Analysis of Online Shop Systems
Fachhochschule Gießen-Friedberg (University of applied Sciences) Fachbereich 06 MNI (Mathematik, Naturwissenschaften und Informatik)
Diploma thesis for obtaining the academical degree Dipl. Informatiker (FH) in the period of September the 1st 2007 till February the 1st 2008
Analysis of Online Shop Systems
by:
Sebastian Berg Leipziger Str. 12 35463 Fernwald Steinbach
Matrikel-No.: 719948 Referee: Prof. Dr. Peter Kneisel Co-Referee: Prof. Dr. Bodo Alexander Igler
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Table of Contents
Abstract.....................................................................................................................5 1 Introduction............................................................................................................7
1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 Motivation......................................................................................................................7 Task breakdown..............................................................................................................7 E-Commerce...................................................................................................................9 Why to use E-Commerce..............................................................................................10 Market situation............................................................................................................12 Advantages of online shops..........................................................................................13 Architectures.................................................................................................................15 Catalogs........................................................................................................................15
2 Eligibility criteria.................................................................................................17
2.1 Requirements................................................................................................................17 2.1.1 Setting/adapting objectives.................................................................................17 2.1.2 Accurate choice of the platform..........................................................................19 2.1.3 Clarity.................................................................................................................19 2.1.4 Usability..............................................................................................................21 2.1.5 Search functionality............................................................................................23 2.1.6 Security...............................................................................................................25 2.1.7 Service................................................................................................................28 2.1.8 Customizing........................................................................................................29 2.1.9 Conclusion..........................................................................................................30 2.2 Certification..................................................................................................................31 2.2.1 Trusted Shops......................................................................................................32 2.2.2 TÜV-Süd (www.safer-shopping.de) ...................................................................33 2.3 Ten rules of online selling............................................................................................35 2.4 Integration....................................................................................................................35
3 Evaluation.............................................................................................................38
3.1 Intershop.......................................................................................................................38 3.1.1 Working with Enfinity Suite 6............................................................................49 3.1.2 Conclusion..........................................................................................................53 3.2 xt:Commerce................................................................................................................53 3.2.1 Conclusion..........................................................................................................62
4 xt:Commerce in practice......................................................................................63
4.1 Installation....................................................................................................................63 4.2 Configuration................................................................................................................66 4.2.1 Other important preferences...............................................................................69 4.3 Customization...............................................................................................................70 4.3.1 Smarty (template engine)....................................................................................72 3
4.4 Administration..............................................................................................................72 4.4.1 Porting legacy systems........................................................................................73 4.4.2 Connection to Google Maps...............................................................................73
5 Summary and conclusion.....................................................................................76
5.1 Perspectives..................................................................................................................76 5.2 Final statement.............................................................................................................77
Illustration Index....................................................................................................79 Drawing Index........................................................................................................80 Bibliography...........................................................................................................81 6 Appendices............................................................................................................83
6.1 E-Mail correspondence with Florian Labitzke/Marc Seeliger.....................................83 6.2 Screen shot of conversation between S. Berg and M. Hinsche....................................84 6.3 Every-day work (photography)....................................................................................85
Vocabulary..............................................................................................................86 Statutory declaration.............................................................................................90
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Abstract
Meanwhile customers have got used to online shopping. They expect a company to offer their complete product line online as well as offline. Thus E-Commerce is a must-have for companies that want to increase sales and develop new markets – maybe all over the world. This thesis faces two extremely different online shop systems – one open source and one high cost software. Basically both systems bring up the required shop functionalities. Usability, clarity, security as well as a general adaptability and structured presentation of information in the front end and in the backend qualify both systems to be deployed in every-day online shopping. The most important thing to pay attention to while figuring out pros and cons of the systems will be the companies requirements. Setting up a small online shop from scratch, renewing an existing internet appearance or integrating established business processes from suppliers to partners and B2B customers – all these ways of using online shop software are possible, depending on the readiness to invest in high costs for the software and employee trainings on the one hand or deductions on functionality combined with a lot of active work and – at the first sight – comparatively low costs on the other.
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
1.1 Motivation
I chose „Analysis of Online Shop Systems“ as the subject of my diploma thesis because they offer a great chance to gain profit for a company. With a little work on setting up and customizing you can offer an attractive and easy online shop. No matter if you are a „global player“ like Amazon or if you store your products in your garage at home, you can spread them all over the world. If you take time to think about what you want to offer and how you want to offer it, you can respond to your customer´s individual needs and wishes. I think it has become important for every company to offer their products on the world wide web because meanwhile people have got used to online shops. They expect a company to offer their products on the internet and want to benefit from the advantages of ordering their goods at home. Finally a word on language: This thesis is written in English in order to make it available for a bigger audience and, of course, to improve language skills. So the greater efforts that had to be undergone during the creation are certainly worth the endless lookups in online dictionaries and language discussing boards. Last but not least I would like to thank Mr. Reiner Burger for reading this thesis besides his everyday work and helping to make it sound proper and adequate to a scientific work.
1.2 Task breakdown
This thesis is about common online shop software, its features, „must-haves“ and usability. In the last decade more and more online shops have been occurred. Meanwhile some of them are already out of use whereas others have made their mark in every day online shopping. There are commercial as well as free (open source) online shops available. With this thesis I would like to
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introduce E-Commerce and give an overview over the current market situation of online shops, create some eligibility criteria for online shops, 7
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1 Introduction
• •
evaluate two popular online shop systems with these criteria and report on setting up and administrating the online shop for one customer of the Sylphen company.
Chapter one is going to give the overview mentioned above. After some general definitions and a short introduction on electronic Commerce (1.3 E-Commerce) I will give a short overview over the current market situation of well established online shop systems (commercial and open source). Furthermore I will introduce the advantages of online shops in chapter 1.6, their architecture and machinery. In chapter two I´m trying to create eligibility criteria for online shops. Usability, security and integration are taking center stage in this section. Besides I am going to report on renowned certification agencies and their basic requirements on online shops as well as integrating the software into existing business processes. Chapter three deals with the evaluation of two shop systems based on the developed criteria. It tries to point out which system should be used under certain circumstances. Finally the practical part of this thesis is handled in chapter four: It uses chapters two and three as a groundwork and displays the steps of choosing, setting up and „pre-administrating“ an online shop for the GGEW-net, a customer of the Sylphen limited liability company. Problems and highlights during any of the necessary steps handling an online shop system (installation, configuration, customization and administration) will be pointed out in this chapter. This thesis only reports on „out-of-the-box“ online shops which one can manage completely on his1 own. In my opinion such systems offer multiple advantages on customizing, administrating and designing one´s shop in opposite to completely designed and configured hosted online shops. I will try to balance reasons for using a high cost commercial shop system on the one hand and for using an open source shop system on the other. Both systems surely offer pros and cons and this thesis will give an overview and help choosing an adequate shop system for ones needs.
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I chose to use the masculine form in this thesis whenever I write in 3 rd person. There are no discriminating intentions on the female gender but rather priority is given to the simplicity of writing this thesis.
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1 Introduction
1.3 E-Commerce
The following drawing shows the different sectors of E-Commerce, as Merz describes them (cf. [Merz02], p. 24). He defines E-Commerce as „assistance of trading activities via communication networks“. B2C
business B2B
B2 A/ A2 B
consumer C2C
A2 C
administration
Drawing 1: E-Commerce by [Merz02]
My thesis deals with one specific section of E-Commerce – the eB2C2 sector. This means that I would like to highlight legal E-Commerce via the internet using software especially designed for online trading. The typical way of buying goods offline (and eB2C respectively) brings up four different steps which have to be passed through before a product or good is bought: 1. Negotiation You cannot exactly call this step negotiation, because you do not really negotiate. In fact you are just gathering information during this step via descriptions or images of articles or by reading online discussion forums about it. But the word negotiation in some way mirrors what you do before you buy an article in „offline“ transactions. 2. Conclusion of the contract In this step you typically accept the offerer´s general terms and conditions before you send him your order- and payment information by clicking the „order“-button in the online shop. After this the offerer gives his confirmation of your order and informs you about the payment.
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eB2C = electronic business to consumer. Of course there are more sections, namely business to business, consumer to consumer (e.g. eBay), administration to business, business to administration and administration to consumer.
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1 Introduction
3. Transaction During the transaction you usually pay your goods and the offerer ships them when he receives the payment.3 At this point the contract is made because both parties have agreed to it. The customer agrees by making the payment under the general terms and conditions, the offerer by shipping the goods. 4. After sales management A company has to take care about its customer relationships after a complete transaction in case of reclamations or retours. Maybe the customer receives newsletters about new products, product updates or products related to his last order. A good customer relationships management (CRM) is necessary in any kind of shops (online or offline).
1.4 Why to use E-Commerce
As per [TNS06], with 32 billion Euro Germany „[...]is the biggest online retail market in Europe[.]“ and as per EITO4 the expected sales until 2008 are about 90 billion Euro and 50% of the German internet users buy products via the internet. So Germany has got the second place in Europe. Thus the importance of the internet as a distribution channel has gone up. Looking at the E-Commerce users in Germany Illustration 1 shows, that germany is far above the average of E-Commerce users concerning the country of reference.
Illustration 1: Position of Germany in an international contrast by [TNS07]
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There are different payment procedures like PayPal, credit cards, invoice, electronic cash, etc. European Information Technology Observatory
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1 Introduction
Meanwhile customers simply expect to go shopping in an online store. The typical ways of offline and online shopping are being merged more and more and the trends are going to „multi-channel-shopping“. Very often information about the product is drawn offline e.g. in a book store, followed by a price comparison in the different online stores available. Finally the book is bought at an adequate (online) store with best conditions.5 So the customers appreciate to be able to go shopping in an online store additionally to the classic offline shopping. Looking at generation 50+ (called „Silver Surfers“) as in [UM07] you can notice a behaviour just the other way round. Customers of online travelling stores often abort the booking if any unexpected mistakes or inconsistencies during the checkout process occur. It is also important to mention that the cheapest online store does not imply to be the best. Again the Silver Surfers have to be considered because they usually have sufficient funds and are not impressed by slogans like „Geiz ist geil “ or „Es geht immer billiger [..]“. Customers also take great care in choosing an online store and especially whom they offer their personal data. So the company has got to be reliable and offer e.g. secure connections (https://...) for submitting credit card information and other sensitive personal data. Considering the facts we can say that E-Commerce is a need nowadays but does not always result in success. Online shops enable companies to develop foreign markets and if they are set up properly they are a powerful utility to gain profit. In [WIKI_L_T] Chris Anderson argues „[...]that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.“
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This is not about ripping off the vintage retail markets but rather about sorting out ones best conditions. According to this, customers can also use the different online stores for collecting their information and finally buy their products in retail markets (cf. [TNS05], p. 339).
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1 Introduction
Illustration 2: Long Tail by [WIKI_L_T]
This means, that there is few demand for niche products in restricted areas. The internet is free6 of restrictions so you can reach quite a lot of people all over the world and sell these niche products to everyone who demands them. Furthermore you can evaluate your customer´s preferences and adapt your choice of products, track users, send newsletters and check if they result in orders and a lot more. The internet offers great chances to publish information about a company very easily and quickly and enables customers to have an interactive contact which will hopefully end up in good customer relationships.
1.5 Market situation
There is an abundance of online shop systems available. They are going from open source products up to hundreds of thousands of Euro. Depending on the needs and features one has to choose a suitable system. Table 1 shows a small overview of wellestablished shop systems and their prices.
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International ex-/import conditions, shipping costs or common laws may of course not be disregarded.
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1 Introduction
OS Commerce xt:Commerce
* *
Solid webshop for small stores 98,-€ optional support; easy template system Poor in proportion to the price Solid webshop; a little out of date State of the extensions art webshop; modular
Open source Open source < 100,- € ≥ 830,- € ≥ 950,- € ≥ 1.070,- € ≥ 2.380,- € 240,- to 1.500,- € 500,- to 1.000,- € ≥ 420,- €
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1&1 Webshop
Omeco Webshop* Oxid Eshop PE* Aconon Smartstore.biz* Mondo Shop* Sage GS Shop Intershop
*
Professional webshop for high requirements Exemplary search engine; good usability Client-server architecture; Top dog of shop systems (Otto, T-Com,...)
Epages 5 Merchant* Great administration, easy customizing
> 50.000,- €
Table 1: Overview shop systems (Data from [IWB08/07],[IWB14/07] and [IWB19/07])
All shop systems – except Intershop because8 of being the top-dog – have poor ways to manage additional content caused by the intention of most manufacturers to offer „stand alone“ online stores. They concentrate on shop features instead of wasting time to implement a complete (W)CMS9. There are more or less suitable implementations of simple (W)CMS in the different shops performing their tasks acceptably. Further information about an integration in a WCMS will be given in chapter 2.4 Integration.
1.6 Advantages of online shops
You could say, when using E-Commerce there are several advantages in offering your products in an online shop. The first ones which may come to one´s mind could be a worldwide availability of your store. Other ones could be e.g. the lack of
• • •
business premises (including their hires), employees and stocks.
The shop software is already prepared best for a certification by Trusted Shops. (see chapter 2.2 Certification) Intershop ensures high availability and high performance e.g. in the OTTO webshop that denotes 100 orders per second at peak loads. Intershop clearly says: „We do not want to offer a CMS, but if our customers wish to manage additional content in their shop, we offer them different solutions for the integration.“ That is just because they have to do this to achieve (or increase) customer satisfaction. (Web) Content Management System
* 7 8 9
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1 Introduction
But if we look a little closer into the details we encounter that the things you cannot renounce are the ones just mentioned above. In fact you do need stocks, employees and mostly even business premises. Passing through your products from your suppliers directly to the customers is nearly impossible. In addition to that you cannot disregard a huge amount of employees that manage e.g. orders, newsletters, after sales, shipping returns or a hotline. A lot of companies already have business premises in which they have distributed their products before starting an online shop. And last but not least you have to be aware of the fact that your online shop is not available for everyone in the world. A worldwide selling of your products comes along with different taxes, shipping costs, different export/import conditions and fees and a multilingual appearance of your shop. Nevertheless online shops offer a great opportunity of distributing any kind of hard and soft-goods10. One offers a direct comparability with opponents, the shop is available „twenty-four-seven“ and dealers can „quick-response“ on their customers needs and wishes. Furthermore one can inform customers about new products, updates, releases and special offers using an integrated newsletter system of the shop. Statistics will inform about top sellers and flops and logged search queries (created by e.g. a web analysis tool) can be hints on the customer´s preferences. ECONDA Shop Monitor11 for instance is a monitoring tool that already comes along with xt:Commerce 3.0.4 SP2 in a fourteen day trial version. But the so called „web analysis“ basically aims on the understanding of customers´ movements through a website12. An aborted checkout process could be caused by simply gathering shipping information or by a mistrust against the shop because of an insecure connection during the checkout process. The latter is hard to find out and becomes obvious not until this behaviour is discovered at multiple customers (cf. [CT22/07]). Besides all those advantages the invention of a shop system comes along with several costs. Maybe one has to employ additional staff to manage the more comprehensive work or spend some funds to educate them.
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Hard-goods are every kind of products you can touch. Soft-goods are products like software, musicdownloads, programs or even holiday trips. http://www.econda.de (reviewed on 2007, December 31st) More precisely it is about collecting movement data and aggregating these data to certain user groups (and not a single user) that behave in a certain way.
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1 Introduction
1.7 Architectures
Specializing in eB2C Merz gives following model of processing steps in an online shop: login navigate in catalog product page add to cart view cart
Drawing 2: process steps of an online shop by Merz
ordering info payment info
ordering
download delivery
conditions of use
tracking & tracing
Online shops usually consist of a collection of scripts, templates and server components and their data are stored in a relational database management system (RDBMS). The middleware displays the database contents on HTML pages. The different shop systems differ in the script languages partly standardized partly proprietary. Intershop for instance uses Hybrid-HTML whereas xt:Commerce uses PHP. But in most cases the script language is embedded in the websites beside the HTML tags. Proprietary variables, access control functions or scripts and „servlets“ can be defined as part of the HTML-document. Intershop calls it Template Language Extension variables (TLE), the equivalent in xt:Commerce uses the „Smarty“ template engine. These variables for instance can contain the current date, user name or the number of products in the shopping cart (cf [Merz02], p. 410 – 411).
1.8 Catalogs
Catalogs are usually ordered by categories and offer shop operators some tools to define the structure, product information pages or the graphical layout. Because of the free definition of the different layers which are
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presentation (layout), data modelling ( structure of catalog and product attributes) and contents (product information), 15
1 Introduction
catalog pages are extremely dynamic web contents. Regarding their graphical presentation and their administrating interface they are structured strongly. Differentiation between products and attributes is very important. A product consists of attributes as well as other information like illustrations, texts or sales. The components themselves can be organised as well: Product attributes consist of an attribute type and possibly an amount of predefined values. Products can be categorised and finally they are assigned to certain types providing information about the attribut types assigned to a product. Such a kind of catalog is highly reusable. On the one hand you can adapt it for books and on the other hand for spare parts. No matter which meta model you implement, the product is taking center stage in it. It can be assigned to a category which can be structured hierarchically itself for creating subcategories of user-defined depth. Finally the product is an instance of its type. The types consist of any information that apply to each product of that specific type. Especially the defined attributes are specified by their relation to the attribute types. Thus a product type usually consists of several attribute types. Products can be combined with an arbitrary number of attributes. Hence an attribute can be defined independently to reuse it in itemizing several products(cf [Merz02], p. 414).
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2 Eligibility criteria
2 Eligibility criteria
„It’s not just shoes that need to be comfortable – a company’s website must have the same kind of feelgood factor. If customers don’t find what they are looking for right away, they soon go elsewhere.“
Michael Kraus, Deichmann, Manager E-Commerce, 2006
2.1 Requirements
This chapter is going to light up the most important requirements on effective online shops. As we have already considered in chapter 1 Introduction not every online shop is as lucrative as the other. Not only the technical requirements need to attract one´s interest but also the ones that lead to good customer relations/- satisfactions. Some of the points below – namely clarity, usability and service – could be understood as requirements on the online shop itself and not on its software. In fact the software is meant to support administrators in achieving the requirements. The following criteria shall be understood to be realizable with the deployed shop system. The rest of the criteria – choice of the platform, search functionality, security and customizing – definitely are directly connected to the software itself and should be basic features. And most important: you have to specify the objectives and choose an accurate platform for your store so I would like to go for this section now.
2.1.1 Setting/adapting objectives
In the beginning objectives should be set very clearly. Setting up an online shop without knowing who you want to serve or what you want to offer will not lead to success. If you are developing new businesses you should try to put yourself in the customers position and ask yourself: What would I be searching for? If you have already got an amount of customers you may want to increase the customers satisfaction. If you have got business premises you may want to reduce your hires by downsizing your sales floors without losing your „offline customers“, because your sales floors could be used to exhibit e.g. your top sellers or attract attention for the bigger offerings in your online shop. You have to be aware of your target groups. Business partners, end customers, dealers suppliers or B2B customers have different requirements on the E-Commerce solution.
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These could for instance be:
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desired contents and applications usage patterns/frequency habits in buying or ordering behaviour acceptance of payment methods and modalities requirements on technical interfaces
Even here new customers should be included in all considerations, concerning an online shop´s worldwide availability. In fact: You have to adapt your shop depending on your objectives (cf. Sieben, Frank in [GORA01], p. 424). Besides this you can take advantage of the „AIDA“-principle. AIDA stands for „[...]a common list of events that are very often undergone when a person is selling a product or service.“13. The letters stand for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action and describe the four events a customer passes through when buying a product. At first you have to attract the customers attention which is indeed the most difficult point looking at the huge number of online websites and stores available all over the world. „[...][B]y demonstrating features, advantages, and benefits[.]“ his interest is being raised and after his desire is aroused he finally buys the product (action). Again the Silver Surfers offer a great potential of gaining profit as they posses 46% of the complete spending power of the Germans (Illustration 2). So this class of population has to be included when setting or adapting shop objectives.
22% 46% 32%
50 y ears + 15 - 39 y ears 40 - 49 y ears
Illustration 3: Spending power of German population
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA (reviewed on 2007, December 10th)
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2.1.2 Accurate choice of the platform
An accurate choice of the platform is inevitable before setting up the shop. Different platforms offer different work flows independent of the level of prices. For example the low-cost version14 of 1&1 online shop offers at most ten categories with at most one hundred products. Adaption of functionality and design are kept at a minimum. Whereas xt:Commerce comes along with unlimited numbers of categories and products as well as a template system for adjusting the look and feel of an online shop. This can be of use if an online shop has to be adapted to existing websites. Different payment modules and a simple CMS for additional pages in the shop make it for being an allround shop system. Several other reasons for choosing xt:Commerce as the adequate shop system for the GGEWnet will be described in chapter 3.2 xt:Commerce. Altogether the adequate shop system has to be chosen very carefully. Questions of content management, product categories, discounts, groups, secure connections as well as costs for support by the manufacturer or certifications have to be discussed carefully. Depending on the number of visitors you have to ensure not to outrun traffic restrictions of your provider or to overload database performance.
2.1.3 Clarity
Clarity begins with the frontpage of an online shop. Customers should be able to identify the structure of the websites immediately. They should be enabled to navigate through the different sections of a store by a clearly structured menu and find relevant information about products with a modicum of effort. Important information about the company, shipping costs, general terms and conditions and privacy should be directly accessible from any page of the shop. Furthermore one can adapt so called „eye tracking“15 studies to place relevant information on the websites. People will not go shopping in an online store they do not trust in - and a lack of this information often causes such a mistrust. Altogether it is most important to keep visitors on the websites because current studies show, that a lack of clarity is an important reason for customers to leave the website. Table 2 shows other reasons why customers leave websites during their visit.
