Recipe for Social Commerce

As a continuation to my previous post on Social Commerce, this one follows the implementation of a Social Commerce project I led as a technical director for almost 1.5 years. The project was for a very well known instrument manufacturer that set on a mission to create a very unique site offering engaging eLearning content, entertainment videos, Social Networking and eCommerce.

Site Features

With a laundry list of features, and a highly customized online eLearning system, we set out to deliver the following core site features/functions.

> User and group-level blogging and forums
> Live Chat sessions
> Streaming HD eLearning and entertainment video content (live and pre-recorded)
> Streaming audio content (live and pre-recorded)
> YouTube-like video sharing
> Flickr-like photo sharing
> News articles
> Wikipedia-like library of articles
> eCommerce Store
> End-to-end site search
> Single sign-on user accounts

Technology

To deliver the site, a combination of platforms and technical solutions were used.

> Community Server
- User for all social networking features and functionality
> AspDotNetStorefront
- Used for all eCommerce features and functionality
> Custom eLearning System
- This was built on a customized eLearning database, layered with rich .NET and Flash user controls (e.g. video players, chat with instructor, note taking etc.)
> Custom Flash Video Player
- These were used throughout the site to stream video content at multiple angles, resolutions and chapters/sections
> LHTTPD
- Used to allow for “scrubbing” across a video at any position and start the stream at that position without having to wait for all of it to buffer.
> FFMPEG
- Used to convert multi-format video content to Flash format when users and content producers uploaded their video and audio files.
> Representational State Transfer (REST) Web Services
- The core API that wrapped Community Server and AspDotNetStorefront API was built on REST for improved response times, scalability, compatibility.
> CuteChat for Community Server
- Used to deliver the live chat sessions

Building a Social Commerce Site – A First Hand Experience

This blog post will be part of a string of articles related to Social Commerce and my first-hand experience at designing and building one of the most compelling and unique Social Commerce sites for the music industry. As for the details on this site, you will get a chance to see it publicly within a month and experience the rich media, content and social commerce model it delivers. Stay tuned!

To first set some perspective and align your understanding of Social Commerce, below are details on what Social Commerce is and the current opportunity in the market for e-Commerce sites to pursue it.

“Social commerce is a subset of e-Commerce in which the active participation of customers and their personal relationships are at the forefront. The main element is the involvement of a customer in the marketing of products being sold e.g. recommendations and comments from customers.” and the eventual monetization of this process through the sale of a product – Wikipedia

Your typical e-Commerce site converts at 2%. Meaning, an average of 2 in 100 people purchase products when visiting an e-Commerce site. Sounds unrealistic doesn’t it? Well, it is mostly true – granted sites like Amazon, Eastbay and NewEgg do much better.

Social Commerce models will help break this barrier by engaging buyers with entertainment and rich community content to keep them online longer, therefore increasing the conversion rate. The longer a user is on your site being entertained by video/photo/testimonial reviews of products, the more likely they will eventually buy something.

Taking this a step further, let’s take a look at the evolutionary steps of online commerce. Brick-and-mortar stores in the early/mid 1990’s started pursuing an online presence with e-Commerce sites and online catalogs. This led to the massive growth of online commerce during the Internet bubble with sites like Amazon for example, offering a wide variety of products for sale online.

The whole concept of shopping from your home or office was a breakthrough – not needing to go to the store and hassle with lines, low inventory etc. became a thing of the past.

The past 2-3 years have been shifting online commerce into a new evolutionary phase. This phase is driven by the fact that online commerce is unable to get anywhere close to the 70% offline revenue generated by brick-and-mortar stores. But why is this?! Well, simply because 2% of online shoppers actually buy something when visiting an average e-Commerce site, and also because e-Commerce sites are not “sticky” – meaning they are not engaging.

The current state of e-Commerce sites are that they act as online catalogs with some features of user participation (e.g. reviews, ratings and comments). Clearly not enough to keep buyers entertained. Alternatively, if you walk into the Apple store, for example, you are entertained and engaged – this keeps the customer in the store experiencing the product physically and sharing experiences with others. This enhances the emotionally-driven shopping cycle that attributes to 70% of offline revenue being generated by “product discovery”.

Product discovery is driven by advice from friends, feeling and trying a product out, learning from others what their experiences are etc. Social community sites that generate this content (e.g. Engaget, DP Reviews etc.) generate the online content necessary to bridge that “product discovery” experience. The future of social commerce is about blending content that these sites generate with an e-Commerce model – keep the buyer engaged, and provide that instant buy-now capability.

Now for some interesting numbers…

In an IDC estimate, social networks only made about $400 million in revenues in 2006, but could make as much as $1 billion in 2007. AC Nielsen also noted that nearly 40% of Americans say they participate in online communities, with sites around hobbies, shared personal interests, and health-related issues among the most popular. All these numbers point to signs of an emerging online market space.

Well, all this ideas and numbers are great and fantastic, but how can we get it done?

The answer lies in technologies/solutions that are already available, and were in fact used on the soon to be launched site.

