failure. Failure is feared under normal development circumstances, as the cost of failure is tre-mendous (days, weeks lost). BOLT makes experimentation much less of a risk and the opportunity cost is much lower as a result.
MODERN DEPLOYMENT ARCHITECTURE
The initial deployment of a commerce solution is near-her-culean effort, and scaling the solution can be troublesome for many customers. BOLT by Amplifi Commerce uses mod-ern approaches for deployment and scaling to solve this problem and enable cloud deployments.
To consumers, present day commerce needs to be omni-channel and mobile-first. Commerce is growing at extreme rates and mobile usage is nearly doubling year over year. Commerce success now requires brands to remain nim-ble organizationally in order to be anim-ble to pivot and adjust commerce experiences to meet consumer expectations for how customers research, shop and transact online. In order to be that on-demand brand, your platform must be scal-able, flexible and provide an extreme amount of control to the business. At the same time, it must be fast and easy to build and maintain. BOLT by Amplifi Commerce is the first platform for Oracle Commerce to do all these things.
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Appendix 18
INTERESTED IN LEARNING HOW BOLT CAN TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS?
Let’s talk about your unique needs and how BOLT can help you scale your commerce capabilities.
Web: amplificommerce.com/bolt
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 1-888-963-9309
ABOUT AMPLIFI COMMERCE
We are a leading provider of multi-channel commerce and interactive marketing services enabling clients to navigate and thrive in today’s digital economy. Our eCommerce and ebusiness consultancy provides business strategy, digital marketing, technology implementations and operational management solutions that make a measurable difference to brands across the globe.