14 15 The low cost version of 1&1 online shop costs 14,99 € a month. Only the 70,-€-option offers oftentimes inevitable features like product options, product references, sales discounts or customer groups. Eye tracking of Google search results by [SEOCON05]
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2 Eligibility criteria
84 % 68 % 31 % 23 %
damaged links or slow page reproduction bad usability and untraceable information untraceable company information limited search functions
Table 2: Why people leave websites (Jupiter Research 12/2005)
Web accessibility16 is closely related to clarity. If you enable any disabled people – no matter if physically or technically – you can conquer several markets. Fulfilling requirements of e.g. the „WCAG“-guidelines17 usually results in a highly increased clarity of your online shop and certainly will not lead to a loss of functionality or information. The guidelines also suggest to pay attention on an easy understanding of your content, because the customers have different know-how18 and experiences in using online shops. Different ways of developing content, e.g. a sitemap giving an overview over huge categories and products or simple expressions can help people to navigate through and understand the pages. An easy handling of the cartridge and a fast and structured checkout process will support customers during their shopping trip. In [UM07] none of the test persons were able to book a trip in the TUI online booking store which was among other things caused by an extremely high page reproduction time and mirrors the top result of Table 2. The reload of the result page took up to five minutes oftentimes followed by an error message or a note that no matching results could be found. Most of the test persons were visibly annoyed about the reproduction time as they anyway do not exercise patience during the different booking steps. So the handling of errors and the solving of problems vastly depends on the user´s age. Huge online shops usually offer very numerous products. An easy product search with fault-tolerant result pages and filters for these results are inevitable to ensure clarity of the store. Nevertheless one should have an eye on two other principles called „MAYA“ and „KISS“. Maya stands for „Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable“ and describes how one should design a new product. It has to be decided, if customers shall be confronted with a completely new product or with a well-known one they might already be used
16 17 18 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) Many users do not even have a mental representation of the structure of websites when they first visit an online shop.
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to. This thesis can be copied on the usability of online shops used as an agreement between state of the art web programming and a merely functional website. „Be as innovative as possible without putting people off.“ (cp. [WIKI_MAYA]) Along with Maya comes Kiss, standing for „Keep It Simple and Stupid“. Kiss19 means to solve a problem as simple and easy to understand as possible in order to maintain simplicity. „[...]KISS is also one of the principles of system architecture.“ (cf. [WIKI_KISS])
2.1.4 Usability
A successful online shop needs an easy handling. As we have already considered, customers have different aims and know-how. This is why a shop construction should enable every user to navigate through the shop intuitively - independent from his know-how or the entry page. At [TSHOPS] Trusted Shops offers a usability check for online shops, subdivided into 5 parts:
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frontpage Placing the search form prominently in the upper position of the frontpage as well as displaying a maximum of 7/10 links/categories will achieve best results in this section. product page Presenting product details (price, shipping costs, delivery status, ratings and comparisons with other products) with additional information and pictures will achieve best results here. search functionality This point has a very big importance in online shops and you will find a detailed elaboration on search functionality in chapter 2.1.5 Search functionality cart, ordering process and checkout An available cart at any time with a clearly structured and adaptable overview, e.g. „sorting by price/name/shipping time and an easy and secure (SSL) ordering and checkout process will achieve best results here.
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•
•
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Other acronyms for KISS: "Keep It Sweet & Simple", "Keep It Short & Simple", "Keep it Simple, Sweetheart", "Keep it Simple, Sherlock"
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miscellaneous Nearly all design requirements and specifications of modern web design affect the usability of online shops. Using acceptable contrasts of backgrounds and text, foregoing images as menu links, the strict separation of content and design and providing full functionality in the most commonly used web browsers (just to mention a few) will surely increase usability to a great extent.
Depending on the answers you give, usability of your online shop is being rated and you receive points for every answer. The more points you have received in the end the better your shop usability is. I would like to pick up the frontpage again as it is the main entry page of an online shop. The first seconds of contact are the most important and so the frontpage not only has to attract the user´s interest instantaneously but also has to enable him to get a quick orientation. The harder an orientation on the frontpage is the earlier customers abort their visit at this early point of time. Thus a pleasing design and clearly structured product listings are highly recommended because online shoppers feel like offline shoppers: The more they are pleased by the products displayed, the sooner they are willing to enter the shop. Shop windows that are trimmed boring or confused will frighten off the visitors. But even more importance is given to a quick location of navigation and the whereabouts. The relevant elements like navigation, search and login should be placed prominent as the customers are intended to spend most of the time with shopping and dealing with the products respectively (cf. [PLA&ANA2], p. 2/3). The booking form also is a central point of shop usability. It should be integrated in the ordering process seamlessly and keep functionality of the „navigate back“ button of the browser, which is most commonly used – not only by the Silver Surfers. A loss of form data by clicking on the back button of the browser can cause frustration and lead to aborting the order. Meanwhile the use of mobile devices like cellphones or PDAs for surfing the web and, according to this, online shopping is on the increase. Again complying with HTML and
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CSS guidelines as they are invented by the W3C20 will result in a high accessibility of the websites. They ensure a website to be completely accessible no matter what displaying device is used. Complying with these guidelines requires the output HTML code to be adaptable or on the other hand a software that creates clean (X)HTML and CSS.
2.1.5 Search functionality
One of the most important functions in an online shop is the product search but it is neglected by the majority of shop operators and manufacturers. Basic installations of online shop systems come along with simple PHP-based searches and none of the systems mentioned in chapter 1.5 Market situation offer an adequate fault-tolerant product search. Fault tolerant searches can avoid search and navigation problems. It leads to correct results regardless of typing or spelling mistakes. Furthermore many of the shop operators are afraid of investing in a detailed parametric search (see below). They are satisfied with a simple search not knowing about the sales damages resulting. On the other hand most of the systems offer an additional product search for extra charges between two hundred and four hundred Euro (cf. Dana Huber in [IWB87], p. 28). Not only the product pages should be integrated in the search. More and more people use the search form to find information on general terms and conditions or terms of delivery. So the search results should not only concentrate on products (cf. [COM_MAN1]). Additional CMS can blow up a webshop very fast and there is no doubt that two different search forms will not come across great acceptance of the customers. As Merz describes, there are basically two ways of searching an online catalog. On the one hand one can offer heterogeneous products which are structured very differently. On the other hand one can deal with products that have similar characteristics usually listed in associated categories. The first way is called „hierarchical search“. You navigate to the categorie of interest or you search products by means of their attributes. The second way is called „parametric search“. You could specify product characteristics step by step and see what products are available fulfilling the given
20 World Wide Web Consortium
23
2 Eligibility criteria
restrictions. High performance and efficiency while navigating an online shop are very critical factors of success (cf. [Merz02], p. 414, 419). Thus shop operators should take great care in displaying search results. Customers should receive a clearly structured result list which they can modify/filter21 by the product´s name, price or certain attributes. Displaying the best sellers on top of the search results instead of showing the results in fixed ordering - or even an unsorted list - will surely increase sales figures. Furthermore shop operators should offer a faulttolerant search like „Did you mean: ...“ that displays results even if there are typing or spelling errors in the query. There is hardly anything more frustrating than enormous or even wrong search results not to talk of search results completely out of the context of one´s search criteria. More and more shop operators analyze their customers´ shopping behaviour because search log files will give hints on the users preferences. So they can gain a detailed overview over highly enquired products, lacks in the product line or up to date trends (cf. [COM_MAN1]). Now these criteria aim at those users who exactly know what they want. Actual studies show that the concrete buying intention is being displaced by a kind of virtual strolling around in the internet. The surfers are led by sales offers but on the other hand can definitely go over to a purposeful search. So dealers should definitely organize their frontpage in a way that they appeal to those „strollers“ and catch their attention. In the following I would like to sketch some general SEO22 and landing pages in a short overview. This is a little off-topic but seems to fit in here best.
A little digression concerning SEO and landing pages Search functionality does not only mean an internal search inside the shop websites but also catching those strolling users which may come from external search engines like Google and Co. Potential customers normally do not know of an existing online shop and so they use search engines to discover interesting products. Thus a general optimization for search engines should be performed in regular intervals. An adequate
21 22 The refining of search result is called after search navigation Search Engine Optimization
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keyword density should be applied to all pages and the website should be structured very clearly concerning the used markup, CSS and tagging requirements. Reasonable category names should be chosen and the navigation through categories should best be realized as plain text – even image maps, Java/JavaScript or Flash should be abandoned in case of an optimal preparation for search engines23. Other very important objects are the landing pages. Landing pages are those pages 24, a user „lands“ on after clicking for instance an advertising banner. On the landing page an emotive design and a quick orientation are the most important things to pay attention to. It has to be designed for common web surfers to become customers of the online shop and best promote a single product – not a whole category full of products, because it wants the user to make a quick decision to buy. Besides several information on online advertising and user tracing in [PLA&ANA1]p. 7, one can find seven recommendations25 on landing pages: 1. Integrating the landing page in the website 2. Optically harmonizing with banner 3. Name advantages of the product 4. Focus on a single or just a few products 5. Several views of the product combined with a rational inducement to buy 6. Highlight relevant navigation opportunities and do not ask too much of the users 7. Achieve confidence by transparency and credibility before asking the user to act (buy the product)
2.1.6 Security
A successful online shop has to be exempt from technical points of attack. Again Trusted Shops offers a security check26 subdivided into five parts for free:
•
registration form (secure passwords) Even little password restrictions, e.g. a minimum number of eight characters containing upper and lower case letters and special characters can provide the
23 24 25 26
Based loosely on the slides of Ralf Brinkman, Ebuisness Workshop (Sylphen LLC.); http://www.sylphen.com/files/e-business-suchmaschinenoptimierung.pdf Landing pages for instance can be micro sites, flash-animations or other campaign sites More detailed information on the recommendations can be found in [PLA&ANA1] pg. 4-6 http://www.trustedshops.de/shopbetreiber/security-check.html (reviewed on 2008, January 12th)
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danger of insecure user accounts. Though 50% of the users use passwords that do justice to quite high security issues unfortunately nearly 30% of the responded users in [EBAYTNS06] use insecure passwords.
•
login form (brute force) Possible brute force attacks also known as trial-and-error attacks can cause the illegal use of accounts. The software should lock the user´s account and/or the attacker´s IP adress after a certain number of failed login attempts. search function (cross site scripting) Cross site scripting (XSS27) is one of the most popular attacks on websites. By infiltrating dangerous lines of code via the search form the shop and even the users are in danger because account data can be read out. A possible XSS attack could for instance look like this:
01: 02: 03: 04: 05: 06: ';alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83)) //\ ';alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83)) //";alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83)) //\";alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83)) //--"> '> alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83))
•
Thus the shop should display a message about illegal characters that have been used in the search query instead of opening a pop up window with the letters „XSS“. Regular expressions that block illegal characters in search queries can help to defend against XSS attacks.
•
ordering form (SQL-Injection) Without validating text boxes or areas attackers can infiltrate arbitrary lines of code, manipulate prices, and alter database tables or execute dangerous database queries. When entering the product quantity the software should only accept numbers instead of a string like „ '-- “ and display an error message while you cannot follow the executed query. Software (version) You should always have the latest stable software release of your shop installed. Professional shop manufacturers update their software regularly or release patches and bug fixes for known security lacks.
•
27
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSS (reviewed on 2007, December 10th)
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Depending on the answers you give, security of your online shop is being rated and you receive points for every answer. The more points you have received in the end the better your shop security is. This check is just an orientation but does already provide a first overview on the security of an online shop. Meanwhile customers know better about the different safety mechanisms as they have kept busy with using E-Commerce and online shopping. As matter of principle the users have to be cleared up within the topics of security. 56% of the respondents as per [EBAYTNS06] wish to gain securityrelevant information in a short, clearly structured and detailed way. So this clearing up is another tightrope walk between the necessary depth of information and a well arranged overview. Users are afraid of an insecure storage or transmission of their data – especially with credit card and account information. In this connection it is a main objective to alert the users to the huge amount of existing safety mechanisms. But still shop operators also have to attend to their duty to contribute to a secure online shopping and effective operation of safety mechanisms – even before low prices – while choosing an online shop system. An online shop basically should offer secure connections via https28 protocol – strictly speaking: „[...]the combination of a normal HTTP interaction over an encrypted Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) connection.“28 Alternatively shop operators can offer other transmissions of personal data via telephone, fax or letter to increase the customer´s trust into the shop. Thus the treatment of stored personal data should be laid open. The handling of personal data should be transparent and if so, customers will award this transparency with a greater confidence. Furthermore no more than the necessary data may be stored according to the German laws of data protection. But not only customers are sensitized for security issues. An increasing number of junk registrations and junk orders respectively are the main problems for shop operators. Meanwhile double-opt-in29 mechanisms have been established before a registration for a newsletter subscription. Whereas effective protection mechanisms against junk
28 29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Https (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) Double-opt-in sends a confirmation message to the corresponding e-Mail address. The owner of an address can approve his identity by clicking a confirmation link or be protected against an abuse of his e-Mail address by ignoring the message.
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registrations are a little harder to implement. Automated junk registrations can be avoided by using so called captchas – Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart . They are small PHP scripts that create a blurred view of a certain number of random letters and numbers as a small image. The user has to enter them because he is still able to identify them whereas a computer cannot. Before proceeding with a registration, the system compares the entered combination with the one created and aborts the process if they do not match. A short introduction and a programming example can be found in [IX1/08]. Captchas are an adequate safety mechanism for averagely visited sites because they are easy to implement and offer enough parameters for an individual implementation. Attackers have to engage an OCR30-system to avoid captchas and this results in a significant additional expense. Thus the software should offer those or at least comparable security mechanisms to ensure a general security for dealers.
2.1.7 Service
Online shops naturally have to offer a lot more service than competitors of traditional offline shopping. The customers expect an extremely quick response on their wishes so shop operators have to react on E-Mail requests, complaints or returns very quickly as online customers usually are bound less to an online shop. Most of the time, there is not even a single personal contact between the two parties. Again, the website is the major point of contact and therefore should represent the company´s philosophy, particular objectives, as many information about products as possible31 and an easy usability. Customers expect and claim for a direct access to information and an easy ordering process as well as rapidly traceable contact information on the website as they are taking center stage in an ordering process. A personal and individual customer liaison and support become more and more important. The „cold“ and impersonal nature of the internet should be counterbalanced by for instance „warm“ and communicative customer relationships by e.g. confirming an order and informing the customer via E-Mail after his order has been shipped. If there are any claims or questions on a product, customers should not be put off with some automatically generated E-Mail answer but rather with a personal answer fitting
30 31 Optical Character Recognition e.g. visual information by several product pictures and written information on the product pages
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to their request (cf. [GORA01], p. 426/427; [ZÖL01], p. 115). Service also means to keep your online shop up to date. A newly last modified date indicates a regular update of the pages which shows that a company takes great care of an internet presence up to date. There is nothing worse than old information on a website because nowadays the internet is very fast moving. From this it follows that the variety of products offered online should not be shortened compared to the offline assortment as customers expect both of them to be of the same size (cf. [GORA01], p. 426). Basically you can say, that companies have to enable their customers to communicate by as many channels as possible, which are: telephone, Fax, E-Mail and the web in general. All of these channels have to be available and have to have an acceptable response time. Employees in a call center need to have access to all of the different systems like customer-, product- and stock-information. A single administrating interface with fast access to all these systems should be the central point for administrators (cf. [Merz02], p. 453). The outcome of the things above is that you need to employ staff and consider the follow-up costs for good service for your customers. But investing in the service will surely recompense the costs by increased customer satisfactions and loyalties. The customers loyalty is directly related to an online shops transaction volume. Satisfied customers revisit an online shop and probably spend more money (cf. [Merz02], p. 444).
2.1.8 Customizing
The best online shop is worth nothing unless you can customize it. Several sections of an online shop are of interest to customize. A company may already have a website with a common corporate identity (CI) to which the look and feel of a shop system should be adapted. The strict separation between contents and design conduces to an easy adaption of this look and feel. The reuse of an already existing HTML template – e.g. of a website that is managed by a WCMS – would best suit this purpose. All that would be left to do is replace menus and the main navigation by the specific shop elements like categories and additional information and the online shop comes along
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with the existing CI. Modern template systems like YAML32 support web developers in creating websites that are absolutely accessible for end users. Nevertheless most templates systems cannot relieve of certain HTML and CSS programming skills because the shop elements may have to be aligned and the template has to be tested with common browsers anyway to ensure availability. Besides changes on the design of the shop one may want to add some features concerning functionality or maybe an additional feature during the ordering process. The great advantage of open source online shop systems lies in the total availability of the source code. Changes, features or modifications can be made at any position provided of an adequate programming skill. Smallish commercial systems like the one from 1&1 offer a bunch of functions and features that may be enough for minor requirements. But usually they are extremely shortened in complexity and their functionalities are not adaptable at all. Others like Oxid Eshop PE come along with additional modular extensions and uncover their strengths with those. Finally the global player intershop offers all-purpose extensions for enterprise resource planning (ERP), modules for reuse of your suppliers catalogs on your business clients, subsidiary companies and end users as well as the complete connection to a company´s existing business processes. The choice of the fitting shop system again depends on several decisions. You have to determine the necessary shop features and compare them with the features of the existing systems. Do the features match the requirements or will a more powerful one also be more appropriate? Could you avoid the additional investment by using an open source product and modify it with the in-house know-how or will you need to hire freelancers or experts respectively to effect the necessary adaptions?
2.1.9 Conclusion
The requirements above do not assert one´s claim to be complete but give a description of some important checkpoints on setting up an online store. Most attention has to be put on the platform with its functionalities and possibly its extensibility as the proper operating modes have to be ensured. After this there is another tightrope walk between the customer´s privacy protection and a personalized shopping service with modern
32 YAML stands for Yet Another Multicolumn Layout and represents a framework for creating modern and flexible floating web layouts. See http://www.yaml.de for further information.
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features and state of the art web technologies. All things considered achieving sustained success depends on customer´s loyalty. Customer´s loyalty comes along with his satisfaction and he will be satisfied if he encounters a clearly structured online shop with a quick ordering process, secure data transmissions and a good usability. Looking at this bulk of important things it seems almost impossible to jump over all these barriers, but there are (partly legislative) initiatives that help you protect against the many traps and two of them will be mentioned in chapter 2.2 Certification. All that is left to say is that the perfect shop system does not exist so far. Every software will have advantages and disadvantages and an intensive dealing with the subject online shop systems is unavoidable to bring out best results and great success.
2.2 Certification
Being online usually comes along with online shopping. „[...] [M]erely 4% of 1.000 respondents specify they never bought anything in online shops.“33 As consumers are acting with much more discretion concerning prospective online shopping, inhibition thresholds appear. The greatest fear is – as already mentioned – the misuse of personal data during communication or transaction processes. Customers expect a seal and its representing organization to be well-known and want the requirements to be adapted in practice. „As a matter of fact seals of approval have an enormous significance for online shoppers. For approximately 75% of the respondents seals of approval in online as well as offline shops are 'very important ' or [at least] 'important '.[...] Especially [..] the newcomers that have not gone shopping in the internet attach importance to seals of approval.“31 So how can displaying of seals of approval effect on an online shop´s sales volume? „Two-thirds of the german internet shoppers have already aborted an order because of an apparently missing seriousness. Half of the aborters would have continued the ordering process if a [... seal of approval] had been visible.“34 Displaying a seal of approval can result in a higher conversion rate35 which will in the end result directly in higher sales volumes although there are some additional charges
33 34 35 [TNS_D21], freely adapted by Sebastian Berg [TNS_CERT] (p. 2), freely adapted by Sebastian Berg The conversion rate is the percentage rate of shop visitors that actually buy something in one´s store.
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associated. Nevertheless there are two direct advantages. One on the short term (by the direct purchasing (prepayment) of new customers) and an indirect one on the long term (by those new customers becoming regular customers)(cf. [TNS_CERT], p. 2). As a matter of fact, the topic trust has become a concrete business model. As certification agencies sprang up like mushrooms in the middle of the nineties only few of them have established and even less have been trustworthy before the year 2000. In the following I am going to introduce two renowned certification agencies. I would like to describe their highlights and give a short introduction on their operation breakdowns. However, operating of those agencies agrees in principle: The customers trust in the certification agency that after all could lose its good reputation. On the other hand, the agency limits the customers´ risks, which are for instance: ruin of the shop or a loss of the delivery. The agency trusts the shop because it assured itself of a minor risk to assure the customer. This is what the shop operator pays for. Finally the customer and the shop carry out business as usual (cf. [Merz02], p. 569).
2.2.1 Trusted Shops
Trusted Shops has been existing since 1999 and meanwhile they are market leader in online shop certification in Europe. They focus on a unique combination of the dealers´ certification, a seal of approval, a money-back guarantee and customer services. Shop operators have to undergo more than one hundred criteria36 in the areas of
• • • • • •
reliability security issues transparency of any kind of costs duty to furnish information customer services data protection
Illustration 4: Trusted Shops emblem
and the criteria are being adapted to the latest perceptions of laws and consumer protection permanently. An online shop receives the seal of approval after passing all of the requirements and is allowed to display the above sign on the websites.
