Web services and widgets for ecommerce

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

May 27, 2009 [7616 views]

I have started a Kingston University project together with Shine Marketing to look at widgets and services for ecommerce. We were successful in getting a small government grant to find ways of helping SME retailers improve their online shops. Our project will look at simple additions to sites (through mashups, services and widgets) that improve the customer experience or give us insights into how the customer experience can be optimised.

Our work will be based on the following model of how to improve an online business

Increase the quantity of qualified traffic through marketing, advertising, reputation building and affiliation activity
Optimise the site for onsite SEO to ensure maximum visibility for products, categories and articles
Try and make sure that traffic is directed to appropriate landing pages appropriate to the customer needs
Reduce any barriers to conversion such as registration, errors or unnecessary questions. Streamline the checkout and integrate payment as tightly as possible
Make sure that the branding and design is strong enough to make the site look confident and trustworthy
Add reassurance elements to the site to answer common customer worries: privacy, security, delivery and returns
Consider guided navigation (price, colour, brand etc) where appropriate to the inventory
Provide decision support functionality (such as a gift finder) to help the customer choose products and categories
Add a great internal search
Monitor customer journeys and visitor behaviour through analytics, heat maps and customer feedback to find ways to continuously improve the site

Of particular interest to our research is finding low cost ways of improving a site through the use of mashups and services hosted by third parties. These might include social bookmarking tools such as http://addthis.com, feedback tools such as http://www.kampyle.com or ratings and reviews from http://www.JS-kit.com.

Our research plan involves identifying such tools and services and then experimenting with them on new and existing sites and then reporting back on their effectiveness. We may also try and define gaps in the tools market and prototype them in future experiments.

We would be keen to hear from anyone who knows about mashup tools, widgets or web services particularly with any of the following functionality:

Reviews and ratings and other “Wisdom of crowds” functionality
Customer feedback
Gift selectors
Tag cloud generators (based on analysis of internal & inbound search terms)
Guided search (based on data supplied from the product inventory)
Recommended products (based on crowd behaviour)
Customer tracking and behaviour analysis
Search improvements such as “auto generated suggestions”
Social bookmarking
Data visualisation tools for analysing customer data or presenting on the site

We are fully aware that many of these “services” can be built from scratch but our interest is in proving the value of mashups particularly to SMEs. We are interested in the types of services that can be added to hosted ecommerce platforms such as Shopify as well as open source frameworks such as Magento.

Please get in touch if you know of any services that should be included. We will update our list as new ones are suggested.

Here is a list of what we have found so far: