Anatomy of an ecommerce site: more about Virgin Books
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
October 23, 2004 [4659 views]
Following last week's lecture on Virgin Books to Kingston's Second Year students, I decided to write some more notes about the project to help them see the components involved.
Front end
- Design
- Shopping experience
- Browsing by category
- Search
- Promotional space
- Makes extensive use of Cascading Style Sheets
- Accessible to the visually impaired
It took several weeks to sketch and then create the design. Virgin wanted the navigation and look and feel to be distinct from their competitors while fitting in with the Virgin brand.
Shopping process
* Accounts
* Search
* Browsing
We based the Virgin shopping experience (the flow through the site) on work for previous ecommerce clients. The scale of the shop introduces browsing issues. We need to make sure that hitting the back button does not break the logic of buying. We also need to give very careful thought to what happens when you return a book or it is not delivered. The original shopping system took 5-6 weeks to develop and perfect but can be modified for a new client in 2-3 weeks depending on the differences they require.
Database
* 250,000 titles
* 500,000 images
* Postgres database
Book data is supplied by a third party on a daily basis with an indication of availability and pricing. The database includes 700 books published by Virgin itself. We have to design the data storage table to allow descriptions and pricing to be changed and to minimize the complexity of the accessing query. Processing the images took nearly 3 weeks (automatically and continuously). We have to provide tools that will automatically update the stock table every time we receive new data from the book information partner.
Payment
Our shopping system will clear credit cards using SecPay, a specialist ecommerce payment partner. We chose them because of our ability to integrate their transactions within the Virgin look and feel. One big issue is when you take payment. The law says that before taking payment you must be able to ship the goods within 28 days. Consider the complexity of orders where some of the books are in stock. It takes 4-5 days to integrate the payment partner into the site including the design and negotiations. Virgin needed to acquire a merchant certificate for the site before we could begin testing this integration.
Product updates/order handling
Content management system (CMS)
We used our CMS, OTHERobjects which is written using Enterprise Java.
Virgin need to be able to feature products, change prices and add feature pages. We have extended our content management system to manipulate key parts of the shopping content and to allow processing of returns and problems. Our content management system has been developed over 7 years and the work required to develop a new client is 3-4 weeks.
Marketing
- Promotional spaces
- Offer syndication
- Affiliates
- Guerrilla marketing and search engine optimisation
The shop will only be successful if visitors find it, find the shopping system easy to use and make purchases. Virgin will drive traffic by offering discounts to customers coming from other Virgin sites such as Virgin.com. We need to recognize those visitors and modify the look and feel and the prices to offer the discount. Our ecommerce system can support many types of promotional offers. This functionality took 3-4 weeks to develop but can be reused easily.
Fulfillment
- Shipping
- Shipping costs
- Returns
Virgin will not ship the books themselves but will use a third party fulfillment company. We will pass orders to them over a secure FTP connection and receive acknowledgements and ready to ship instructions. We will process the credit card details and then instruct the company to ship. Each ecommerce client will use a different fulfillment partner and the logic of these transactions needs careful thinking (2-3 weeks work)
Hosting
- Databases
- Web serving
- Transaction
- Security
The site has to be fast, robust and secure. We work with a third party to host our machines in an environment that is physically and logically secure. This site is being served from a cluster of web servers and multiple databases. It is vital to separate the secure information from the site itself to minimize the risk from hackers. Separate development machines are used during the design and development process.
What do you think?