36 A complete list of the criteria can be found at http://www.trustedshops.de/shopbetreiber/download.html (reviewed 2007, December 8th)
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Trusted shops is famous for their money-back guarantee free of any costs which ensures customers to get their money returned in case of problems concerning an abuse of credit card information, product returns, a fall through of delivery or a lack of reimbursement. They have certified more than two thousand online shops and none of the clashes so far have resulted in a hearing. The professional and multilingual procurement could solve all clashes with a satisfactory result to both parties. But not only customers benefit from a certification by Trusted Shops as dealers are being ensured against dissuasions concerning
• • •
incorrect general terms and conditions assigning incorrect taxes and shipping costs wrong phrases in general
As we can see, both parties – dealers as well as customers – benefit from this certification. But there is no doubt that this certification does not come along without any costs. There are three different memberships at Trusted Shops that go from 59,- € over 79,- € up to 99,- € (depending on the annual sales) which offer different services.37 Another two-sided advantage is the presentation of the certified online shop with its products at www.trustedshops.de. New customers benefit from the guaranteed services the online shop offers and the shops benefit from the customers´ trust in their shop. Altogether a membership at Trusted Shops is an allround No-Worry package for customers and dealers and the additional costs will surely result in higher sales as the Trusted Shops seal is the most commonly used seal of online shop certification in Europe. A complete list of the certified shops can be found at http://www.trustedshops.de/profil/.
2.2.2 TÜV-Süd (www.safer-shopping.de)
The TÜV degree of popularity of 99% in the German-speaking areas makes it for being another well-known certification agency. The criteria38 for online shop dealers are very
37 A complete list of features and services of the different memberships can be found at http://www.trustedshops.de/shopbetreiber/mitgliedschaft.html (reviewed on December, 10th 2007)
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similar to the ones of Trusted Shops. Main differences39 lay in the guaranteed compliance of the criteria. Furthermore s@fer-shopping offers additions to their general certification which are in detail
• • • •
quality management ecological management IT security- and service-management certification of specific shop sections
Illustration 5: TÜV-Süd emblem
Unlike Trusted Shops TÜV has an international acceptance and therefore professionalism is ensured. TÜV also takes great care in the secure transmission of credit card information and personal data using SSL connections and has a moneyback guarantee. The general workflow of s@fer-shopping is subdivided into four parts. During the online rating TÜV evaluates the shop pages concerning structure, navigation und customer information. The security check uses port-scans and several special tools and scripts not only on web-servers and web-applications but also on systems that are reachable online, like firewalls, routers, mail- and name-servers. The local audition verifies consistency of organisation and business processes according to s@fershopping standards. Finally the report consists of possible deviations of those standards and supports dealers to improve their shop´s efficiency (cf. [TÜV_SÜD]). There is an initial payment of about 3.500 €40 - for the first certification – covering the detailed online check, the security check and the audit in one´s company itself. After this the follow-up costs covering the yearly inspection is only 80% of the initial costs. With only two years less experience than the combatants of Trusted Shops TÜV harks back on an international awareness level and also offers an allround No-Worry package for both, customers as well as shop operators. In addition they also offer a bulk of continuing certificates based on the latest perceptions of laws and consumer protection.
38 39 40
A complete list of the criteria can be found at https://www.safer-shopping.de/kriterien.html (reviewed on December, 10th 2007) As per https://www.safer-shopping.de/pruefsiegel.html (reviewed on December, 10th 2007) The prices are taken from an e-Mail by Mr. Marc Seliger from TÜV SÜD, Vertriebsinnendienst München, from December, 18th 2007. The complete e-Mail correspondence can be found in chapter 6.1 E-Mail correspondence with Florian Labitzke/Marc Seeliger
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2.3 Ten rules of online selling
In [GORA01] Frank Sieben has worked out ten rules of successful online selling that everyone should follow. They are in detail:41 1. Create a homepage that covers a clear and well-defined message about your company and your services. 2. The structure of the shop has to be arranged clearly. 3. The buying process should be designed eventfully and fast (do not exceed three clicks to navigate to the first product). 4. Offer your complete product range with up to date prices. 5. Clearly explain shipping conditions and the different opportunities. 6. Offer different payment methods/modules. 7. Create different customer groups with different shop areas (e.g. for dealers etc.). 8. Look for niches and design them during an analysis of your customers data. 9. Offer an outstanding customer service that exceeds their expectations. 10. Try to get traffic on your site using online advertisement, banners, links, etc..
2.4 Integration
Whenever things like an ERP, a CMS or maybe a warehouse management come into play, the shop software should provide integration to these existing systems/business processes. The software should also provide an import of existing data. Maybe there already is a customer database that needs to be inherited after the invention of the software. Common exchange formats for the data can extremely simplify the transfer between the two systems as customer databases are the most important parts of an online shop and a manual transfer can never be accomplished without any errors and massive personnel costs. Orders sometimes get forwarded directly to suppliers and/or external servers for further processing or at an imminent emptiness of stocks.. An adaptable forwarding system for orders – via e-Mail, SQL-export, or even in plain text – can also simplify these processes and help reducing personnel and/or administrative costs.
41 Freely translated from Frank Sieben
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Finally shop operators wish for a centralized contact point that maybe covers management of the shop websites as well as administration of the online store in one go. There are several modules of well-established CMSs that embed the shop´s backend in the CMS´s backend. But this decentralized solution has advantages as well as disadvantages. Oftentimes the integration offers not a full functionality so that administrators have to go back to the shop´s backend to cope with all necessary tasks. On the other hand this solution offers a greater insurance against technical problems. A technical malfunction in a webshop that offers additional content management will paralyze the homepage as well as the online shop whereas separate web servers offer more security and a higher availability. Furthermore a unidimensional order processing like in Drawing 342 is not always possible. Several business processes or customer interventions may influence a strict eradication of the ordering process like in Drawing 442.
incoming order
acknowledgement
packing
shipping
notify customer
Drawing 3: unidimensional order processing
incoming order
acknowledgement
packing
shipping
merge with additional order
Notify via collective service
notify customer merge packages
customer
partner company
packing
Drawing 4: more-dimensional order processing
42
Based loosely on the slides of Ralph Bossler, E-Business Workshop (Sylphen LLC); http://www.sylphen.com/files/e-business-integration.pdf
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The cooperation of the different applications of Drawing 4 is managed by a centralized workflow logic. Enterprise Application Integration43 (EAI) and Service Oriented Architectures44 (SOA) can support the different participants in the B2B supply chain by a process oriented integration of their business processes loosely coupled from any operating systems or programming languages.
43 44
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_application_integration#Purposes_of_EAI (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture (reviewed on 2007, December 10th)
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3 Evaluation
This chapter deals with an evaluation of two very different shop systems. On the one hand it will take a look at the top dog intershop as being the market leader of online shop systems. On the other hand xt:Commerce, an open source shop software will be rated. The criteria of chapter two will be the groundwork of the evaluation. They will be processed point by point. The intershop software rating will be based on a trial account that was offered by the company for this thesis. In addition several online shops45 working with this software were tested according to the requirements of chapter two. Most importance was attached to the general shop usability (with special attention on the ordering process), its search functionalities and security. The xt:Commerce rating will be based on the experiences with the software during a project with the GGEW-net, subsidiary company of the GGEW corporation, customer of Sylphen limited liability company. The results are based on a general installation of xt:Commerce without any extensions or modifications on the sources.
3.1 Intershop
Clarity Looking at the frontends in the shops of reference during this evaluation one can say that they all are very clearly structured and easy to use. Intershop offers an exemplary software to create easy-to-use websites and this is reflected in the online stores. Unfortunately the page reproduction especially in the BMW shop is quite long. If we take a closer look on the size of the companies using Intershop´s software they expectedly offer online shops with a great clearness not only because of their brand awareness and variety of products.
45
Namely the shops of Club Bertelsmann (http://www.derclub.de) Quelle Versandhaus (http://www.quelle.de) Otto Versandhaus (www.otto.de) BMW Online Shop (https://shop.bmwgroup.com)
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A digression concerning Intershop software I would like to use this chapter now to introduce the Intershop software and its general machinery as it is quite uncomfortable when getting in touch with it for the first time. Nevertheless „Intershop helps its customers to achieve and maintain their competitive advantages[.]46“ and offers special trainings for their customers to learn about the usage of their software. Enfinity Suite 6, the completely modular intershop software offers six different so called channels as you can see in Illustration 6. „All six modules can be deployed as separate applications or combined to create customized sell-side, buy-side or portal solutions. This enables enterprises to consolidate and to centrally control all E-Commerce channels on one platform. The outstanding internationalization features of Enfinity Suite 6 make it, in addition, a solid base for implementing global E-Commerce strategies.46“
Illustration 6: Intershop: Enfinity Suite 6 technology (cf.[ENF6_Bro], p 11)
Further descriptions of the different channels can be found in [ENF6_Bro], pg. 6-7. They will not be explained in here as it would go beyond the scope of this thesis. In fact I would like to highlight a possible Intershop infrastructure combining all different channels now. Though Intershops philosophy says that Intershop is just a shop – but it is top class indeed – a general supplier integration and stock management is possible, but not among the main objectives of the company. Nevertheless they do offer solutions to completely integrate the whole enterprise resource planning from buy-side channels to sell-side channels in the B2B as well as the B2C E-Commerce. Illustration 7 shows a possible implementation based on the Enfinity Suite6 Multi Site Technology.
46
cf. [ENF6_Bro], p. 2
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Illustration 7: Possible infrastructure in Enfinity Suite 6 (cf. [ENF6_Bro], p. 5)
The software consists of a visual programming logic nearly without Java. About 75% of Enfinity´s business logic is implemented as visual programs47. Illustration 747 shows a programming example with the software. A business process is called „pipeline“ that is being processed step by step after its invocation. It consists of controlling structures (conditions and branches) and encapsulation of the business logic. In turn pipelines also can invoke other pipelines. The blue boxes represent Java classes that expect different input parameters and provide different output parameters. The rhombuses represent the branches and finally the different steps of a pipeline are symbolized by arrows.
Illustration 8: Visual programming in Enfinity Suite 6
47
(Freely translated from) [ENF6_Tech], p. 16
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Intershop comes along with a huge amount of predefined Java classes that can be used inside the business processes. Of course new classes can be added by their customers themselves and Intershop also offers extensions on their software as they surely have to required know-how. Basically the software is subdivided into three layers (Drawing 5). On the bottom one can locate the Enfinity MultiSite Technology, above comes the business logic mentioned above. And on top of the architecture the different channel applications – usually realized as web sites – are resident (cp. [ENF6_Tech], p. 10).
Content Channel Application
Consumer Channel Application
Business Channel Application
Partner Channel Application
Supplier Channel Application
Procurement Channel Application
Business components Enfinity MultiSite Technology
Drawing 5: Enfinity Suite 6 Application
So much for the general machinery of Enfinity Suite 6. In chapter 3.1.1 Working with Enfinity Suite 6 we will take a closer look into the every day work with the shop system and I am going to highlight some administrating work based on the demo accounts that were given to the Sylphen company to get in touch with the software and learn about some general workflows. All in all Intershop results in easy-tu-use online shops due to the know-how of „[...]15-year expertise in E-Commerce consulting and software development [.]48“ for major enterprises as well as medium-sized businesses. The huge complexity of the software naturally comes along with high costs on the software itself but also on employee trainings and additional Oracle49 licences. Small projects can be realized from about 50.000 Euro up to several hundreds of thousands of Euro for projects like the T-Com or Otto Online Shops. Looking at these facts, clarity seems very far away in an online shop using Intershop software but it will pay off if this first hurdle has been jumped.
48 49 cf. [ENF6_Bro], p. 9 Intershop uses Oracle databases to ensure the highest availability [ENF6_Tech], pg. 24,25,28.
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3 Evaluation
Usability All of the tested online shops offer an exemplary usability. The checkpoints as specified by Trusted Shops in chapter 2.1.4 Usability are implemented nearly 100%. So they receive top rankings in all categories. Customers discover different ways of accessing the contents by browsing through the different categories, following sales offers or making their way through recommendations connected to the products they viewed. The shops of Quelle, Otto and Der Club Bertelsmann basically lack a sitemap but it can be integrated as you can see at the online shop of BMW and Musicstore.de 50. At least in the BMW shop a sitemap is integrated and also reasonable as it does not offer such a variety of products like the online stores of Quelle.de or Otto.de. These shops are recognized for their outstanding clearness and product presentation, with modern web design techniques on the one hand, and a clear, plain and simple presentation on the other. There is no untraceable information as it seems in the tested online stores. All necessary topics are presented at prominent positions at the top or the bottom of the online store where customers expect for instance the product search or general terms and conditions as well as contact information or the company´s presentation. The shopping cart is available at any time during the visit and takes you to the checkout form with a single click. The checkout process provides all necessary functions namely the back and forth navigation with the browsers hot-keys combined with a preservation of already entered form information. As the BMW shop shows, the different checkout can be made directly accessible by clicking via a breadcrumb menu surely without a loss of form data. Even unexpected errors do not cause the loss of previously entered form information. The checkout process – regardless of being a registered user or not – can be finished every time. Additionally the software offers a navigation trail helping users not to lose orientation, keep an overview of the whereabouts and move through categories in an easy way. These navigation trails typically are located at the top of the page and offer another possibility to navigate through the shop. Unfortunately – and of course – there are some negative things that occurred during
50 http://www.musicstore.de/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/MusicStore-MusicStoreShopSite/de_DE/-/EUR/ViewSiteMap-Start;pgid=TOZgS6SfaObm0000000000000000OhZPPrzS (reviewed on 2007, January 15th)
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the shopping tour: Every main menu just seems to work properly with Javascript enabled in the visitor´s web browser. At least a general navigation through the shop is possible in the shops of Quelle, Otto and Der Club Bertelsmann51, whereas the online shop of BMW cannot be navigated unless Javascript is enabled and sometimes even crashes with some non-fitting error pages. Thus a full accessibility of the main menu should be implemented as it would make usability of the online shops more intuitive and consistent. Ordering products without enabled Javascript is possible in the Bertelsmann store only. Despite the fact, that the shopping cart preview in the head of the website does not show correct number and totals of articles, an order is at least possible. The other reference shops do not work properly when putting articles into the shopping cart or – like the Quelle store – display a notification on disabled Javascript informing the customer that enabled Javascript is necessary to use the complete features of the website. It is a pity that shopping itself – and putting products into the cart respectively – seems to be a feature of the Quelle, BMW and Otto stores while Bertelsmann shows that the software is able to output a working online shop independent from Javascript. Another disadvantage: the page reloads sometimes take a bit too long to enable visitors to have a light-hearted shopping tour. Being the top reason in Table 2: Why people leave websites (Jupiter Research 12/2005) special attention should be paid on a quick page reproduction. Nevertheless one surely can recognize that „something happens“ during the page reload while images, menus, forms and banners are loaded – sometimes it could just be a little faster. Search functionality The tested shops and thus the Intershop software respectively offer a brilliant search functionality with with all the features customers may desire. Except the BMW shop – caused by the relatively limited variety of products – all reference shops offer combinations of parametric and hierarchical searches. After searching the online shop for e.g. „trousers“ the engine displays an overview showing the number of matches found. These results can be navigated hierarchically, sorted by price, color and size, or refined with certain parameters due to a clearly structured overview of manufacturers
51 These shops offer multiple ways of navigating the store by a drop down menu in the head of the page on the one hand and additionally a menu on the left side of the website depending on the corresponding category. Thus visitors do not depend on a single java-script-based navigation.
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or any shop category – with the quantity of matching products in brackets – containing the product of interest. Even while refining the results with certain parameters a hierarchical navigation of the matching products is still available. Of course a direct search for patrons via product ID is possible in all the shops. The Quelle and Bertelsmann webshops combine the product search with modern Web2.0 features like Google suggest52 and offer a quick overview over possible products of interest while the user is typing. This enables the customers to recognize whether a product can be found in the product line or not even before finishing his proper search. A fault tolerant search is possible in all the shops but unfortunately the Otto and Bertelsmann shops are the only ones displaying results located in the shop´s additional content. A search with the keyword „AGB“ for general terms and conditions for instance just provides results of matching products or stays empty in the Quelle and BMW shops. Looking at the efforts on SEO „[...]Enfinity Suite 6 provides several options for optimizing your online shop pages for internet search engines.53“. A search for instance with Google entering the keywords „privileg waschmaschine“ resulted in top rankings of the Quelle webshop – in an advertisement with search engine friendly URL – as they have had a special offer on their frontpage on the date of searching54. The landing page of this advertisement directly leads to the Quelle section of washing machines. All in all, Intershop offers great software concerning search functionality in the shop frontend itself as well as in terms of search engine optimization and advertisement. The predefined search modules attend to their duties according to the needs and requirements of a comfortable and multi channel product search.
52 53 54
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en cf. [ENF6_Bro], p. 6 This Google search was performed on 2008, January 17th
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3 Evaluation
Security Protection against attacks with XSS and SQL injection seems to be realized in all of the online shops due to an effectual validation of form data. HTML or Javascript code respectively cannot be infiltrated by for instance the search form. One the one hand one can discover a limited number of characters that can be entered in the form and on the other characters like „ Payment Systems“ several payment systems are available and they can be installed and activated with a single click. Same applies to the shipping methods: „Modules -> Shipping Methods“ lists all available shipping methods and they can be installed and activated with a single click. Other information pages Any information page in xt:Commerce can be adapted. At the first visit the software displays an information text like:
Nice to see you again Mr. Sebastian Berg! Would you like to view our new products ? This is a basic installation of xt:Commerce. All products displayed are just for demonstrating the shop machinery. Ordered products will neither be shipped nor billed. All information concerning the different products are fictive and do not assert one´s claim to be acquired. If you´re interested to use the program being the groundwork of this shop please visit the support page of xt:Commerce. This shop is based on xt:Commerce v3.0.4. This text can be edited in the administration interface -> Content Manager - Index entry.
So administrators are guided to the Content Manager immediately where they can create the most important information pages concerning shipping and returns, privacy notice, conditions of use, and e.g. company contact. The content manager represents the small CMS mentioned above and provides a multilingual representation of each page, depending on the number of languages the online shop runs with.
67 cf. file permissions on UNIX based webservers
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4 xt:Commerce in practice
Fulfillment confirmations Confirmations via e-Mail usually are sent when an online shop receives an order. xt:Commerce automatically sends such confirmations to the customer´s e-Mail address. Dealers may want to edit the text of the e-Mail to make it sound more familiar or change the order of the different text elements. xt:Commerce basically sends eMails in plain, HTML or both formats. The look and feel of an e-Mail is not globally configured but can be adapted independently for each template that is running on xt:Commerce. The folder „/templates//mail//“ contains HTML and text templates the automatic e-Mails are created from. Those templates for instance are a mix of HTML-Code, plain text and smarty variables, to get necessary information about the order such as total price, each product´s single price and maybe a shipping address. An example text mail can be found in chapter 4.3 Fulfillment confirmation (subpart). Integrating any PHP/HTML files into the website When creating a new page in the online shop one may want to reuse an already existing one. Any PHP or HTML files can be chosen from a specific directory and will be displayed inside the content area of the website. A drop down menu containing a list of all files inside the „/media/content“ directory is available for each page created with the content manager. Thus a maximum flexibility is warranted for displaying contents and existing source code can be reused in a quick and easy way.
4.3 Customization
Fulfillment confirmation Special requirements on the fulfillment confirmation are necessary at the GGEW-net company because a copy of these confirmations is automatically sent to a so called „radius server“ for further processing. Text elements have to be in a certain order to ensure correct processing of the e-Mail. Below you can find an example text mail template.
{$address_label_customer} {if $PAYMENT_METHOD}Zahlungsmethode: {$PAYMENT_METHOD}{/if} Bestellnummer: {$oID}
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Datum: {$DATE} {if $csID}Kundennummer :{$csID}{/if} ---------------------------------------------------------------------Hallo {$NAME}, Dies ist nur ein Standardtext {$PAYMENT_INFO_TXT} {if $COMMENTS} Ihre Anmerkungen: {$COMMENTS}{/if} Ihre Bestellten Produkte zur Kontrollle ---------------------------------------------------------------------{foreach name=aussen item=order_values from=$order_data} {$order_values.PRODUCTS_QTY} x {$order_values.PRODUCTS_NAME} {$order_values.PRODUCTS_PRICE} {if $order_values.PRODUCTS_SHIPPING_TIME neq ' '}Lieferzeit: {$order_values.PRODUCTS_SHIPPING_TIME}{/if} {if $order_values.PRODUCTS_ATTRIBUTES != ' '} {$order_values.PRODUCTS_ATTRIBUTES}{/if}{/foreach} {foreach name=aussen item=order_total_values from=$order_total} {$order_total_values.TITLE}{$order_total_values.TEXT}{/foreach} {if $address_label_payment} Rechnungsadresse ---------------------------------------------------------------------{$address_label_payment}{/if} Versandadresse ---------------------------------------------------------------------{$address_label_shipping}
Presentation of products without shipping costs The GGEW-net runs WLAN hotspots in the region of Bensheim, Hessen (Germany). A lot of products therefore offer required login information called „Internet tickets“68 for those hotspots and do not need to be shipped at all. Thus for these tickets no shipping costs need to to be displayed. As aforementioned xt:Commerce features an individual presentation of (each) product(s) if desired. Different HTML templates can be assigned to the products and so a separate displaying of tickets apart from the rest of the products commonly shipped is available. The templates are stored in a folder whose files are selectable from a drop down menu in the backend´s products detail page. At the moment the login information is sent to the customers by e-Mail, but under these
68 There are different tickets for one week, one month or one year in two different access modes available.
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circumstances a use of the digital download features of xt:Commerce would surely be conceivable. When cashed a digital download page could be activated that is available e.g. for a certain amount of days.
