Ecommerce Subsystem (explained for MBAs)
of the
Ecommerce Module documentation
(this small part of which was written by
Philip Greenspun)
The big decision:
- you are the retailer
- you send all orders to one retailer
- you offer products and send orders to multiple retailers
- you let an arbitrary number of retailers come to your site and build
shops (Yahoo! Store; Amazon Z Shops)
ACS supports the first three ways of doing business and will eventually
support the last one (clone of Yahoo! Store).
High-level features
If your imagination is limited, you can think of this as "Amazon.com in
a box". Is is it impressive to do everything that Amazon does? Not
really. Ecommerce is a fast-moving field. Packaged software always
embodies last year's business ideas. The interesting thing is how
quickly one can extend an open-source software system to accomodate the
latest business ideas.
Feature List
| in MBA-speak
| translation for programmers
|
| catalog engine
| Oracle table (ec_products) plus
extra tables for mapping to categories, subcategories, and
subsubcategories; bulk upload from structured data
|
| e-recommendation engine
| Oracle table (ec_product_recommendations)
mapping products to categories, subcategories, for everyone or only a
particular class of user
|
| e-review technology
| Oracle tables for professional reviews and customer-contributed
reviews
|
| shopping cart
| Oracle tables (ec_user_sessions, ec_orders, ec_items)
|
| real-time credit card billing
| CyberCash and CyberSource interfaces
|
| user tracking
| log every page view and search
|
| integrated customer service (telephone, fax, email, and Web)
| all interactions logged into same Oracle table; inbound
email handler (Perl script); call
center staff sit at Web browsers and use the /admin/ecommerce/ pages
|
| CRM
| write custom rules for standard ACS CRM module
|
| intelligent agent
| Oracle query for "users who bought X also bought Y"
|
| content management with visual interface
| Web forms plus auditing of all changes
|
| discounts for different classes of user
| Example: MIT Press wants to sell journals
at different rates for individual, institutional, and student subscriptions
|
| cross-sales platform
| Oracle table of "if you're interested in X, you probably
also should buy Y"; links are unidirectional
|
| object-oriented design
| per-publisher custom fields table to add arbitrary
attributes to products
|
| intelligent parametric and free-text search engine
| pseudo_contains if you want to have an easy
Oracle dbadmin life; Contains (Intermedia text) if you
don't;
limit to category at user's option
|
| gift certificates
| auditing and mandatory expiration
|
| enterprise-scale e-business solution
| add more processors to your Oracle server
|
| highly scalable transaction engine
| orders are inserted into Oracle table
|
| XML-enabled
| download free Java XML libraries from Oracle
|
Bottom line
If a closed-source ecommerce package doesn't do exactly what you want,
you're out of business. If the company behind a closed-source ecommerce
package goes out of business, so will you. If the company behind a
closed-source ecommerce adopts a different "business model", you're
screwed.
If you're even tempted to adopt a commercial ecommerce system from a
company other than IBM, Oracle or SAP (three enterprise software vendors
that seem likely to be around for awhile), read the iCat story towards
the end of http://photo.net/wtr/using-the-acs
philg@mit.edu
