An ecommerce platform is not just for Christmas

Archived article dated Tuesday November 13th 2007

Two recent surveys by SciVisium and Martec International revealed not only that UK e-tailers are losing £300m in sales from 'invisible errors' on their sites but also that 24 per cent of UK retailers are planning to replace their entire website systems in 2008. Ian Davis, Head of OnDemand at ATG considers the importance of scalable ecommerce infrastructure investments.

We are reaching the time of year when e-tailers have completed their architectural preparations for Christmas and are locking down on any unnecessary server activity ahead of the traffic onslaught. The only changes that we tend to witness after October are content adjustments to the sites themselves from sales or marketing. Typically however, after scaling up on licenses and servers in Q3, most companies do not tend to de-scale at the start of the new year.

Because the quantity and sophistication of ecommerce applications are always on the increase, the extra infrastructure provisioning that a company will make at times of seasonal peak often turn out to fit their new average traffic volume by the same time next year. While the number of online shoppers begins to plateau, the number of online sales continues to grow exponentially and retailers are forced to offer customers ever more sophisticated and rich experiences to maintain their loyalty. The market has never been more competitive and it is now vital that IT does not become a bottleneck to business advantage.

Retailers need to be confident that their e-commerce platforms can continue to meet the evolving needs of the consumer, as well as those of the internal sales and marketing teams. Problems arise when they discover that their IT infrastructure has grown to consist of a “Frankenstein's monster” of point software products that have been sporadically tapped on to fix hiccups whenever they are needed. Not only is this IT environment incredibly difficult to understand and sustain but it still requires risky, time-consuming and expensive bolting-on for future features such as guided navigation, personalised recommendations and micro-targeting. As we witness the number of undetectable site errors increasing in the UK, we are seeing the inevitable consequence of this mish mesh. Ecommerce IT is becoming ungovernable.

Rather than taking on a plethora of pieces from different vendors each year, many UK companies have reached the tipping point and are now looking to deploy a holistic pre-integrated suite. This can include bespoke features from the core e-commerce components such as commerce engine, catalogue management and search to more sophisticated scalable capabilities such as affinity selling, click-to-call and site analytics. Ultimately, it is the smart retailers that see the 'elephant in the room' and consolidate their IT into an integrated platform that will break away from their competitors - £300m of lost sales is a lot of money to ignore.

Tagged as: atg | ecommerce

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