4.3.1 Smarty (template engine)
Smarty is a template engine, that provides a simple assignment of variables that can be called at any position in HTML source code. For example on any pages user data or any other information stored in a database can be displayed. Assignment of these variables usually is being done in a global index PHP file which puts the website together. Simple or nested if conditions combined with logical expressions as well as simple loops are some of Smarty´s features69. The Smarty variables are available in the whole online shop and can also be used in fulfillment confirmations or any other eMail as we have already seen in chapter 4.3 Fulfillment confirmation . Nevertheless there can be some difficulties with Smarty concerning special files in xt:Commerce. The Smarty variables are usable in HTML files only. Most of the xt:Commerce modules use HTML files to create the source code but some70 use PHP files. Trying to insert a Smarty variable in a PHP file will result in a preprocessing by PHP istead of a preprocessing by the Smarty template engine. Considering the facts one encounters a restriction on the statement that the variables are available in file of the store. Therefore the Smarty variables can be used in any HTML page of the online shop.
4.4 Administration
I am going to report on some administrative duties now that had been necessary for a proper working of the GGEW-net online shop. In this regard it is worth mentioning that the shop – as it was implemented during this thesis – is still unproductive. Nevertheless the setup has been finished so far, required functionalities are available and have been tested on a proper operability. Caused by a revision of the GGEW´s
69 70 A Smarty introduction or documentation can be found at http://www.smarty.net/crashcourse.php or http://www.smarty.net/docs.php (reviewed 2007, December 10th) E.g. the box that creates the main navigation from categories stored in the database. This is necessary because the main navigation structure is being put together by several elements of a database query that is executed by a PHP file.
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corporate identity the shop design – as it was created by a freelance designer working for the Sylphen company for several years – doest not comply with the future look and feel of the GGEW´s CI. Another template is going to be added when the GGEW´s CI will be revised.
4.4.1 Porting legacy systems
As the old GGEW-net shop was running on OSCommerce and because of xt:Commerce being the groundwork of OSCommerce, a general import of the old product information would have been possible yet with some restrictions. The support forum offers some PHP scripts that migrate the old shop data from an OSCommerce shop into an xt:Commerce shop. Executing an export script71 via a browser creates a MySQL database dump that simply can be imported with an appropriate tool like phpMyAdmin or directly using the MySQL commands of a unix shell. In spite of everything, the scripts are said to be working for an xt:Commerce in version 3.0.3. Nevertheless the import of shop data was successful, except the old purchase orders. A complete migration could be denoted indeed but these data unfortunately are not completely visible in the corresponding section of the xt:Commerce backend. The assignment of customer and order could not be accomplished – even a manual import of the corresponding databes tables did not succeed. A support ticket was created for the xt:Commerce core team that unfortunately could not help unless using the porting service with additional costs72. Nevertheless the involved purchase orders are still retrievable by the purchase order number and so this exception could neglected for the GGEW-net employees. After the database import another update or rather a little substitution of one PHP file – concerning the different encryption methods of OSC and XTC – is necessary to ensure that customers can still log in with their old passwords.
4.4.2 Connection to Google Maps
To enable customers to find out where the GGEW-net´s so called hot spots are available, the company offers a map giving an overview of currently installed and prospective hotspots in the region of Bensheim. So it was obvious to integrate the free
71 72 The zipped archive is available at http://www.xt-commerce.com/forum/showthread.php?t=34811 (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) A screen shot of the conversation with a support member can be found in the appendices.
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maps of Google Maps73 into the websites. Due to the WYSIWYG 74 editor integrated in the mini CMS of xt:Commerce and the opportunity to edit content directly as HTML source code an integration of a Google Maps area was very easy. Creating an empty -element that contains and id-attribute is all you need to do when creating the page that is going to contain the map. By means of the id-attribute a javascript file – that for instance could be included in the head of the website – fills the -element with the deposited lines of code. Additionally a Google generated key75 is necessary to display Google´s maps on a website. This key also can be integrated in the head of the HTML document. Coordinates for the hotspots can simply be added/updated in the javascript source file. An integration of the javascript code inside the WYSIWYG editor would also be possible due to the opportunity of directly editing the website´s source code with the editor.
73 74 75
http://maps.google.de (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) What You See Is What You Get editors offer a direct formatting of web content inside an editing form of a WCMS. Changes on font sizes, colors and paragraphs are visible immediately and give editors a preview of how the content will look in the website during its creation. A free Google key can be generated at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) provided that a valid Google account to which the key can be connected to is available.
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Illustration 19: Google Maps in the GGEW-net store
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5 Summary and conclusion
5 Summary and conclusion
5.1 Perspectives
Meanwhile the so called „mobile commerce“ or M-Commerce is developing very fast. As per [TNS07], p. 270 people do more and more accept the classic internet platforms on which they can buy products and services. Mobile broadband internet connections are spreading quickly and hence a mobile online shopping with cell phones, PDAs or SmartCards will come across greater acceptance in the population. It is going to be integrated in the every-day-life, supported by an already existing acceptance of mobile devices. The online purchase of mobile music will be the biggest sector in the B2C ECommerce. The abdication of DRM76 will surely eliminate reservations of end customers and this development could also copy on the amusement industry (cp. [TNS07], p. 270). An up to date example is amazonmp3.com77. Launched in September 2007 AmazonMP3 is going to offer „[...]DRM-Free Downloads from SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT“, emanating from an amazon press release78. Other benefits of M-Commerce are experienced in an all-time-availability of the consumer´s device that keeps a connection upright or the so called „ubiquitous computing“ - a permanent mobility of the end device (cf. [Merz02], p. 381). Combined with biometric identification, mobile payment developments, and optional secure connections these devices will offer a secure authentication and payment regardless of the consumers current location.
76 77 78
Digital Rights Management http://www.amazonmp3.com (reviewed on 2008, January 22nd) http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1095117&highlight= (reviewed on 2008, January 22nd)
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5 Summary and conclusion
5.2 Final statement
This thesis was written to introduce an open source shop system like xt:Commerce and a high cost shop system based on Interhop´s Enfinity Suite 6 MulitSite Technology. On the basis of some eligibility criteria developed in chapter 2 both shop systems were rated. Finally the focus will be on a general recommendation of which online shop to use. The answer is: it depends! Due to the open sources and the resultant high adaptability of the xt:Commerce shop system one can say that it is a contemporary shop system fulfilling most of the common requirements on usability, security and clarity. The participating community around xt:Commerce helps newcomers as well as „old stagers“ with any kind of concerns. The price performance ratio of the 99,-€ support ticket is quite acceptable due to a huge archive of already solved problems and the core team dealing with support tickets and offering several services like data migration of legacy systems or scripts to reuse old customer passwords that come from os:Commerce. Thus a standalone management of an online shop can be accomplished beginning with the installation over several customizations and product management to an integration in ERP systems – a certain know-how and quite a big training period preconditioned. With xt:Commerce small and medium-sized companies will definitely find a software worth a try that brings up basic shop functionalities and some simple workflows in shop management. Modern features like digital download products, coupons and sales campaigns make it an allround software. The quick page reproductions based on an SQL-caching mechanism, the good preparation for a Trusted Shops certification and last but not least the template system will produce state of the art websites. Reasonable presets and predefined information pages help dealers to provide a legally compliant and structured online shop that – due to the multilingual features – is available all over the world. The product export to several search engines enables companies to be compared together with their competitors. Following the criteria on shop usability, clarity and service, associated with a seal of approval success just seems to depend on the customers – but they will award an online shop set up correctly and offering additional services like availability via several communication channels.
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5 Summary and conclusion
Opposing Intershop to xt:Commerce we can encounter some differences. The shop features in general are nearly the same. Just like its open source competitor Intershop offers a well-thought-out online shop system. The output sites are clearly structured, easy to use and offer a general protection from popular attacks. The distinctive features show themselves in the details. The exemplary search functions for instance contribute to a more comfortable product search – including Ajax technologies like in the Quelle and Bertelsmann shops. Furthermore one can create checkout procedures or menus free of Javascript or completely realized with Javascript. The high adaptability results in differently realizable online shop systems offering their strengths just where dealers want them to occur. Concerning backend usability and clarity it definitely receives some penalties. The system´s immense mightiness calls for a long training period for newbies before being able to work with the software. But this is being balanced by Intershop´s special employee trainings according to the company´s requirements. Integration is the keyword that makes Intershop different from its competitor. If the matter is about integrating different suppliers, partners and B2B customers altogether on a single platform with different subgroups, different catalogs for each of the groups that are build together dynamically depending on the visitor, Intershop is the software of interest. Additionally there is the high scaling rate and the high availability of online shops – even at peak loads – using the software that make Intershop the leading company of online shop software. Unfortunately the biggest disadvantage comes with the costs of an online shop realized with Intershop. Small or medium-sized companies will have to think twice about realizing a project with minimum costs of about 50.000 Euro. Nevertheless one should definitely figure out the costs for another commercial shop system partly fulfilling the requirements on e.g. an ERP or a complete system like Intershop that covers all needs and wishes. Investing in a well-thought out online shop system might pay off by great customer liabilities, reduced administrating costs and an exemplary integration of the whole value-added chain.
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5 Summary and conclusion
Illustration Index
Illustration 1: Position of Germany in an international contrast by [TNS07]........10 Illustration 2: Long Tail by [WIKI_L_T].................................................................12 Illustration 3: Spending power of German population.........................................18 Illustration 4: Trusted Shops emblem..................................................................32 Illustration 5: TÜV-Süd emblem...........................................................................34 Illustration 6: Intershop: Enfinity Suite 6 technology (cf.[ENF6_Bro], p 11)........39 Illustration 7: Possible infrastructure in Enfinity Suite 6 (cf. [ENF6_Bro], p. 5)...40 Illustration 8: Visual programming in Enfinity Suite 6..........................................40 Illustration 9: Intershop´s Storefront Editing........................................................50 Illustration 10: Intershop´s product update..........................................................51 Illustration 11: Intershop´s business channel......................................................52 Illustration 12: xt:Commerce backend areas.......................................................54 Illustration 13: GGEW-net screen shot................................................................63 Illustration 14: Step 1; permissions and language...............................................64 Illustration 15: Step 2; database and webserver settings....................................65 Illustration 16: Step 5; configure main files..........................................................66 Illustration 17: Step 6; entering admin data.........................................................67 Illustration 18: Step 7; guest and customer setup...............................................68 Illustration 19: Google Maps in the GGEW-net store..........................................75 Illustration 20: Support ticket conversation screenshot S. Berg / M. Hinsche....84
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5 Summary and conclusion
Drawing Index
Drawing 1: E-Commerce by [Merz02]...................................................................9 Drawing 2: process steps of an online shop by Merz..........................................15 Drawing 3: unidimensional order processing......................................................36 Drawing 4: more-dimensional order processing..................................................36 Drawing 5: Enfinity Suite 6 Application................................................................41
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Bibliography
[COM_MAN1] Nur so hilft die Produktsuche im Online-Shop wirklich...; www.commercemanager.de, 2006; http://www.commercemanager.de/magazin/artikel_1256_produktsuche_onli ne_shop.html (reviewed on December, 25th 2007) [CT02/08] [CT22/07] Wartmann, Tim: Risiko 2.0 - Eine Analyse der Sicherheit von Ajax; c´t 02/2008 02/2008; Puscher, Frank: Fährtenleser - Webanalyse als Marketingwerkzeug; c´t 22/2007 22/2007;
[EBAYTNS06] eBay, TNS Infratest - eBay/TNS Infratest-Studie: Sicherheit im OnlineHandel 2006, 2006; [ENF6_Bro] [ENF6_Help] [ENF6_Tech] [GORA01] [IWB08/07] [IWB14/07] [IWB19/07] [IWB87] [IX1/08] [Merz02] Intershop Communications AG: Enfinity Suite 6, 2007; http://www.intershop.com/uploads/media/Enfinity_Brochure.pdf Enfinity Suite 6 - Online Help Center; , 2007; The URL´s are subject to restrictions concerning the demo account for this thesis. () Intershop Communications AG: Enfinity Suite 6 - Technischer Überblick, 2005; PowerPoint Presentation Gora, Walther; Mann, Erika: Handbuch Electronic Commerce: Kompendium zum elektronischen Handel, Springer 2001; Huber, Dana: Shopsysteme unter der Lupe; Internet World Business 08/2007; Altmann, J.;Van der Wielen: Shoptest: Smartstore.biz; Internet World Business 14/2007; Dana Huber: Getestet: Sage GS Shop 2007; Internet World Business 19/2007; Huber, Dana: Shopsysteme unter der Lupe; Internet World Business 08/2007; Ritzdorf, Hubert Benjamin: Captchas in PHP; iX 01/2008 1/2008; Merz, Michael: E-Commerce und E-Business - Marktmodelle, Anwendungen und Technologien, dpunkt.Verlag GmbH 2002;
[PLA&ANA1] Schmeißer, Daniel Reza; Oberg, Nicole; Behrendt, Catharina: Planung und Analyse - Wie aus Nutzern Kunden werden; 1/2007; http://www.phaydon.de/content/phaydon_Wie-aus-Nutzern-Kundenwerden.pdf (reviewed on 2007, Dec. 27th) [PLA&ANA2] Schmeißer, Daniel Reza; Sauer, Hans Michael: Planung und Analyse Usability-Forschung im E-Commerce; 1/2005; http://www.phaydon.de/content/phaydon_usability.pdf (reviewed on 2007, Dec. 27th) [SEOCON05] Eye Tracking Studie zeigt Webseiten Blickfeld; seo-consulting.de, 2007; http://www.seo-consulting.de/pages/news-380.php (reviewed on 2007, Nov.
5 Summary and conclusion
1st) [TNS_CERT] Hafenbradel, Ulrich - Was kann ein Gütesiegel im Shop bewirken? Fallstudie und Umfrageergebnisse, 2007; [TNS_D21] [TNS05] [TNS06] [TNS07] [TSHOPS] Sonnek, Peter - Zentrale Erkenntnisse: Online Gütesiegel für Initiative D21 e.V. (PDF), 2005; Graumann, Dr. Sabine; Florian Neinert - Monitoring Informationswirtschaft 8. Faktenbericht 2005 - E-Commerce, 2005; Graumann, Dr. Sabine; Florian Neinert - Monitoring Informationswirtschaft 9. Faktenbericht 2006, 2006; Wolf, Malthe Dr.; Graumann, Sabine Dr. - Monitoring Informations- & Kommunikationswirtschaft - 10.Faktenbericht 2007, 2007; Trusted shops - The safe way to web shopping; trustedshops.de, 2007; http://www.trustedshops.de/shopbetreiber (reviewed on November, 14th, 2007) TÜV SÜD - s@fer-shopping; www.safer-shopping.de, 2007; http://www.safer-shopping.de (reviewed on December, 10th, 2007) Usability Monitor 2007 (PDF); Syzygy.net, 2007; http://www.syzygy.net (reviewed on November, 21st, 2007)
[TÜV_SÜD] [UM07]
[WIKI_KISS] KISS principle; wikipedia.org, 2007; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle (reviewed on November, 21st, 2007) [WIKI_L_T] The Long Tail; wikipedia.org, 2007; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail (reviewed on 2007, Oct. the 17th)
[WIKI_MAYA] MAYA-Prinzip; wikipedia.org, 2007; http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAYAPrinzip (reviewed on November, 21st, 2007) [ZÖL01] Zölzer, Henrik - Erfolgsfaktoren von Online-Shops, 2001;
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6 Appendices
6 Appendices
6.1 E-Mail correspondence with Florian Labitzke/Marc Seeliger
E-Mail from 2007, December 17th Sehr geehrter Herr Labitzke, [...] Ich würde Sie gerne noch etwas fragen. Auf Ihren Seiten ist leider keine Übersicht der monatlichen Kosten bzw. der Zertifizierungskosten zu finden. Könnten sie mir darüber vielleicht noch eine Auskunft geben bzw. mir ein paar typische Werte für einen kleinen Shop mit ca. 15 Artikeln zwischen 5,- und 500,- €, etwa 20.000 - 30.000 € Jahresumsatz nennen? Das würde mir noch fehlen um den Abschnitt zu vervollständigen. Vielen Dank für die Bearbeitung meines Anliegens, MfG, Sebastian Berg E-Mail from 2007, December 18th Sehr geehrter Herr Berg, Unser Prüfverfahren für Ihre Website beinhaltet einen ausführlichen Online-Check, einen Security-Check sowie ein Audit bei Ihnen vor Ort. Eine Zertifizierung kostet, je nach Komplexität des Angebotes ab etwa 3.500 EUR (erstmalig). Der Folgepreis für die jährliche Überwachung beträgt dann nur noch 80% der Erstzertifizierung. Gerade Online-Shops profitieren von einer Investition in ein TÜV SÜD-Siegel, da dies oftmals ein Allleinstellungsmerkmal gegenüber dem Wettbewerb darstellt. Dazu finden Sie auch einige interessante Kundenaussagen auf unserer Website unter http://www.safershopping.de/kundenaussagen.html. Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Kind regards
Marc Seeliger
TÜV SÜD Management Service GmbH Vertriebsinnendienst München (VL-MUC) Ridlerstraße 65 83
6 Appendices
80339 München Deutschland Telefon: +49/ (0) 89 - 57 91 – 4611 Telefax: +49/ (0) 89 - 57 91 – 2197 mailto:marc.seeliger@tuev-sued.de http://www.tuev-sued.de Sitz: München Amtsgericht München HRB 105439 Geschäftsführer: Prof. Dr. Peter Schaff
6.2 Screen shot of conversation between S. Berg and M. Hinsche
Illustration 20: Support ticket conversation screenshot S. Berg / M. Hinsche
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6 Appendices
6.3 Every-day work (photography)
85
6 Appendices
Vocabulary
A
a mere child´s play das reinste Kinderspiel....................................................................................................................................63 abdication of sth. Verzicht auf etw. ..............................................................................................................................................77 abundance die Fülle............................................................................................................................................................13 additional expenses der Mehraufwand............................................................................................................................................29 arbitrary beliebig..............................................................................................................................................................17 as aforementioned wie oben erwähnt.............................................................................................................................................72 ask too much of so., (to) jmdn. überfordern...........................................................................................................................................26 attend to one´s duty, (to) seiner Pflicht nachkommen.............................................................................................................................28
B brand awareness Bekanntheitsgrad einer Marke.......................................................................................................................39 business premises Geschäftsräume...............................................................................................................................................14
C cakewalk Kinderspiel.......................................................................................................................................................70 clash Streitfall............................................................................................................................................................34 come off, (to) abschneiden......................................................................................................................................................59 comply with, (to) befolgen.............................................................................................................................................................23 conceivable denkbar.............................................................................................................................................................73 conduce to sth., (to) einer Sache dienen...........................................................................................................................................30 confined to sth. beschränkt auf etw...........................................................................................................................................59
D deliberate wohl durchdacht..............................................................................................................................................56
86
6 Appendices
deviation Abweichung......................................................................................................................................................35 digression der Exkurs........................................................................................................................................................25 dissuasions Abmahnung......................................................................................................................................................34
E effectual hinreichend.......................................................................................................................................................46 emanate from, (to) hervorgehen aus...............................................................................................................................................77 enquire, (to) nachfragen........................................................................................................................................................25 eradication Abarbeitung.....................................................................................................................................................37 exempt from frei von..............................................................................................................................................................26
F fair dealing die Kulanz.........................................................................................................................................................61 fall through Ausfall...............................................................................................................................................................34
G go beyond the scope of sth., (to) den Rahmen einer Sache sprengen.................................................................................................................40
I imminent bevorstehend, drohend....................................................................................................................................36 inducement die Aufforderung..............................................................................................................................................26 inhibition threshold Hemmschwelle.................................................................................................................................................32 instantaneous unmittelbar.......................................................................................................................................................23
L leaves nothing to be desired lässt nichts zu wünschen übrig.......................................................................................................................47 legacy system Altsystem..........................................................................................................................................................74
M machinery der Aufbau..........................................................................................................................................................9 merely lediglich.............................................................................................................................................................22
87
6 Appendices
N nip sth. in the bud, (to) etw. im Keim ersticken....................................................................................................................................46
O old stager alter Hase..........................................................................................................................................................78 on the increase, (to be) zunehmen..........................................................................................................................................................23
P put so. off, (to) jmd. abschrecken.............................................................................................................................................22
R receive consideration beachtet werden...............................................................................................................................................61 recognized for sth., (to be) durch etw. bestechen........................................................................................................................................43 reimbursement Rückerstattung.................................................................................................................................................34 renounce sth., (to) auf etw. verzichten...........................................................................................................................................15 renowned renommiert.........................................................................................................................................................9 retail market Einzelhandel.....................................................................................................................................................12
S sensitize, (to) sensibilisieren...................................................................................................................................................28 spare part das Ersatzteil....................................................................................................................................................17 stroll, (to) bummeln...........................................................................................................................................................25
T the latter Letzteres............................................................................................................................................................15 tie in with sth., (to) an etw. anknüpfen............................................................................................................................................64 tightrope walk Gratwanderung................................................................................................................................................31 transmittal Einsendung.......................................................................................................................................................59
V vastly erheblich...........................................................................................................................................................21
88
6 Appendices
vintage altmodisch.........................................................................................................................................................12
89
6 Appendices
Statutory declaration
I herewith formally declare that I have written the submitted thesis independently. I did not use any outside support except for the quoted literature and other sources mentioned in the paper. I clearly marked and separately listed all of the literature and all of the other sources which I employed when producing this academic work, either literally or in content. I am aware that the violation of this regulation will lead to failure of the thesis.
....................................................
Location, date
..................................................
Student´s signature
90
Bibliography: [TÜV_SÜD] [UM07] [WIKI_KISS] KISS principle; wikipedia.org, 2007; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle (reviewed on November, 21st, 2007) [WIKI_L_T] The Long Tail; wikipedia.org, 2007; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail (reviewed on 2007, Oct [WIKI_MAYA] MAYA-Prinzip; wikipedia.org, 2007; http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAYAPrinzip (reviewed on November, 21st, 2007) [ZÖL01] Zölzer, Henrik - Erfolgsfaktoren von Online-Shops, 2001; 82
Diploma thesis for obtaining the academical degree Dipl. Informatiker (FH) in the period of September the 1st 2007 till February the 1st 2008
Analysis of Online Shop Systems
by:
Sebastian Berg Leipziger Str. 12 35463 Fernwald Steinbach
Matrikel-No.: 719948 Referee: Prof. Dr. Peter Kneisel Co-Referee: Prof. Dr. Bodo Alexander Igler
2
Table of Contents
Abstract.....................................................................................................................5 1 Introduction............................................................................................................7
1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 Motivation......................................................................................................................7 Task breakdown..............................................................................................................7 E-Commerce...................................................................................................................9 Why to use E-Commerce..............................................................................................10 Market situation............................................................................................................12 Advantages of online shops..........................................................................................13 Architectures.................................................................................................................15 Catalogs........................................................................................................................15
2 Eligibility criteria.................................................................................................17
2.1 Requirements................................................................................................................17 2.1.1 Setting/adapting objectives.................................................................................17 2.1.2 Accurate choice of the platform..........................................................................19 2.1.3 Clarity.................................................................................................................19 2.1.4 Usability..............................................................................................................21 2.1.5 Search functionality............................................................................................23 2.1.6 Security...............................................................................................................25 2.1.7 Service................................................................................................................28 2.1.8 Customizing........................................................................................................29 2.1.9 Conclusion..........................................................................................................30 2.2 Certification..................................................................................................................31 2.2.1 Trusted Shops......................................................................................................32 2.2.2 TÜV-Süd (www.safer-shopping.de) ...................................................................33 2.3 Ten rules of online selling............................................................................................35 2.4 Integration....................................................................................................................35
3 Evaluation.............................................................................................................38
3.1 Intershop.......................................................................................................................38 3.1.1 Working with Enfinity Suite 6............................................................................49 3.1.2 Conclusion..........................................................................................................53 3.2 xt:Commerce................................................................................................................53 3.2.1 Conclusion..........................................................................................................62
4 xt:Commerce in practice......................................................................................63
4.1 Installation....................................................................................................................63 4.2 Configuration................................................................................................................66 4.2.1 Other important preferences...............................................................................69 4.3 Customization...............................................................................................................70 4.3.1 Smarty (template engine)....................................................................................72 3
4.4 Administration..............................................................................................................72 4.4.1 Porting legacy systems........................................................................................73 4.4.2 Connection to Google Maps...............................................................................73
5 Summary and conclusion.....................................................................................76
5.1 Perspectives..................................................................................................................76 5.2 Final statement.............................................................................................................77
Illustration Index....................................................................................................79 Drawing Index........................................................................................................80 Bibliography...........................................................................................................81 6 Appendices............................................................................................................83
6.1 E-Mail correspondence with Florian Labitzke/Marc Seeliger.....................................83 6.2 Screen shot of conversation between S. Berg and M. Hinsche....................................84 6.3 Every-day work (photography)....................................................................................85
Vocabulary..............................................................................................................86 Statutory declaration.............................................................................................90
4
Abstract
Meanwhile customers have got used to online shopping. They expect a company to offer their complete product line online as well as offline. Thus E-Commerce is a must-have for companies that want to increase sales and develop new markets – maybe all over the world. This thesis faces two extremely different online shop systems – one open source and one high cost software. Basically both systems bring up the required shop functionalities. Usability, clarity, security as well as a general adaptability and structured presentation of information in the front end and in the backend qualify both systems to be deployed in every-day online shopping. The most important thing to pay attention to while figuring out pros and cons of the systems will be the companies requirements. Setting up a small online shop from scratch, renewing an existing internet appearance or integrating established business processes from suppliers to partners and B2B customers – all these ways of using online shop software are possible, depending on the readiness to invest in high costs for the software and employee trainings on the one hand or deductions on functionality combined with a lot of active work and – at the first sight – comparatively low costs on the other.
5
6
1 Introduction
1 Introduction
1.1 Motivation
I chose „Analysis of Online Shop Systems“ as the subject of my diploma thesis because they offer a great chance to gain profit for a company. With a little work on setting up and customizing you can offer an attractive and easy online shop. No matter if you are a „global player“ like Amazon or if you store your products in your garage at home, you can spread them all over the world. If you take time to think about what you want to offer and how you want to offer it, you can respond to your customer´s individual needs and wishes. I think it has become important for every company to offer their products on the world wide web because meanwhile people have got used to online shops. They expect a company to offer their products on the internet and want to benefit from the advantages of ordering their goods at home. Finally a word on language: This thesis is written in English in order to make it available for a bigger audience and, of course, to improve language skills. So the greater efforts that had to be undergone during the creation are certainly worth the endless lookups in online dictionaries and language discussing boards. Last but not least I would like to thank Mr. Reiner Burger for reading this thesis besides his everyday work and helping to make it sound proper and adequate to a scientific work.
1.2 Task breakdown
This thesis is about common online shop software, its features, „must-haves“ and usability. In the last decade more and more online shops have been occurred. Meanwhile some of them are already out of use whereas others have made their mark in every day online shopping. There are commercial as well as free (open source) online shops available. With this thesis I would like to
•
introduce E-Commerce and give an overview over the current market situation of online shops, create some eligibility criteria for online shops, 7
•
1 Introduction
• •
evaluate two popular online shop systems with these criteria and report on setting up and administrating the online shop for one customer of the Sylphen company.
Chapter one is going to give the overview mentioned above. After some general definitions and a short introduction on electronic Commerce (1.3 E-Commerce) I will give a short overview over the current market situation of well established online shop systems (commercial and open source). Furthermore I will introduce the advantages of online shops in chapter 1.6, their architecture and machinery. In chapter two I´m trying to create eligibility criteria for online shops. Usability, security and integration are taking center stage in this section. Besides I am going to report on renowned certification agencies and their basic requirements on online shops as well as integrating the software into existing business processes. Chapter three deals with the evaluation of two shop systems based on the developed criteria. It tries to point out which system should be used under certain circumstances. Finally the practical part of this thesis is handled in chapter four: It uses chapters two and three as a groundwork and displays the steps of choosing, setting up and „pre-administrating“ an online shop for the GGEW-net, a customer of the Sylphen limited liability company. Problems and highlights during any of the necessary steps handling an online shop system (installation, configuration, customization and administration) will be pointed out in this chapter. This thesis only reports on „out-of-the-box“ online shops which one can manage completely on his1 own. In my opinion such systems offer multiple advantages on customizing, administrating and designing one´s shop in opposite to completely designed and configured hosted online shops. I will try to balance reasons for using a high cost commercial shop system on the one hand and for using an open source shop system on the other. Both systems surely offer pros and cons and this thesis will give an overview and help choosing an adequate shop system for ones needs.
1
I chose to use the masculine form in this thesis whenever I write in 3 rd person. There are no discriminating intentions on the female gender but rather priority is given to the simplicity of writing this thesis.
8
1 Introduction
1.3 E-Commerce
The following drawing shows the different sectors of E-Commerce, as Merz describes them (cf. [Merz02], p. 24). He defines E-Commerce as „assistance of trading activities via communication networks“. B2C
business B2B
B2 A/ A2 B
consumer C2C
A2 C
administration
Drawing 1: E-Commerce by [Merz02]
My thesis deals with one specific section of E-Commerce – the eB2C2 sector. This means that I would like to highlight legal E-Commerce via the internet using software especially designed for online trading. The typical way of buying goods offline (and eB2C respectively) brings up four different steps which have to be passed through before a product or good is bought: 1. Negotiation You cannot exactly call this step negotiation, because you do not really negotiate. In fact you are just gathering information during this step via descriptions or images of articles or by reading online discussion forums about it. But the word negotiation in some way mirrors what you do before you buy an article in „offline“ transactions. 2. Conclusion of the contract In this step you typically accept the offerer´s general terms and conditions before you send him your order- and payment information by clicking the „order“-button in the online shop. After this the offerer gives his confirmation of your order and informs you about the payment.
2
eB2C = electronic business to consumer. Of course there are more sections, namely business to business, consumer to consumer (e.g. eBay), administration to business, business to administration and administration to consumer.
9
1 Introduction
3. Transaction During the transaction you usually pay your goods and the offerer ships them when he receives the payment.3 At this point the contract is made because both parties have agreed to it. The customer agrees by making the payment under the general terms and conditions, the offerer by shipping the goods. 4. After sales management A company has to take care about its customer relationships after a complete transaction in case of reclamations or retours. Maybe the customer receives newsletters about new products, product updates or products related to his last order. A good customer relationships management (CRM) is necessary in any kind of shops (online or offline).
1.4 Why to use E-Commerce
As per [TNS06], with 32 billion Euro Germany „[...]is the biggest online retail market in Europe[.]“ and as per EITO4 the expected sales until 2008 are about 90 billion Euro and 50% of the German internet users buy products via the internet. So Germany has got the second place in Europe. Thus the importance of the internet as a distribution channel has gone up. Looking at the E-Commerce users in Germany Illustration 1 shows, that germany is far above the average of E-Commerce users concerning the country of reference.
Illustration 1: Position of Germany in an international contrast by [TNS07]
3 4
There are different payment procedures like PayPal, credit cards, invoice, electronic cash, etc. European Information Technology Observatory
10
1 Introduction
Meanwhile customers simply expect to go shopping in an online store. The typical ways of offline and online shopping are being merged more and more and the trends are going to „multi-channel-shopping“. Very often information about the product is drawn offline e.g. in a book store, followed by a price comparison in the different online stores available. Finally the book is bought at an adequate (online) store with best conditions.5 So the customers appreciate to be able to go shopping in an online store additionally to the classic offline shopping. Looking at generation 50+ (called „Silver Surfers“) as in [UM07] you can notice a behaviour just the other way round. Customers of online travelling stores often abort the booking if any unexpected mistakes or inconsistencies during the checkout process occur. It is also important to mention that the cheapest online store does not imply to be the best. Again the Silver Surfers have to be considered because they usually have sufficient funds and are not impressed by slogans like „Geiz ist geil “ or „Es geht immer billiger [..]“. Customers also take great care in choosing an online store and especially whom they offer their personal data. So the company has got to be reliable and offer e.g. secure connections (https://...) for submitting credit card information and other sensitive personal data. Considering the facts we can say that E-Commerce is a need nowadays but does not always result in success. Online shops enable companies to develop foreign markets and if they are set up properly they are a powerful utility to gain profit. In [WIKI_L_T] Chris Anderson argues „[...]that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.“
5
This is not about ripping off the vintage retail markets but rather about sorting out ones best conditions. According to this, customers can also use the different online stores for collecting their information and finally buy their products in retail markets (cf. [TNS05], p. 339).
11
1 Introduction
Illustration 2: Long Tail by [WIKI_L_T]
This means, that there is few demand for niche products in restricted areas. The internet is free6 of restrictions so you can reach quite a lot of people all over the world and sell these niche products to everyone who demands them. Furthermore you can evaluate your customer´s preferences and adapt your choice of products, track users, send newsletters and check if they result in orders and a lot more. The internet offers great chances to publish information about a company very easily and quickly and enables customers to have an interactive contact which will hopefully end up in good customer relationships.
1.5 Market situation
There is an abundance of online shop systems available. They are going from open source products up to hundreds of thousands of Euro. Depending on the needs and features one has to choose a suitable system. Table 1 shows a small overview of wellestablished shop systems and their prices.
6
International ex-/import conditions, shipping costs or common laws may of course not be disregarded.
12
1 Introduction
OS Commerce xt:Commerce
* *
Solid webshop for small stores 98,-€ optional support; easy template system Poor in proportion to the price Solid webshop; a little out of date State of the extensions art webshop; modular
Open source Open source < 100,- € ≥ 830,- € ≥ 950,- € ≥ 1.070,- € ≥ 2.380,- € 240,- to 1.500,- € 500,- to 1.000,- € ≥ 420,- €
7
1&1 Webshop
Omeco Webshop* Oxid Eshop PE* Aconon Smartstore.biz* Mondo Shop* Sage GS Shop Intershop
*
Professional webshop for high requirements Exemplary search engine; good usability Client-server architecture; Top dog of shop systems (Otto, T-Com,...)
Epages 5 Merchant* Great administration, easy customizing
> 50.000,- €
Table 1: Overview shop systems (Data from [IWB08/07],[IWB14/07] and [IWB19/07])
All shop systems – except Intershop because8 of being the top-dog – have poor ways to manage additional content caused by the intention of most manufacturers to offer „stand alone“ online stores. They concentrate on shop features instead of wasting time to implement a complete (W)CMS9. There are more or less suitable implementations of simple (W)CMS in the different shops performing their tasks acceptably. Further information about an integration in a WCMS will be given in chapter 2.4 Integration.
1.6 Advantages of online shops
You could say, when using E-Commerce there are several advantages in offering your products in an online shop. The first ones which may come to one´s mind could be a worldwide availability of your store. Other ones could be e.g. the lack of
• • •
business premises (including their hires), employees and stocks.
The shop software is already prepared best for a certification by Trusted Shops. (see chapter 2.2 Certification) Intershop ensures high availability and high performance e.g. in the OTTO webshop that denotes 100 orders per second at peak loads. Intershop clearly says: „We do not want to offer a CMS, but if our customers wish to manage additional content in their shop, we offer them different solutions for the integration.“ That is just because they have to do this to achieve (or increase) customer satisfaction. (Web) Content Management System
* 7 8 9
13
1 Introduction
But if we look a little closer into the details we encounter that the things you cannot renounce are the ones just mentioned above. In fact you do need stocks, employees and mostly even business premises. Passing through your products from your suppliers directly to the customers is nearly impossible. In addition to that you cannot disregard a huge amount of employees that manage e.g. orders, newsletters, after sales, shipping returns or a hotline. A lot of companies already have business premises in which they have distributed their products before starting an online shop. And last but not least you have to be aware of the fact that your online shop is not available for everyone in the world. A worldwide selling of your products comes along with different taxes, shipping costs, different export/import conditions and fees and a multilingual appearance of your shop. Nevertheless online shops offer a great opportunity of distributing any kind of hard and soft-goods10. One offers a direct comparability with opponents, the shop is available „twenty-four-seven“ and dealers can „quick-response“ on their customers needs and wishes. Furthermore one can inform customers about new products, updates, releases and special offers using an integrated newsletter system of the shop. Statistics will inform about top sellers and flops and logged search queries (created by e.g. a web analysis tool) can be hints on the customer´s preferences. ECONDA Shop Monitor11 for instance is a monitoring tool that already comes along with xt:Commerce 3.0.4 SP2 in a fourteen day trial version. But the so called „web analysis“ basically aims on the understanding of customers´ movements through a website12. An aborted checkout process could be caused by simply gathering shipping information or by a mistrust against the shop because of an insecure connection during the checkout process. The latter is hard to find out and becomes obvious not until this behaviour is discovered at multiple customers (cf. [CT22/07]). Besides all those advantages the invention of a shop system comes along with several costs. Maybe one has to employ additional staff to manage the more comprehensive work or spend some funds to educate them.
10 11 12
Hard-goods are every kind of products you can touch. Soft-goods are products like software, musicdownloads, programs or even holiday trips. http://www.econda.de (reviewed on 2007, December 31st) More precisely it is about collecting movement data and aggregating these data to certain user groups (and not a single user) that behave in a certain way.
14
1 Introduction
1.7 Architectures
Specializing in eB2C Merz gives following model of processing steps in an online shop: login navigate in catalog product page add to cart view cart
Drawing 2: process steps of an online shop by Merz
ordering info payment info
ordering
download delivery
conditions of use
tracking & tracing
Online shops usually consist of a collection of scripts, templates and server components and their data are stored in a relational database management system (RDBMS). The middleware displays the database contents on HTML pages. The different shop systems differ in the script languages partly standardized partly proprietary. Intershop for instance uses Hybrid-HTML whereas xt:Commerce uses PHP. But in most cases the script language is embedded in the websites beside the HTML tags. Proprietary variables, access control functions or scripts and „servlets“ can be defined as part of the HTML-document. Intershop calls it Template Language Extension variables (TLE), the equivalent in xt:Commerce uses the „Smarty“ template engine. These variables for instance can contain the current date, user name or the number of products in the shopping cart (cf [Merz02], p. 410 – 411).
1.8 Catalogs
Catalogs are usually ordered by categories and offer shop operators some tools to define the structure, product information pages or the graphical layout. Because of the free definition of the different layers which are
• • •
presentation (layout), data modelling ( structure of catalog and product attributes) and contents (product information), 15
1 Introduction
catalog pages are extremely dynamic web contents. Regarding their graphical presentation and their administrating interface they are structured strongly. Differentiation between products and attributes is very important. A product consists of attributes as well as other information like illustrations, texts or sales. The components themselves can be organised as well: Product attributes consist of an attribute type and possibly an amount of predefined values. Products can be categorised and finally they are assigned to certain types providing information about the attribut types assigned to a product. Such a kind of catalog is highly reusable. On the one hand you can adapt it for books and on the other hand for spare parts. No matter which meta model you implement, the product is taking center stage in it. It can be assigned to a category which can be structured hierarchically itself for creating subcategories of user-defined depth. Finally the product is an instance of its type. The types consist of any information that apply to each product of that specific type. Especially the defined attributes are specified by their relation to the attribute types. Thus a product type usually consists of several attribute types. Products can be combined with an arbitrary number of attributes. Hence an attribute can be defined independently to reuse it in itemizing several products(cf [Merz02], p. 414).
16
2 Eligibility criteria
2 Eligibility criteria
„It’s not just shoes that need to be comfortable – a company’s website must have the same kind of feelgood factor. If customers don’t find what they are looking for right away, they soon go elsewhere.“
Michael Kraus, Deichmann, Manager E-Commerce, 2006
2.1 Requirements
This chapter is going to light up the most important requirements on effective online shops. As we have already considered in chapter 1 Introduction not every online shop is as lucrative as the other. Not only the technical requirements need to attract one´s interest but also the ones that lead to good customer relations/- satisfactions. Some of the points below – namely clarity, usability and service – could be understood as requirements on the online shop itself and not on its software. In fact the software is meant to support administrators in achieving the requirements. The following criteria shall be understood to be realizable with the deployed shop system. The rest of the criteria – choice of the platform, search functionality, security and customizing – definitely are directly connected to the software itself and should be basic features. And most important: you have to specify the objectives and choose an accurate platform for your store so I would like to go for this section now.
2.1.1 Setting/adapting objectives
In the beginning objectives should be set very clearly. Setting up an online shop without knowing who you want to serve or what you want to offer will not lead to success. If you are developing new businesses you should try to put yourself in the customers position and ask yourself: What would I be searching for? If you have already got an amount of customers you may want to increase the customers satisfaction. If you have got business premises you may want to reduce your hires by downsizing your sales floors without losing your „offline customers“, because your sales floors could be used to exhibit e.g. your top sellers or attract attention for the bigger offerings in your online shop. You have to be aware of your target groups. Business partners, end customers, dealers suppliers or B2B customers have different requirements on the E-Commerce solution.
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2 Eligibility criteria
These could for instance be:
• • • • •
desired contents and applications usage patterns/frequency habits in buying or ordering behaviour acceptance of payment methods and modalities requirements on technical interfaces
Even here new customers should be included in all considerations, concerning an online shop´s worldwide availability. In fact: You have to adapt your shop depending on your objectives (cf. Sieben, Frank in [GORA01], p. 424). Besides this you can take advantage of the „AIDA“-principle. AIDA stands for „[...]a common list of events that are very often undergone when a person is selling a product or service.“13. The letters stand for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action and describe the four events a customer passes through when buying a product. At first you have to attract the customers attention which is indeed the most difficult point looking at the huge number of online websites and stores available all over the world. „[...][B]y demonstrating features, advantages, and benefits[.]“ his interest is being raised and after his desire is aroused he finally buys the product (action). Again the Silver Surfers offer a great potential of gaining profit as they posses 46% of the complete spending power of the Germans (Illustration 2). So this class of population has to be included when setting or adapting shop objectives.
22% 46% 32%
50 y ears + 15 - 39 y ears 40 - 49 y ears
Illustration 3: Spending power of German population
13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA (reviewed on 2007, December 10th)
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2 Eligibility criteria
2.1.2 Accurate choice of the platform
An accurate choice of the platform is inevitable before setting up the shop. Different platforms offer different work flows independent of the level of prices. For example the low-cost version14 of 1&1 online shop offers at most ten categories with at most one hundred products. Adaption of functionality and design are kept at a minimum. Whereas xt:Commerce comes along with unlimited numbers of categories and products as well as a template system for adjusting the look and feel of an online shop. This can be of use if an online shop has to be adapted to existing websites. Different payment modules and a simple CMS for additional pages in the shop make it for being an allround shop system. Several other reasons for choosing xt:Commerce as the adequate shop system for the GGEWnet will be described in chapter 3.2 xt:Commerce. Altogether the adequate shop system has to be chosen very carefully. Questions of content management, product categories, discounts, groups, secure connections as well as costs for support by the manufacturer or certifications have to be discussed carefully. Depending on the number of visitors you have to ensure not to outrun traffic restrictions of your provider or to overload database performance.
2.1.3 Clarity
Clarity begins with the frontpage of an online shop. Customers should be able to identify the structure of the websites immediately. They should be enabled to navigate through the different sections of a store by a clearly structured menu and find relevant information about products with a modicum of effort. Important information about the company, shipping costs, general terms and conditions and privacy should be directly accessible from any page of the shop. Furthermore one can adapt so called „eye tracking“15 studies to place relevant information on the websites. People will not go shopping in an online store they do not trust in - and a lack of this information often causes such a mistrust. Altogether it is most important to keep visitors on the websites because current studies show, that a lack of clarity is an important reason for customers to leave the website. Table 2 shows other reasons why customers leave websites during their visit.
14 15 The low cost version of 1&1 online shop costs 14,99 € a month. Only the 70,-€-option offers oftentimes inevitable features like product options, product references, sales discounts or customer groups. Eye tracking of Google search results by [SEOCON05]
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2 Eligibility criteria
84 % 68 % 31 % 23 %
damaged links or slow page reproduction bad usability and untraceable information untraceable company information limited search functions
Table 2: Why people leave websites (Jupiter Research 12/2005)
Web accessibility16 is closely related to clarity. If you enable any disabled people – no matter if physically or technically – you can conquer several markets. Fulfilling requirements of e.g. the „WCAG“-guidelines17 usually results in a highly increased clarity of your online shop and certainly will not lead to a loss of functionality or information. The guidelines also suggest to pay attention on an easy understanding of your content, because the customers have different know-how18 and experiences in using online shops. Different ways of developing content, e.g. a sitemap giving an overview over huge categories and products or simple expressions can help people to navigate through and understand the pages. An easy handling of the cartridge and a fast and structured checkout process will support customers during their shopping trip. In [UM07] none of the test persons were able to book a trip in the TUI online booking store which was among other things caused by an extremely high page reproduction time and mirrors the top result of Table 2. The reload of the result page took up to five minutes oftentimes followed by an error message or a note that no matching results could be found. Most of the test persons were visibly annoyed about the reproduction time as they anyway do not exercise patience during the different booking steps. So the handling of errors and the solving of problems vastly depends on the user´s age. Huge online shops usually offer very numerous products. An easy product search with fault-tolerant result pages and filters for these results are inevitable to ensure clarity of the store. Nevertheless one should have an eye on two other principles called „MAYA“ and „KISS“. Maya stands for „Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable“ and describes how one should design a new product. It has to be decided, if customers shall be confronted with a completely new product or with a well-known one they might already be used
16 17 18 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) Many users do not even have a mental representation of the structure of websites when they first visit an online shop.
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2 Eligibility criteria
to. This thesis can be copied on the usability of online shops used as an agreement between state of the art web programming and a merely functional website. „Be as innovative as possible without putting people off.“ (cp. [WIKI_MAYA]) Along with Maya comes Kiss, standing for „Keep It Simple and Stupid“. Kiss19 means to solve a problem as simple and easy to understand as possible in order to maintain simplicity. „[...]KISS is also one of the principles of system architecture.“ (cf. [WIKI_KISS])
2.1.4 Usability
A successful online shop needs an easy handling. As we have already considered, customers have different aims and know-how. This is why a shop construction should enable every user to navigate through the shop intuitively - independent from his know-how or the entry page. At [TSHOPS] Trusted Shops offers a usability check for online shops, subdivided into 5 parts:
•
frontpage Placing the search form prominently in the upper position of the frontpage as well as displaying a maximum of 7/10 links/categories will achieve best results in this section. product page Presenting product details (price, shipping costs, delivery status, ratings and comparisons with other products) with additional information and pictures will achieve best results here. search functionality This point has a very big importance in online shops and you will find a detailed elaboration on search functionality in chapter 2.1.5 Search functionality cart, ordering process and checkout An available cart at any time with a clearly structured and adaptable overview, e.g. „sorting by price/name/shipping time and an easy and secure (SSL) ordering and checkout process will achieve best results here.
•
•
•
19
Other acronyms for KISS: "Keep It Sweet & Simple", "Keep It Short & Simple", "Keep it Simple, Sweetheart", "Keep it Simple, Sherlock"
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•
miscellaneous Nearly all design requirements and specifications of modern web design affect the usability of online shops. Using acceptable contrasts of backgrounds and text, foregoing images as menu links, the strict separation of content and design and providing full functionality in the most commonly used web browsers (just to mention a few) will surely increase usability to a great extent.
Depending on the answers you give, usability of your online shop is being rated and you receive points for every answer. The more points you have received in the end the better your shop usability is. I would like to pick up the frontpage again as it is the main entry page of an online shop. The first seconds of contact are the most important and so the frontpage not only has to attract the user´s interest instantaneously but also has to enable him to get a quick orientation. The harder an orientation on the frontpage is the earlier customers abort their visit at this early point of time. Thus a pleasing design and clearly structured product listings are highly recommended because online shoppers feel like offline shoppers: The more they are pleased by the products displayed, the sooner they are willing to enter the shop. Shop windows that are trimmed boring or confused will frighten off the visitors. But even more importance is given to a quick location of navigation and the whereabouts. The relevant elements like navigation, search and login should be placed prominent as the customers are intended to spend most of the time with shopping and dealing with the products respectively (cf. [PLA&ANA2], p. 2/3). The booking form also is a central point of shop usability. It should be integrated in the ordering process seamlessly and keep functionality of the „navigate back“ button of the browser, which is most commonly used – not only by the Silver Surfers. A loss of form data by clicking on the back button of the browser can cause frustration and lead to aborting the order. Meanwhile the use of mobile devices like cellphones or PDAs for surfing the web and, according to this, online shopping is on the increase. Again complying with HTML and
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CSS guidelines as they are invented by the W3C20 will result in a high accessibility of the websites. They ensure a website to be completely accessible no matter what displaying device is used. Complying with these guidelines requires the output HTML code to be adaptable or on the other hand a software that creates clean (X)HTML and CSS.
2.1.5 Search functionality
One of the most important functions in an online shop is the product search but it is neglected by the majority of shop operators and manufacturers. Basic installations of online shop systems come along with simple PHP-based searches and none of the systems mentioned in chapter 1.5 Market situation offer an adequate fault-tolerant product search. Fault tolerant searches can avoid search and navigation problems. It leads to correct results regardless of typing or spelling mistakes. Furthermore many of the shop operators are afraid of investing in a detailed parametric search (see below). They are satisfied with a simple search not knowing about the sales damages resulting. On the other hand most of the systems offer an additional product search for extra charges between two hundred and four hundred Euro (cf. Dana Huber in [IWB87], p. 28). Not only the product pages should be integrated in the search. More and more people use the search form to find information on general terms and conditions or terms of delivery. So the search results should not only concentrate on products (cf. [COM_MAN1]). Additional CMS can blow up a webshop very fast and there is no doubt that two different search forms will not come across great acceptance of the customers. As Merz describes, there are basically two ways of searching an online catalog. On the one hand one can offer heterogeneous products which are structured very differently. On the other hand one can deal with products that have similar characteristics usually listed in associated categories. The first way is called „hierarchical search“. You navigate to the categorie of interest or you search products by means of their attributes. The second way is called „parametric search“. You could specify product characteristics step by step and see what products are available fulfilling the given
20 World Wide Web Consortium
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2 Eligibility criteria
restrictions. High performance and efficiency while navigating an online shop are very critical factors of success (cf. [Merz02], p. 414, 419). Thus shop operators should take great care in displaying search results. Customers should receive a clearly structured result list which they can modify/filter21 by the product´s name, price or certain attributes. Displaying the best sellers on top of the search results instead of showing the results in fixed ordering - or even an unsorted list - will surely increase sales figures. Furthermore shop operators should offer a faulttolerant search like „Did you mean: ...“ that displays results even if there are typing or spelling errors in the query. There is hardly anything more frustrating than enormous or even wrong search results not to talk of search results completely out of the context of one´s search criteria. More and more shop operators analyze their customers´ shopping behaviour because search log files will give hints on the users preferences. So they can gain a detailed overview over highly enquired products, lacks in the product line or up to date trends (cf. [COM_MAN1]). Now these criteria aim at those users who exactly know what they want. Actual studies show that the concrete buying intention is being displaced by a kind of virtual strolling around in the internet. The surfers are led by sales offers but on the other hand can definitely go over to a purposeful search. So dealers should definitely organize their frontpage in a way that they appeal to those „strollers“ and catch their attention. In the following I would like to sketch some general SEO22 and landing pages in a short overview. This is a little off-topic but seems to fit in here best.
A little digression concerning SEO and landing pages Search functionality does not only mean an internal search inside the shop websites but also catching those strolling users which may come from external search engines like Google and Co. Potential customers normally do not know of an existing online shop and so they use search engines to discover interesting products. Thus a general optimization for search engines should be performed in regular intervals. An adequate
21 22 The refining of search result is called after search navigation Search Engine Optimization
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keyword density should be applied to all pages and the website should be structured very clearly concerning the used markup, CSS and tagging requirements. Reasonable category names should be chosen and the navigation through categories should best be realized as plain text – even image maps, Java/JavaScript or Flash should be abandoned in case of an optimal preparation for search engines23. Other very important objects are the landing pages. Landing pages are those pages 24, a user „lands“ on after clicking for instance an advertising banner. On the landing page an emotive design and a quick orientation are the most important things to pay attention to. It has to be designed for common web surfers to become customers of the online shop and best promote a single product – not a whole category full of products, because it wants the user to make a quick decision to buy. Besides several information on online advertising and user tracing in [PLA&ANA1]p. 7, one can find seven recommendations25 on landing pages: 1. Integrating the landing page in the website 2. Optically harmonizing with banner 3. Name advantages of the product 4. Focus on a single or just a few products 5. Several views of the product combined with a rational inducement to buy 6. Highlight relevant navigation opportunities and do not ask too much of the users 7. Achieve confidence by transparency and credibility before asking the user to act (buy the product)
2.1.6 Security
A successful online shop has to be exempt from technical points of attack. Again Trusted Shops offers a security check26 subdivided into five parts for free:
•
registration form (secure passwords) Even little password restrictions, e.g. a minimum number of eight characters containing upper and lower case letters and special characters can provide the
23 24 25 26
Based loosely on the slides of Ralf Brinkman, Ebuisness Workshop (Sylphen LLC.); http://www.sylphen.com/files/e-business-suchmaschinenoptimierung.pdf Landing pages for instance can be micro sites, flash-animations or other campaign sites More detailed information on the recommendations can be found in [PLA&ANA1] pg. 4-6 http://www.trustedshops.de/shopbetreiber/security-check.html (reviewed on 2008, January 12th)
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danger of insecure user accounts. Though 50% of the users use passwords that do justice to quite high security issues unfortunately nearly 30% of the responded users in [EBAYTNS06] use insecure passwords.
•
login form (brute force) Possible brute force attacks also known as trial-and-error attacks can cause the illegal use of accounts. The software should lock the user´s account and/or the attacker´s IP adress after a certain number of failed login attempts. search function (cross site scripting) Cross site scripting (XSS27) is one of the most popular attacks on websites. By infiltrating dangerous lines of code via the search form the shop and even the users are in danger because account data can be read out. A possible XSS attack could for instance look like this:
01: 02: 03: 04: 05: 06: ';alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83)) //\ ';alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83)) //";alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83)) //\";alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83)) //--"> '> alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83))
•
Thus the shop should display a message about illegal characters that have been used in the search query instead of opening a pop up window with the letters „XSS“. Regular expressions that block illegal characters in search queries can help to defend against XSS attacks.
•
ordering form (SQL-Injection) Without validating text boxes or areas attackers can infiltrate arbitrary lines of code, manipulate prices, and alter database tables or execute dangerous database queries. When entering the product quantity the software should only accept numbers instead of a string like „ '-- “ and display an error message while you cannot follow the executed query. Software (version) You should always have the latest stable software release of your shop installed. Professional shop manufacturers update their software regularly or release patches and bug fixes for known security lacks.
•
27
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSS (reviewed on 2007, December 10th)
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Depending on the answers you give, security of your online shop is being rated and you receive points for every answer. The more points you have received in the end the better your shop security is. This check is just an orientation but does already provide a first overview on the security of an online shop. Meanwhile customers know better about the different safety mechanisms as they have kept busy with using E-Commerce and online shopping. As matter of principle the users have to be cleared up within the topics of security. 56% of the respondents as per [EBAYTNS06] wish to gain securityrelevant information in a short, clearly structured and detailed way. So this clearing up is another tightrope walk between the necessary depth of information and a well arranged overview. Users are afraid of an insecure storage or transmission of their data – especially with credit card and account information. In this connection it is a main objective to alert the users to the huge amount of existing safety mechanisms. But still shop operators also have to attend to their duty to contribute to a secure online shopping and effective operation of safety mechanisms – even before low prices – while choosing an online shop system. An online shop basically should offer secure connections via https28 protocol – strictly speaking: „[...]the combination of a normal HTTP interaction over an encrypted Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) connection.“28 Alternatively shop operators can offer other transmissions of personal data via telephone, fax or letter to increase the customer´s trust into the shop. Thus the treatment of stored personal data should be laid open. The handling of personal data should be transparent and if so, customers will award this transparency with a greater confidence. Furthermore no more than the necessary data may be stored according to the German laws of data protection. But not only customers are sensitized for security issues. An increasing number of junk registrations and junk orders respectively are the main problems for shop operators. Meanwhile double-opt-in29 mechanisms have been established before a registration for a newsletter subscription. Whereas effective protection mechanisms against junk
28 29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Https (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) Double-opt-in sends a confirmation message to the corresponding e-Mail address. The owner of an address can approve his identity by clicking a confirmation link or be protected against an abuse of his e-Mail address by ignoring the message.
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registrations are a little harder to implement. Automated junk registrations can be avoided by using so called captchas – Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart . They are small PHP scripts that create a blurred view of a certain number of random letters and numbers as a small image. The user has to enter them because he is still able to identify them whereas a computer cannot. Before proceeding with a registration, the system compares the entered combination with the one created and aborts the process if they do not match. A short introduction and a programming example can be found in [IX1/08]. Captchas are an adequate safety mechanism for averagely visited sites because they are easy to implement and offer enough parameters for an individual implementation. Attackers have to engage an OCR30-system to avoid captchas and this results in a significant additional expense. Thus the software should offer those or at least comparable security mechanisms to ensure a general security for dealers.
2.1.7 Service
Online shops naturally have to offer a lot more service than competitors of traditional offline shopping. The customers expect an extremely quick response on their wishes so shop operators have to react on E-Mail requests, complaints or returns very quickly as online customers usually are bound less to an online shop. Most of the time, there is not even a single personal contact between the two parties. Again, the website is the major point of contact and therefore should represent the company´s philosophy, particular objectives, as many information about products as possible31 and an easy usability. Customers expect and claim for a direct access to information and an easy ordering process as well as rapidly traceable contact information on the website as they are taking center stage in an ordering process. A personal and individual customer liaison and support become more and more important. The „cold“ and impersonal nature of the internet should be counterbalanced by for instance „warm“ and communicative customer relationships by e.g. confirming an order and informing the customer via E-Mail after his order has been shipped. If there are any claims or questions on a product, customers should not be put off with some automatically generated E-Mail answer but rather with a personal answer fitting
30 31 Optical Character Recognition e.g. visual information by several product pictures and written information on the product pages
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to their request (cf. [GORA01], p. 426/427; [ZÖL01], p. 115). Service also means to keep your online shop up to date. A newly last modified date indicates a regular update of the pages which shows that a company takes great care of an internet presence up to date. There is nothing worse than old information on a website because nowadays the internet is very fast moving. From this it follows that the variety of products offered online should not be shortened compared to the offline assortment as customers expect both of them to be of the same size (cf. [GORA01], p. 426). Basically you can say, that companies have to enable their customers to communicate by as many channels as possible, which are: telephone, Fax, E-Mail and the web in general. All of these channels have to be available and have to have an acceptable response time. Employees in a call center need to have access to all of the different systems like customer-, product- and stock-information. A single administrating interface with fast access to all these systems should be the central point for administrators (cf. [Merz02], p. 453). The outcome of the things above is that you need to employ staff and consider the follow-up costs for good service for your customers. But investing in the service will surely recompense the costs by increased customer satisfactions and loyalties. The customers loyalty is directly related to an online shops transaction volume. Satisfied customers revisit an online shop and probably spend more money (cf. [Merz02], p. 444).
2.1.8 Customizing
The best online shop is worth nothing unless you can customize it. Several sections of an online shop are of interest to customize. A company may already have a website with a common corporate identity (CI) to which the look and feel of a shop system should be adapted. The strict separation between contents and design conduces to an easy adaption of this look and feel. The reuse of an already existing HTML template – e.g. of a website that is managed by a WCMS – would best suit this purpose. All that would be left to do is replace menus and the main navigation by the specific shop elements like categories and additional information and the online shop comes along
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with the existing CI. Modern template systems like YAML32 support web developers in creating websites that are absolutely accessible for end users. Nevertheless most templates systems cannot relieve of certain HTML and CSS programming skills because the shop elements may have to be aligned and the template has to be tested with common browsers anyway to ensure availability. Besides changes on the design of the shop one may want to add some features concerning functionality or maybe an additional feature during the ordering process. The great advantage of open source online shop systems lies in the total availability of the source code. Changes, features or modifications can be made at any position provided of an adequate programming skill. Smallish commercial systems like the one from 1&1 offer a bunch of functions and features that may be enough for minor requirements. But usually they are extremely shortened in complexity and their functionalities are not adaptable at all. Others like Oxid Eshop PE come along with additional modular extensions and uncover their strengths with those. Finally the global player intershop offers all-purpose extensions for enterprise resource planning (ERP), modules for reuse of your suppliers catalogs on your business clients, subsidiary companies and end users as well as the complete connection to a company´s existing business processes. The choice of the fitting shop system again depends on several decisions. You have to determine the necessary shop features and compare them with the features of the existing systems. Do the features match the requirements or will a more powerful one also be more appropriate? Could you avoid the additional investment by using an open source product and modify it with the in-house know-how or will you need to hire freelancers or experts respectively to effect the necessary adaptions?
2.1.9 Conclusion
The requirements above do not assert one´s claim to be complete but give a description of some important checkpoints on setting up an online store. Most attention has to be put on the platform with its functionalities and possibly its extensibility as the proper operating modes have to be ensured. After this there is another tightrope walk between the customer´s privacy protection and a personalized shopping service with modern
32 YAML stands for Yet Another Multicolumn Layout and represents a framework for creating modern and flexible floating web layouts. See http://www.yaml.de for further information.
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features and state of the art web technologies. All things considered achieving sustained success depends on customer´s loyalty. Customer´s loyalty comes along with his satisfaction and he will be satisfied if he encounters a clearly structured online shop with a quick ordering process, secure data transmissions and a good usability. Looking at this bulk of important things it seems almost impossible to jump over all these barriers, but there are (partly legislative) initiatives that help you protect against the many traps and two of them will be mentioned in chapter 2.2 Certification. All that is left to say is that the perfect shop system does not exist so far. Every software will have advantages and disadvantages and an intensive dealing with the subject online shop systems is unavoidable to bring out best results and great success.
2.2 Certification
Being online usually comes along with online shopping. „[...] [M]erely 4% of 1.000 respondents specify they never bought anything in online shops.“33 As consumers are acting with much more discretion concerning prospective online shopping, inhibition thresholds appear. The greatest fear is – as already mentioned – the misuse of personal data during communication or transaction processes. Customers expect a seal and its representing organization to be well-known and want the requirements to be adapted in practice. „As a matter of fact seals of approval have an enormous significance for online shoppers. For approximately 75% of the respondents seals of approval in online as well as offline shops are 'very important ' or [at least] 'important '.[...] Especially [..] the newcomers that have not gone shopping in the internet attach importance to seals of approval.“31 So how can displaying of seals of approval effect on an online shop´s sales volume? „Two-thirds of the german internet shoppers have already aborted an order because of an apparently missing seriousness. Half of the aborters would have continued the ordering process if a [... seal of approval] had been visible.“34 Displaying a seal of approval can result in a higher conversion rate35 which will in the end result directly in higher sales volumes although there are some additional charges
33 34 35 [TNS_D21], freely adapted by Sebastian Berg [TNS_CERT] (p. 2), freely adapted by Sebastian Berg The conversion rate is the percentage rate of shop visitors that actually buy something in one´s store.
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associated. Nevertheless there are two direct advantages. One on the short term (by the direct purchasing (prepayment) of new customers) and an indirect one on the long term (by those new customers becoming regular customers)(cf. [TNS_CERT], p. 2). As a matter of fact, the topic trust has become a concrete business model. As certification agencies sprang up like mushrooms in the middle of the nineties only few of them have established and even less have been trustworthy before the year 2000. In the following I am going to introduce two renowned certification agencies. I would like to describe their highlights and give a short introduction on their operation breakdowns. However, operating of those agencies agrees in principle: The customers trust in the certification agency that after all could lose its good reputation. On the other hand, the agency limits the customers´ risks, which are for instance: ruin of the shop or a loss of the delivery. The agency trusts the shop because it assured itself of a minor risk to assure the customer. This is what the shop operator pays for. Finally the customer and the shop carry out business as usual (cf. [Merz02], p. 569).
2.2.1 Trusted Shops
Trusted Shops has been existing since 1999 and meanwhile they are market leader in online shop certification in Europe. They focus on a unique combination of the dealers´ certification, a seal of approval, a money-back guarantee and customer services. Shop operators have to undergo more than one hundred criteria36 in the areas of
• • • • • •
reliability security issues transparency of any kind of costs duty to furnish information customer services data protection
Illustration 4: Trusted Shops emblem
and the criteria are being adapted to the latest perceptions of laws and consumer protection permanently. An online shop receives the seal of approval after passing all of the requirements and is allowed to display the above sign on the websites.
36 A complete list of the criteria can be found at http://www.trustedshops.de/shopbetreiber/download.html (reviewed 2007, December 8th)
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Trusted shops is famous for their money-back guarantee free of any costs which ensures customers to get their money returned in case of problems concerning an abuse of credit card information, product returns, a fall through of delivery or a lack of reimbursement. They have certified more than two thousand online shops and none of the clashes so far have resulted in a hearing. The professional and multilingual procurement could solve all clashes with a satisfactory result to both parties. But not only customers benefit from a certification by Trusted Shops as dealers are being ensured against dissuasions concerning
• • •
incorrect general terms and conditions assigning incorrect taxes and shipping costs wrong phrases in general
As we can see, both parties – dealers as well as customers – benefit from this certification. But there is no doubt that this certification does not come along without any costs. There are three different memberships at Trusted Shops that go from 59,- € over 79,- € up to 99,- € (depending on the annual sales) which offer different services.37 Another two-sided advantage is the presentation of the certified online shop with its products at www.trustedshops.de. New customers benefit from the guaranteed services the online shop offers and the shops benefit from the customers´ trust in their shop. Altogether a membership at Trusted Shops is an allround No-Worry package for customers and dealers and the additional costs will surely result in higher sales as the Trusted Shops seal is the most commonly used seal of online shop certification in Europe. A complete list of the certified shops can be found at http://www.trustedshops.de/profil/.
2.2.2 TÜV-Süd (www.safer-shopping.de)
The TÜV degree of popularity of 99% in the German-speaking areas makes it for being another well-known certification agency. The criteria38 for online shop dealers are very
37 A complete list of features and services of the different memberships can be found at http://www.trustedshops.de/shopbetreiber/mitgliedschaft.html (reviewed on December, 10th 2007)
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similar to the ones of Trusted Shops. Main differences39 lay in the guaranteed compliance of the criteria. Furthermore s@fer-shopping offers additions to their general certification which are in detail
• • • •
quality management ecological management IT security- and service-management certification of specific shop sections
Illustration 5: TÜV-Süd emblem
Unlike Trusted Shops TÜV has an international acceptance and therefore professionalism is ensured. TÜV also takes great care in the secure transmission of credit card information and personal data using SSL connections and has a moneyback guarantee. The general workflow of s@fer-shopping is subdivided into four parts. During the online rating TÜV evaluates the shop pages concerning structure, navigation und customer information. The security check uses port-scans and several special tools and scripts not only on web-servers and web-applications but also on systems that are reachable online, like firewalls, routers, mail- and name-servers. The local audition verifies consistency of organisation and business processes according to s@fershopping standards. Finally the report consists of possible deviations of those standards and supports dealers to improve their shop´s efficiency (cf. [TÜV_SÜD]). There is an initial payment of about 3.500 €40 - for the first certification – covering the detailed online check, the security check and the audit in one´s company itself. After this the follow-up costs covering the yearly inspection is only 80% of the initial costs. With only two years less experience than the combatants of Trusted Shops TÜV harks back on an international awareness level and also offers an allround No-Worry package for both, customers as well as shop operators. In addition they also offer a bulk of continuing certificates based on the latest perceptions of laws and consumer protection.
38 39 40
A complete list of the criteria can be found at https://www.safer-shopping.de/kriterien.html (reviewed on December, 10th 2007) As per https://www.safer-shopping.de/pruefsiegel.html (reviewed on December, 10th 2007) The prices are taken from an e-Mail by Mr. Marc Seliger from TÜV SÜD, Vertriebsinnendienst München, from December, 18th 2007. The complete e-Mail correspondence can be found in chapter 6.1 E-Mail correspondence with Florian Labitzke/Marc Seeliger
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2.3 Ten rules of online selling
In [GORA01] Frank Sieben has worked out ten rules of successful online selling that everyone should follow. They are in detail:41 1. Create a homepage that covers a clear and well-defined message about your company and your services. 2. The structure of the shop has to be arranged clearly. 3. The buying process should be designed eventfully and fast (do not exceed three clicks to navigate to the first product). 4. Offer your complete product range with up to date prices. 5. Clearly explain shipping conditions and the different opportunities. 6. Offer different payment methods/modules. 7. Create different customer groups with different shop areas (e.g. for dealers etc.). 8. Look for niches and design them during an analysis of your customers data. 9. Offer an outstanding customer service that exceeds their expectations. 10. Try to get traffic on your site using online advertisement, banners, links, etc..
2.4 Integration
Whenever things like an ERP, a CMS or maybe a warehouse management come into play, the shop software should provide integration to these existing systems/business processes. The software should also provide an import of existing data. Maybe there already is a customer database that needs to be inherited after the invention of the software. Common exchange formats for the data can extremely simplify the transfer between the two systems as customer databases are the most important parts of an online shop and a manual transfer can never be accomplished without any errors and massive personnel costs. Orders sometimes get forwarded directly to suppliers and/or external servers for further processing or at an imminent emptiness of stocks.. An adaptable forwarding system for orders – via e-Mail, SQL-export, or even in plain text – can also simplify these processes and help reducing personnel and/or administrative costs.
41 Freely translated from Frank Sieben
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Finally shop operators wish for a centralized contact point that maybe covers management of the shop websites as well as administration of the online store in one go. There are several modules of well-established CMSs that embed the shop´s backend in the CMS´s backend. But this decentralized solution has advantages as well as disadvantages. Oftentimes the integration offers not a full functionality so that administrators have to go back to the shop´s backend to cope with all necessary tasks. On the other hand this solution offers a greater insurance against technical problems. A technical malfunction in a webshop that offers additional content management will paralyze the homepage as well as the online shop whereas separate web servers offer more security and a higher availability. Furthermore a unidimensional order processing like in Drawing 342 is not always possible. Several business processes or customer interventions may influence a strict eradication of the ordering process like in Drawing 442.
incoming order
acknowledgement
packing
shipping
notify customer
Drawing 3: unidimensional order processing
incoming order
acknowledgement
packing
shipping
merge with additional order
Notify via collective service
notify customer merge packages
customer
partner company
packing
Drawing 4: more-dimensional order processing
42
Based loosely on the slides of Ralph Bossler, E-Business Workshop (Sylphen LLC); http://www.sylphen.com/files/e-business-integration.pdf
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The cooperation of the different applications of Drawing 4 is managed by a centralized workflow logic. Enterprise Application Integration43 (EAI) and Service Oriented Architectures44 (SOA) can support the different participants in the B2B supply chain by a process oriented integration of their business processes loosely coupled from any operating systems or programming languages.
43 44
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_application_integration#Purposes_of_EAI (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture (reviewed on 2007, December 10th)
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3 Evaluation
3 Evaluation
This chapter deals with an evaluation of two very different shop systems. On the one hand it will take a look at the top dog intershop as being the market leader of online shop systems. On the other hand xt:Commerce, an open source shop software will be rated. The criteria of chapter two will be the groundwork of the evaluation. They will be processed point by point. The intershop software rating will be based on a trial account that was offered by the company for this thesis. In addition several online shops45 working with this software were tested according to the requirements of chapter two. Most importance was attached to the general shop usability (with special attention on the ordering process), its search functionalities and security. The xt:Commerce rating will be based on the experiences with the software during a project with the GGEW-net, subsidiary company of the GGEW corporation, customer of Sylphen limited liability company. The results are based on a general installation of xt:Commerce without any extensions or modifications on the sources.
3.1 Intershop
Clarity Looking at the frontends in the shops of reference during this evaluation one can say that they all are very clearly structured and easy to use. Intershop offers an exemplary software to create easy-to-use websites and this is reflected in the online stores. Unfortunately the page reproduction especially in the BMW shop is quite long. If we take a closer look on the size of the companies using Intershop´s software they expectedly offer online shops with a great clearness not only because of their brand awareness and variety of products.
45
Namely the shops of Club Bertelsmann (http://www.derclub.de) Quelle Versandhaus (http://www.quelle.de) Otto Versandhaus (www.otto.de) BMW Online Shop (https://shop.bmwgroup.com)
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3 Evaluation
A digression concerning Intershop software I would like to use this chapter now to introduce the Intershop software and its general machinery as it is quite uncomfortable when getting in touch with it for the first time. Nevertheless „Intershop helps its customers to achieve and maintain their competitive advantages[.]46“ and offers special trainings for their customers to learn about the usage of their software. Enfinity Suite 6, the completely modular intershop software offers six different so called channels as you can see in Illustration 6. „All six modules can be deployed as separate applications or combined to create customized sell-side, buy-side or portal solutions. This enables enterprises to consolidate and to centrally control all E-Commerce channels on one platform. The outstanding internationalization features of Enfinity Suite 6 make it, in addition, a solid base for implementing global E-Commerce strategies.46“
Illustration 6: Intershop: Enfinity Suite 6 technology (cf.[ENF6_Bro], p 11)
Further descriptions of the different channels can be found in [ENF6_Bro], pg. 6-7. They will not be explained in here as it would go beyond the scope of this thesis. In fact I would like to highlight a possible Intershop infrastructure combining all different channels now. Though Intershops philosophy says that Intershop is just a shop – but it is top class indeed – a general supplier integration and stock management is possible, but not among the main objectives of the company. Nevertheless they do offer solutions to completely integrate the whole enterprise resource planning from buy-side channels to sell-side channels in the B2B as well as the B2C E-Commerce. Illustration 7 shows a possible implementation based on the Enfinity Suite6 Multi Site Technology.
46
cf. [ENF6_Bro], p. 2
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3 Evaluation
Illustration 7: Possible infrastructure in Enfinity Suite 6 (cf. [ENF6_Bro], p. 5)
The software consists of a visual programming logic nearly without Java. About 75% of Enfinity´s business logic is implemented as visual programs47. Illustration 747 shows a programming example with the software. A business process is called „pipeline“ that is being processed step by step after its invocation. It consists of controlling structures (conditions and branches) and encapsulation of the business logic. In turn pipelines also can invoke other pipelines. The blue boxes represent Java classes that expect different input parameters and provide different output parameters. The rhombuses represent the branches and finally the different steps of a pipeline are symbolized by arrows.
Illustration 8: Visual programming in Enfinity Suite 6
47
(Freely translated from) [ENF6_Tech], p. 16
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Intershop comes along with a huge amount of predefined Java classes that can be used inside the business processes. Of course new classes can be added by their customers themselves and Intershop also offers extensions on their software as they surely have to required know-how. Basically the software is subdivided into three layers (Drawing 5). On the bottom one can locate the Enfinity MultiSite Technology, above comes the business logic mentioned above. And on top of the architecture the different channel applications – usually realized as web sites – are resident (cp. [ENF6_Tech], p. 10).
Content Channel Application
Consumer Channel Application
Business Channel Application
Partner Channel Application
Supplier Channel Application
Procurement Channel Application
Business components Enfinity MultiSite Technology
Drawing 5: Enfinity Suite 6 Application
So much for the general machinery of Enfinity Suite 6. In chapter 3.1.1 Working with Enfinity Suite 6 we will take a closer look into the every day work with the shop system and I am going to highlight some administrating work based on the demo accounts that were given to the Sylphen company to get in touch with the software and learn about some general workflows. All in all Intershop results in easy-tu-use online shops due to the know-how of „[...]15-year expertise in E-Commerce consulting and software development [.]48“ for major enterprises as well as medium-sized businesses. The huge complexity of the software naturally comes along with high costs on the software itself but also on employee trainings and additional Oracle49 licences. Small projects can be realized from about 50.000 Euro up to several hundreds of thousands of Euro for projects like the T-Com or Otto Online Shops. Looking at these facts, clarity seems very far away in an online shop using Intershop software but it will pay off if this first hurdle has been jumped.
48 49 cf. [ENF6_Bro], p. 9 Intershop uses Oracle databases to ensure the highest availability [ENF6_Tech], pg. 24,25,28.
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Usability All of the tested online shops offer an exemplary usability. The checkpoints as specified by Trusted Shops in chapter 2.1.4 Usability are implemented nearly 100%. So they receive top rankings in all categories. Customers discover different ways of accessing the contents by browsing through the different categories, following sales offers or making their way through recommendations connected to the products they viewed. The shops of Quelle, Otto and Der Club Bertelsmann basically lack a sitemap but it can be integrated as you can see at the online shop of BMW and Musicstore.de 50. At least in the BMW shop a sitemap is integrated and also reasonable as it does not offer such a variety of products like the online stores of Quelle.de or Otto.de. These shops are recognized for their outstanding clearness and product presentation, with modern web design techniques on the one hand, and a clear, plain and simple presentation on the other. There is no untraceable information as it seems in the tested online stores. All necessary topics are presented at prominent positions at the top or the bottom of the online store where customers expect for instance the product search or general terms and conditions as well as contact information or the company´s presentation. The shopping cart is available at any time during the visit and takes you to the checkout form with a single click. The checkout process provides all necessary functions namely the back and forth navigation with the browsers hot-keys combined with a preservation of already entered form information. As the BMW shop shows, the different checkout can be made directly accessible by clicking via a breadcrumb menu surely without a loss of form data. Even unexpected errors do not cause the loss of previously entered form information. The checkout process – regardless of being a registered user or not – can be finished every time. Additionally the software offers a navigation trail helping users not to lose orientation, keep an overview of the whereabouts and move through categories in an easy way. These navigation trails typically are located at the top of the page and offer another possibility to navigate through the shop. Unfortunately – and of course – there are some negative things that occurred during
50 http://www.musicstore.de/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/MusicStore-MusicStoreShopSite/de_DE/-/EUR/ViewSiteMap-Start;pgid=TOZgS6SfaObm0000000000000000OhZPPrzS (reviewed on 2007, January 15th)
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the shopping tour: Every main menu just seems to work properly with Javascript enabled in the visitor´s web browser. At least a general navigation through the shop is possible in the shops of Quelle, Otto and Der Club Bertelsmann51, whereas the online shop of BMW cannot be navigated unless Javascript is enabled and sometimes even crashes with some non-fitting error pages. Thus a full accessibility of the main menu should be implemented as it would make usability of the online shops more intuitive and consistent. Ordering products without enabled Javascript is possible in the Bertelsmann store only. Despite the fact, that the shopping cart preview in the head of the website does not show correct number and totals of articles, an order is at least possible. The other reference shops do not work properly when putting articles into the shopping cart or – like the Quelle store – display a notification on disabled Javascript informing the customer that enabled Javascript is necessary to use the complete features of the website. It is a pity that shopping itself – and putting products into the cart respectively – seems to be a feature of the Quelle, BMW and Otto stores while Bertelsmann shows that the software is able to output a working online shop independent from Javascript. Another disadvantage: the page reloads sometimes take a bit too long to enable visitors to have a light-hearted shopping tour. Being the top reason in Table 2: Why people leave websites (Jupiter Research 12/2005) special attention should be paid on a quick page reproduction. Nevertheless one surely can recognize that „something happens“ during the page reload while images, menus, forms and banners are loaded – sometimes it could just be a little faster. Search functionality The tested shops and thus the Intershop software respectively offer a brilliant search functionality with with all the features customers may desire. Except the BMW shop – caused by the relatively limited variety of products – all reference shops offer combinations of parametric and hierarchical searches. After searching the online shop for e.g. „trousers“ the engine displays an overview showing the number of matches found. These results can be navigated hierarchically, sorted by price, color and size, or refined with certain parameters due to a clearly structured overview of manufacturers
51 These shops offer multiple ways of navigating the store by a drop down menu in the head of the page on the one hand and additionally a menu on the left side of the website depending on the corresponding category. Thus visitors do not depend on a single java-script-based navigation.
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or any shop category – with the quantity of matching products in brackets – containing the product of interest. Even while refining the results with certain parameters a hierarchical navigation of the matching products is still available. Of course a direct search for patrons via product ID is possible in all the shops. The Quelle and Bertelsmann webshops combine the product search with modern Web2.0 features like Google suggest52 and offer a quick overview over possible products of interest while the user is typing. This enables the customers to recognize whether a product can be found in the product line or not even before finishing his proper search. A fault tolerant search is possible in all the shops but unfortunately the Otto and Bertelsmann shops are the only ones displaying results located in the shop´s additional content. A search with the keyword „AGB“ for general terms and conditions for instance just provides results of matching products or stays empty in the Quelle and BMW shops. Looking at the efforts on SEO „[...]Enfinity Suite 6 provides several options for optimizing your online shop pages for internet search engines.53“. A search for instance with Google entering the keywords „privileg waschmaschine“ resulted in top rankings of the Quelle webshop – in an advertisement with search engine friendly URL – as they have had a special offer on their frontpage on the date of searching54. The landing page of this advertisement directly leads to the Quelle section of washing machines. All in all, Intershop offers great software concerning search functionality in the shop frontend itself as well as in terms of search engine optimization and advertisement. The predefined search modules attend to their duties according to the needs and requirements of a comfortable and multi channel product search.
52 53 54
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en cf. [ENF6_Bro], p. 6 This Google search was performed on 2008, January 17th
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3 Evaluation
Security Protection against attacks with XSS and SQL injection seems to be realized in all of the online shops due to an effectual validation of form data. HTML or Javascript code respectively cannot be infiltrated by for instance the search form. One the one hand one can discover a limited number of characters that can be entered in the form and on the other characters like „ Payment Systems“ several payment systems are available and they can be installed and activated with a single click. Same applies to the shipping methods: „Modules -> Shipping Methods“ lists all available shipping methods and they can be installed and activated with a single click. Other information pages Any information page in xt:Commerce can be adapted. At the first visit the software displays an information text like:
Nice to see you again Mr. Sebastian Berg! Would you like to view our new products ? This is a basic installation of xt:Commerce. All products displayed are just for demonstrating the shop machinery. Ordered products will neither be shipped nor billed. All information concerning the different products are fictive and do not assert one´s claim to be acquired. If you´re interested to use the program being the groundwork of this shop please visit the support page of xt:Commerce. This shop is based on xt:Commerce v3.0.4. This text can be edited in the administration interface -> Content Manager - Index entry.
So administrators are guided to the Content Manager immediately where they can create the most important information pages concerning shipping and returns, privacy notice, conditions of use, and e.g. company contact. The content manager represents the small CMS mentioned above and provides a multilingual representation of each page, depending on the number of languages the online shop runs with.
67 cf. file permissions on UNIX based webservers
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Fulfillment confirmations Confirmations via e-Mail usually are sent when an online shop receives an order. xt:Commerce automatically sends such confirmations to the customer´s e-Mail address. Dealers may want to edit the text of the e-Mail to make it sound more familiar or change the order of the different text elements. xt:Commerce basically sends eMails in plain, HTML or both formats. The look and feel of an e-Mail is not globally configured but can be adapted independently for each template that is running on xt:Commerce. The folder „/templates//mail//“ contains HTML and text templates the automatic e-Mails are created from. Those templates for instance are a mix of HTML-Code, plain text and smarty variables, to get necessary information about the order such as total price, each product´s single price and maybe a shipping address. An example text mail can be found in chapter 4.3 Fulfillment confirmation (subpart). Integrating any PHP/HTML files into the website When creating a new page in the online shop one may want to reuse an already existing one. Any PHP or HTML files can be chosen from a specific directory and will be displayed inside the content area of the website. A drop down menu containing a list of all files inside the „/media/content“ directory is available for each page created with the content manager. Thus a maximum flexibility is warranted for displaying contents and existing source code can be reused in a quick and easy way.
4.3 Customization
Fulfillment confirmation Special requirements on the fulfillment confirmation are necessary at the GGEW-net company because a copy of these confirmations is automatically sent to a so called „radius server“ for further processing. Text elements have to be in a certain order to ensure correct processing of the e-Mail. Below you can find an example text mail template.
{$address_label_customer} {if $PAYMENT_METHOD}Zahlungsmethode: {$PAYMENT_METHOD}{/if} Bestellnummer: {$oID}
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Datum: {$DATE} {if $csID}Kundennummer :{$csID}{/if} ---------------------------------------------------------------------Hallo {$NAME}, Dies ist nur ein Standardtext {$PAYMENT_INFO_TXT} {if $COMMENTS} Ihre Anmerkungen: {$COMMENTS}{/if} Ihre Bestellten Produkte zur Kontrollle ---------------------------------------------------------------------{foreach name=aussen item=order_values from=$order_data} {$order_values.PRODUCTS_QTY} x {$order_values.PRODUCTS_NAME} {$order_values.PRODUCTS_PRICE} {if $order_values.PRODUCTS_SHIPPING_TIME neq ' '}Lieferzeit: {$order_values.PRODUCTS_SHIPPING_TIME}{/if} {if $order_values.PRODUCTS_ATTRIBUTES != ' '} {$order_values.PRODUCTS_ATTRIBUTES}{/if}{/foreach} {foreach name=aussen item=order_total_values from=$order_total} {$order_total_values.TITLE}{$order_total_values.TEXT}{/foreach} {if $address_label_payment} Rechnungsadresse ---------------------------------------------------------------------{$address_label_payment}{/if} Versandadresse ---------------------------------------------------------------------{$address_label_shipping}
Presentation of products without shipping costs The GGEW-net runs WLAN hotspots in the region of Bensheim, Hessen (Germany). A lot of products therefore offer required login information called „Internet tickets“68 for those hotspots and do not need to be shipped at all. Thus for these tickets no shipping costs need to to be displayed. As aforementioned xt:Commerce features an individual presentation of (each) product(s) if desired. Different HTML templates can be assigned to the products and so a separate displaying of tickets apart from the rest of the products commonly shipped is available. The templates are stored in a folder whose files are selectable from a drop down menu in the backend´s products detail page. At the moment the login information is sent to the customers by e-Mail, but under these
68 There are different tickets for one week, one month or one year in two different access modes available.
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circumstances a use of the digital download features of xt:Commerce would surely be conceivable. When cashed a digital download page could be activated that is available e.g. for a certain amount of days.
4.3.1 Smarty (template engine)
Smarty is a template engine, that provides a simple assignment of variables that can be called at any position in HTML source code. For example on any pages user data or any other information stored in a database can be displayed. Assignment of these variables usually is being done in a global index PHP file which puts the website together. Simple or nested if conditions combined with logical expressions as well as simple loops are some of Smarty´s features69. The Smarty variables are available in the whole online shop and can also be used in fulfillment confirmations or any other eMail as we have already seen in chapter 4.3 Fulfillment confirmation . Nevertheless there can be some difficulties with Smarty concerning special files in xt:Commerce. The Smarty variables are usable in HTML files only. Most of the xt:Commerce modules use HTML files to create the source code but some70 use PHP files. Trying to insert a Smarty variable in a PHP file will result in a preprocessing by PHP istead of a preprocessing by the Smarty template engine. Considering the facts one encounters a restriction on the statement that the variables are available in file of the store. Therefore the Smarty variables can be used in any HTML page of the online shop.
4.4 Administration
I am going to report on some administrative duties now that had been necessary for a proper working of the GGEW-net online shop. In this regard it is worth mentioning that the shop – as it was implemented during this thesis – is still unproductive. Nevertheless the setup has been finished so far, required functionalities are available and have been tested on a proper operability. Caused by a revision of the GGEW´s
69 70 A Smarty introduction or documentation can be found at http://www.smarty.net/crashcourse.php or http://www.smarty.net/docs.php (reviewed 2007, December 10th) E.g. the box that creates the main navigation from categories stored in the database. This is necessary because the main navigation structure is being put together by several elements of a database query that is executed by a PHP file.
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corporate identity the shop design – as it was created by a freelance designer working for the Sylphen company for several years – doest not comply with the future look and feel of the GGEW´s CI. Another template is going to be added when the GGEW´s CI will be revised.
4.4.1 Porting legacy systems
As the old GGEW-net shop was running on OSCommerce and because of xt:Commerce being the groundwork of OSCommerce, a general import of the old product information would have been possible yet with some restrictions. The support forum offers some PHP scripts that migrate the old shop data from an OSCommerce shop into an xt:Commerce shop. Executing an export script71 via a browser creates a MySQL database dump that simply can be imported with an appropriate tool like phpMyAdmin or directly using the MySQL commands of a unix shell. In spite of everything, the scripts are said to be working for an xt:Commerce in version 3.0.3. Nevertheless the import of shop data was successful, except the old purchase orders. A complete migration could be denoted indeed but these data unfortunately are not completely visible in the corresponding section of the xt:Commerce backend. The assignment of customer and order could not be accomplished – even a manual import of the corresponding databes tables did not succeed. A support ticket was created for the xt:Commerce core team that unfortunately could not help unless using the porting service with additional costs72. Nevertheless the involved purchase orders are still retrievable by the purchase order number and so this exception could neglected for the GGEW-net employees. After the database import another update or rather a little substitution of one PHP file – concerning the different encryption methods of OSC and XTC – is necessary to ensure that customers can still log in with their old passwords.
4.4.2 Connection to Google Maps
To enable customers to find out where the GGEW-net´s so called hot spots are available, the company offers a map giving an overview of currently installed and prospective hotspots in the region of Bensheim. So it was obvious to integrate the free
71 72 The zipped archive is available at http://www.xt-commerce.com/forum/showthread.php?t=34811 (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) A screen shot of the conversation with a support member can be found in the appendices.
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maps of Google Maps73 into the websites. Due to the WYSIWYG 74 editor integrated in the mini CMS of xt:Commerce and the opportunity to edit content directly as HTML source code an integration of a Google Maps area was very easy. Creating an empty -element that contains and id-attribute is all you need to do when creating the page that is going to contain the map. By means of the id-attribute a javascript file – that for instance could be included in the head of the website – fills the -element with the deposited lines of code. Additionally a Google generated key75 is necessary to display Google´s maps on a website. This key also can be integrated in the head of the HTML document. Coordinates for the hotspots can simply be added/updated in the javascript source file. An integration of the javascript code inside the WYSIWYG editor would also be possible due to the opportunity of directly editing the website´s source code with the editor.
73 74 75
http://maps.google.de (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) What You See Is What You Get editors offer a direct formatting of web content inside an editing form of a WCMS. Changes on font sizes, colors and paragraphs are visible immediately and give editors a preview of how the content will look in the website during its creation. A free Google key can be generated at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html (reviewed on 2007, December 10th) provided that a valid Google account to which the key can be connected to is available.
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Illustration 19: Google Maps in the GGEW-net store
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5 Summary and conclusion
5 Summary and conclusion
5.1 Perspectives
Meanwhile the so called „mobile commerce“ or M-Commerce is developing very fast. As per [TNS07], p. 270 people do more and more accept the classic internet platforms on which they can buy products and services. Mobile broadband internet connections are spreading quickly and hence a mobile online shopping with cell phones, PDAs or SmartCards will come across greater acceptance in the population. It is going to be integrated in the every-day-life, supported by an already existing acceptance of mobile devices. The online purchase of mobile music will be the biggest sector in the B2C ECommerce. The abdication of DRM76 will surely eliminate reservations of end customers and this development could also copy on the amusement industry (cp. [TNS07], p. 270). An up to date example is amazonmp3.com77. Launched in September 2007 AmazonMP3 is going to offer „[...]DRM-Free Downloads from SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT“, emanating from an amazon press release78. Other benefits of M-Commerce are experienced in an all-time-availability of the consumer´s device that keeps a connection upright or the so called „ubiquitous computing“ - a permanent mobility of the end device (cf. [Merz02], p. 381). Combined with biometric identification, mobile payment developments, and optional secure connections these devices will offer a secure authentication and payment regardless of the consumers current location.
76 77 78
Digital Rights Management http://www.amazonmp3.com (reviewed on 2008, January 22nd) http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1095117&highlight= (reviewed on 2008, January 22nd)
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5.2 Final statement
This thesis was written to introduce an open source shop system like xt:Commerce and a high cost shop system based on Interhop´s Enfinity Suite 6 MulitSite Technology. On the basis of some eligibility criteria developed in chapter 2 both shop systems were rated. Finally the focus will be on a general recommendation of which online shop to use. The answer is: it depends! Due to the open sources and the resultant high adaptability of the xt:Commerce shop system one can say that it is a contemporary shop system fulfilling most of the common requirements on usability, security and clarity. The participating community around xt:Commerce helps newcomers as well as „old stagers“ with any kind of concerns. The price performance ratio of the 99,-€ support ticket is quite acceptable due to a huge archive of already solved problems and the core team dealing with support tickets and offering several services like data migration of legacy systems or scripts to reuse old customer passwords that come from os:Commerce. Thus a standalone management of an online shop can be accomplished beginning with the installation over several customizations and product management to an integration in ERP systems – a certain know-how and quite a big training period preconditioned. With xt:Commerce small and medium-sized companies will definitely find a software worth a try that brings up basic shop functionalities and some simple workflows in shop management. Modern features like digital download products, coupons and sales campaigns make it an allround software. The quick page reproductions based on an SQL-caching mechanism, the good preparation for a Trusted Shops certification and last but not least the template system will produce state of the art websites. Reasonable presets and predefined information pages help dealers to provide a legally compliant and structured online shop that – due to the multilingual features – is available all over the world. The product export to several search engines enables companies to be compared together with their competitors. Following the criteria on shop usability, clarity and service, associated with a seal of approval success just seems to depend on the customers – but they will award an online shop set up correctly and offering additional services like availability via several communication channels.
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5 Summary and conclusion
Opposing Intershop to xt:Commerce we can encounter some differences. The shop features in general are nearly the same. Just like its open source competitor Intershop offers a well-thought-out online shop system. The output sites are clearly structured, easy to use and offer a general protection from popular attacks. The distinctive features show themselves in the details. The exemplary search functions for instance contribute to a more comfortable product search – including Ajax technologies like in the Quelle and Bertelsmann shops. Furthermore one can create checkout procedures or menus free of Javascript or completely realized with Javascript. The high adaptability results in differently realizable online shop systems offering their strengths just where dealers want them to occur. Concerning backend usability and clarity it definitely receives some penalties. The system´s immense mightiness calls for a long training period for newbies before being able to work with the software. But this is being balanced by Intershop´s special employee trainings according to the company´s requirements. Integration is the keyword that makes Intershop different from its competitor. If the matter is about integrating different suppliers, partners and B2B customers altogether on a single platform with different subgroups, different catalogs for each of the groups that are build together dynamically depending on the visitor, Intershop is the software of interest. Additionally there is the high scaling rate and the high availability of online shops – even at peak loads – using the software that make Intershop the leading company of online shop software. Unfortunately the biggest disadvantage comes with the costs of an online shop realized with Intershop. Small or medium-sized companies will have to think twice about realizing a project with minimum costs of about 50.000 Euro. Nevertheless one should definitely figure out the costs for another commercial shop system partly fulfilling the requirements on e.g. an ERP or a complete system like Intershop that covers all needs and wishes. Investing in a well-thought out online shop system might pay off by great customer liabilities, reduced administrating costs and an exemplary integration of the whole value-added chain.
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Illustration Index
Illustration 1: Position of Germany in an international contrast by [TNS07]........10 Illustration 2: Long Tail by [WIKI_L_T].................................................................12 Illustration 3: Spending power of German population.........................................18 Illustration 4: Trusted Shops emblem..................................................................32 Illustration 5: TÜV-Süd emblem...........................................................................34 Illustration 6: Intershop: Enfinity Suite 6 technology (cf.[ENF6_Bro], p 11)........39 Illustration 7: Possible infrastructure in Enfinity Suite 6 (cf. [ENF6_Bro], p. 5)...40 Illustration 8: Visual programming in Enfinity Suite 6..........................................40 Illustration 9: Intershop´s Storefront Editing........................................................50 Illustration 10: Intershop´s product update..........................................................51 Illustration 11: Intershop´s business channel......................................................52 Illustration 12: xt:Commerce backend areas.......................................................54 Illustration 13: GGEW-net screen shot................................................................63 Illustration 14: Step 1; permissions and language...............................................64 Illustration 15: Step 2; database and webserver settings....................................65 Illustration 16: Step 5; configure main files..........................................................66 Illustration 17: Step 6; entering admin data.........................................................67 Illustration 18: Step 7; guest and customer setup...............................................68 Illustration 19: Google Maps in the GGEW-net store..........................................75 Illustration 20: Support ticket conversation screenshot S. Berg / M. Hinsche....84
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Drawing Index
Drawing 1: E-Commerce by [Merz02]...................................................................9 Drawing 2: process steps of an online shop by Merz..........................................15 Drawing 3: unidimensional order processing......................................................36 Drawing 4: more-dimensional order processing..................................................36 Drawing 5: Enfinity Suite 6 Application................................................................41
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Bibliography
[COM_MAN1] Nur so hilft die Produktsuche im Online-Shop wirklich...; www.commercemanager.de, 2006; http://www.commercemanager.de/magazin/artikel_1256_produktsuche_onli ne_shop.html (reviewed on December, 25th 2007) [CT02/08] [CT22/07] Wartmann, Tim: Risiko 2.0 - Eine Analyse der Sicherheit von Ajax; c´t 02/2008 02/2008; Puscher, Frank: Fährtenleser - Webanalyse als Marketingwerkzeug; c´t 22/2007 22/2007;
[EBAYTNS06] eBay, TNS Infratest - eBay/TNS Infratest-Studie: Sicherheit im OnlineHandel 2006, 2006; [ENF6_Bro] [ENF6_Help] [ENF6_Tech] [GORA01] [IWB08/07] [IWB14/07] [IWB19/07] [IWB87] [IX1/08] [Merz02] Intershop Communications AG: Enfinity Suite 6, 2007; http://www.intershop.com/uploads/media/Enfinity_Brochure.pdf Enfinity Suite 6 - Online Help Center; , 2007; The URL´s are subject to restrictions concerning the demo account for this thesis. () Intershop Communications AG: Enfinity Suite 6 - Technischer Überblick, 2005; PowerPoint Presentation Gora, Walther; Mann, Erika: Handbuch Electronic Commerce: Kompendium zum elektronischen Handel, Springer 2001; Huber, Dana: Shopsysteme unter der Lupe; Internet World Business 08/2007; Altmann, J.;Van der Wielen: Shoptest: Smartstore.biz; Internet World Business 14/2007; Dana Huber: Getestet: Sage GS Shop 2007; Internet World Business 19/2007; Huber, Dana: Shopsysteme unter der Lupe; Internet World Business 08/2007; Ritzdorf, Hubert Benjamin: Captchas in PHP; iX 01/2008 1/2008; Merz, Michael: E-Commerce und E-Business - Marktmodelle, Anwendungen und Technologien, dpunkt.Verlag GmbH 2002;
[PLA&ANA1] Schmeißer, Daniel Reza; Oberg, Nicole; Behrendt, Catharina: Planung und Analyse - Wie aus Nutzern Kunden werden; 1/2007; http://www.phaydon.de/content/phaydon_Wie-aus-Nutzern-Kundenwerden.pdf (reviewed on 2007, Dec. 27th) [PLA&ANA2] Schmeißer, Daniel Reza; Sauer, Hans Michael: Planung und Analyse Usability-Forschung im E-Commerce; 1/2005; http://www.phaydon.de/content/phaydon_usability.pdf (reviewed on 2007, Dec. 27th) [SEOCON05] Eye Tracking Studie zeigt Webseiten Blickfeld; seo-consulting.de, 2007; http://www.seo-consulting.de/pages/news-380.php (reviewed on 2007, Nov.
5 Summary and conclusion
1st) [TNS_CERT] Hafenbradel, Ulrich - Was kann ein Gütesiegel im Shop bewirken? Fallstudie und Umfrageergebnisse, 2007; [TNS_D21] [TNS05] [TNS06] [TNS07] [TSHOPS] Sonnek, Peter - Zentrale Erkenntnisse: Online Gütesiegel für Initiative D21 e.V. (PDF), 2005; Graumann, Dr. Sabine; Florian Neinert - Monitoring Informationswirtschaft 8. Faktenbericht 2005 - E-Commerce, 2005; Graumann, Dr. Sabine; Florian Neinert - Monitoring Informationswirtschaft 9. Faktenbericht 2006, 2006; Wolf, Malthe Dr.; Graumann, Sabine Dr. - Monitoring Informations- & Kommunikationswirtschaft - 10.Faktenbericht 2007, 2007; Trusted shops - The safe way to web shopping; trustedshops.de, 2007; http://www.trustedshops.de/shopbetreiber (reviewed on November, 14th, 2007) TÜV SÜD - s@fer-shopping; www.safer-shopping.de, 2007; http://www.safer-shopping.de (reviewed on December, 10th, 2007) Usability Monitor 2007 (PDF); Syzygy.net, 2007; http://www.syzygy.net (reviewed on November, 21st, 2007)
[TÜV_SÜD] [UM07]
[WIKI_KISS] KISS principle; wikipedia.org, 2007; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle (reviewed on November, 21st, 2007) [WIKI_L_T] The Long Tail; wikipedia.org, 2007; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail (reviewed on 2007, Oct. the 17th)
[WIKI_MAYA] MAYA-Prinzip; wikipedia.org, 2007; http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAYAPrinzip (reviewed on November, 21st, 2007) [ZÖL01] Zölzer, Henrik - Erfolgsfaktoren von Online-Shops, 2001;
82
6 Appendices
6 Appendices
6.1 E-Mail correspondence with Florian Labitzke/Marc Seeliger
E-Mail from 2007, December 17th Sehr geehrter Herr Labitzke, [...] Ich würde Sie gerne noch etwas fragen. Auf Ihren Seiten ist leider keine Übersicht der monatlichen Kosten bzw. der Zertifizierungskosten zu finden. Könnten sie mir darüber vielleicht noch eine Auskunft geben bzw. mir ein paar typische Werte für einen kleinen Shop mit ca. 15 Artikeln zwischen 5,- und 500,- €, etwa 20.000 - 30.000 € Jahresumsatz nennen? Das würde mir noch fehlen um den Abschnitt zu vervollständigen. Vielen Dank für die Bearbeitung meines Anliegens, MfG, Sebastian Berg E-Mail from 2007, December 18th Sehr geehrter Herr Berg, Unser Prüfverfahren für Ihre Website beinhaltet einen ausführlichen Online-Check, einen Security-Check sowie ein Audit bei Ihnen vor Ort. Eine Zertifizierung kostet, je nach Komplexität des Angebotes ab etwa 3.500 EUR (erstmalig). Der Folgepreis für die jährliche Überwachung beträgt dann nur noch 80% der Erstzertifizierung. Gerade Online-Shops profitieren von einer Investition in ein TÜV SÜD-Siegel, da dies oftmals ein Allleinstellungsmerkmal gegenüber dem Wettbewerb darstellt. Dazu finden Sie auch einige interessante Kundenaussagen auf unserer Website unter http://www.safershopping.de/kundenaussagen.html. Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Kind regards
Marc Seeliger
TÜV SÜD Management Service GmbH Vertriebsinnendienst München (VL-MUC) Ridlerstraße 65 83
6 Appendices
80339 München Deutschland Telefon: +49/ (0) 89 - 57 91 – 4611 Telefax: +49/ (0) 89 - 57 91 – 2197 mailto:marc.seeliger@tuev-sued.de http://www.tuev-sued.de Sitz: München Amtsgericht München HRB 105439 Geschäftsführer: Prof. Dr. Peter Schaff
6.2 Screen shot of conversation between S. Berg and M. Hinsche
Illustration 20: Support ticket conversation screenshot S. Berg / M. Hinsche
84
6 Appendices
6.3 Every-day work (photography)
85
6 Appendices
Vocabulary
A
a mere child´s play das reinste Kinderspiel....................................................................................................................................63 abdication of sth. Verzicht auf etw. ..............................................................................................................................................77 abundance die Fülle............................................................................................................................................................13 additional expenses der Mehraufwand............................................................................................................................................29 arbitrary beliebig..............................................................................................................................................................17 as aforementioned wie oben erwähnt.............................................................................................................................................72 ask too much of so., (to) jmdn. überfordern...........................................................................................................................................26 attend to one´s duty, (to) seiner Pflicht nachkommen.............................................................................................................................28
B brand awareness Bekanntheitsgrad einer Marke.......................................................................................................................39 business premises Geschäftsräume...............................................................................................................................................14
C cakewalk Kinderspiel.......................................................................................................................................................70 clash Streitfall............................................................................................................................................................34 come off, (to) abschneiden......................................................................................................................................................59 comply with, (to) befolgen.............................................................................................................................................................23 conceivable denkbar.............................................................................................................................................................73 conduce to sth., (to) einer Sache dienen...........................................................................................................................................30 confined to sth. beschränkt auf etw...........................................................................................................................................59
D deliberate wohl durchdacht..............................................................................................................................................56
86
6 Appendices
deviation Abweichung......................................................................................................................................................35 digression der Exkurs........................................................................................................................................................25 dissuasions Abmahnung......................................................................................................................................................34
E effectual hinreichend.......................................................................................................................................................46 emanate from, (to) hervorgehen aus...............................................................................................................................................77 enquire, (to) nachfragen........................................................................................................................................................25 eradication Abarbeitung.....................................................................................................................................................37 exempt from frei von..............................................................................................................................................................26
F fair dealing die Kulanz.........................................................................................................................................................61 fall through Ausfall...............................................................................................................................................................34
G go beyond the scope of sth., (to) den Rahmen einer Sache sprengen.................................................................................................................40
I imminent bevorstehend, drohend....................................................................................................................................36 inducement die Aufforderung..............................................................................................................................................26 inhibition threshold Hemmschwelle.................................................................................................................................................32 instantaneous unmittelbar.......................................................................................................................................................23
L leaves nothing to be desired lässt nichts zu wünschen übrig.......................................................................................................................47 legacy system Altsystem..........................................................................................................................................................74
M machinery der Aufbau..........................................................................................................................................................9 merely lediglich.............................................................................................................................................................22
87
6 Appendices
N nip sth. in the bud, (to) etw. im Keim ersticken....................................................................................................................................46
O old stager alter Hase..........................................................................................................................................................78 on the increase, (to be) zunehmen..........................................................................................................................................................23
P put so. off, (to) jmd. abschrecken.............................................................................................................................................22
R receive consideration beachtet werden...............................................................................................................................................61 recognized for sth., (to be) durch etw. bestechen........................................................................................................................................43 reimbursement Rückerstattung.................................................................................................................................................34 renounce sth., (to) auf etw. verzichten...........................................................................................................................................15 renowned renommiert.........................................................................................................................................................9 retail market Einzelhandel.....................................................................................................................................................12
S sensitize, (to) sensibilisieren...................................................................................................................................................28 spare part das Ersatzteil....................................................................................................................................................17 stroll, (to) bummeln...........................................................................................................................................................25
T the latter Letzteres............................................................................................................................................................15 tie in with sth., (to) an etw. anknüpfen............................................................................................................................................64 tightrope walk Gratwanderung................................................................................................................................................31 transmittal Einsendung.......................................................................................................................................................59
V vastly erheblich...........................................................................................................................................................21
88
6 Appendices
vintage altmodisch.........................................................................................................................................................12
89
6 Appendices
Statutory declaration
I herewith formally declare that I have written the submitted thesis independently. I did not use any outside support except for the quoted literature and other sources mentioned in the paper. I clearly marked and separately listed all of the literature and all of the other sources which I employed when producing this academic work, either literally or in content. I am aware that the violation of this regulation will lead to failure of the thesis.
....................................................
Location, date
..................................................
Student´s signature
90
Bibliography: [TÜV_SÜD] [UM07] [WIKI_KISS] KISS principle; wikipedia.org, 2007; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle (reviewed on November, 21st, 2007) [WIKI_L_T] The Long Tail; wikipedia.org, 2007; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail (reviewed on 2007, Oct [WIKI_MAYA] MAYA-Prinzip; wikipedia.org, 2007; http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAYAPrinzip (reviewed on November, 21st, 2007) [ZÖL01] Zölzer, Henrik - Erfolgsfaktoren von Online-Shops, 2001; 82
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