There are several advanced e-Commerce platforms that offer the out-of-box functionality needed to put a store online almost instantly. Products like AspDotNetStorefront for small to mid, and soon large, sized businesses, MediaChase ECF for mid to large size businesses, and Microsoft Commerce Server for large to enterprise businesses.

Taking these platforms and blending/merging them with Community Server, allows you to leverage the community aspects/features into the e-Commerce model. Product reviews, videos, photos, forums, live chat and much more will help add that “stickiness” to an e-Commerce site and break the 2% barrier that many e-Commerce businesses are striving to breach.

From a technical aspect, these types of blended products will provide single sign-on and unified accounts, seamless community-to-commerce and commerce-to-community purchasing and publication processes, integrated administrative interfaces and highly customized and extended applications running on a unified SOA model.

In conclusion, there is a great market opportunity picking up steam, and solutions out there that can be leveraged to provide for a social commerce platform.

In my next post, I will present the project/site I worked on and discuss the technical solutions used to deliver it.

Development Best Practices

Leverage Internal Methodologies and Frameworks for Designing Applications

> Use existing examples of documentation from other projects.
> Use cases, detailed functional requirements and high-level business/entity objects.
> Enforce database design practices (e.g. ERDs, data models etc.)

Stub Generation and Low-Level Design Documents

> Technical meeting to review all requirements and scope low-level documentation requirements.
> Oversight by tech-lead/senior-dev/DBA during design or development phase.
> Document entities, data application layer, business logic layer and presentation layer.
> Create activity diagrams and sequence diagrams for application flow and object interactions.

Sign-off by Developer per Task

> Developers should fully understand all design requirements, and tech lead should enforce.

Code Review

> Code review as per development standards/methodologies.
> Tech lead should ensure architecture is scalable, extensible and modular.
> Tech lead should ensure proper source code versioning, branching and commenting/documenting.

Testing

> Create manual test scripts for the site and follow them for system and regression testing.
> Developer should test on latest version of IE, Firefox and Safari for basic browser compatibility testing.
> Create and enforce automated unit-tests and test scripts for custom development using tools like nUnit, SQLUnit, Visual Studio Test projects.

Standardize Output

> Enforce development tools across on-site and off-shore development teams.
> Enforce a library/framework based on design requirements.
> Tech lead should leverage UML and modeling tools (e.g. Enterprise Architect, Rational Rose etc.)
> Tech lead should be fully responsible for managing all builds and enforcing rules with team (e.g. branching, tagging etc.)
> Use collaboration tools like Team Foundation Server and Sharepoint to track issues/bugs across team members.

Single Sign On with AspDotNetStorefront and Community Server

The ongoing debate and question continues… However, as of late, some breakthroughs on my end in this area.

Basically, with a little bit of tweaking, hacking, cheating, and fooling, AspDotNetStorefront (ASPDNSF) and Community Server (CS) can live happily ever after in a single user session and “share” user account information.

And now, for the approach… In broad strokes:

1. Setup ASPDNSF and CS in their own virtual Webs within the same domain (e.g. domain.com/community, domain.com/store/)
2. Set both ASPDNSF and CS Web.config machine keys and cookie names to be identical.
3. Modify ASPDNSF code where it reads/writes to the cookie to reference the new shared name.
4. Add a column in ASPDNSF customer table that stores the CS user name (so when a user account is created on CS it will create a user account in ASPDNSF with a matching user name)
5. Modify ASPDNSF code where it reads cookie to pickup the user name (since CS will write the user name to the cookie and not a ASPDNSF GUID as ASPDNSF normally does out of box), then using that user name lookup ASPDNSF’s customer GUID in the DB and reference that for the ASPDNSF session.
6. Locate all locations in stored procedures that create/update user accounts to handle the new CS user name column.

This will ultimately allow you to sign into CS, then go to domain.com/store/ and get automatically signed into ASPDNSF since the cookie already has your sign-in information and a matching session record is located in ASPDNSF’s database.

As for the rest of the details – specific code changes, stored procedures etc., more details to come later when time permits.

Finally, since CS and ASPDNSF have URL re-writing engines we can elegantly handle those elaborate URL’s so things look nice and clean when a user view’s a ASPDNSF page and a CS page.

Hope that helps with some people out there… Enjoy!

Solutions Customization and Integration – Part III

It has been a while since I posted an update on this project… So here it goes.

Since my last post, the project I am working on has evolved to a 3-piece solution tying in AspDotNetStorefront ML 7.0, Community Server 2007 SP1 and a fully custom e-Learning solution built on Flash and .NET controls.

Due to the complexity and unique features on this project, the architecture and design grew to be very specific and custom – beyond the normal skinning of the out-of-box products and turning features on/off. The final architecture came down to an intermediate Data Application Layer (DAL) and Business Logic (BL) layer that encapsulates and partly overrides the methods/classes provided by Community Server and AspDotNetStorefront. The thinking behind this implementation is to retain the core functionality of both systems, allowing us to implement software upgrades easily and support the application maintenance and enhancement lifecycle. The e-Learning system, being that it’s designed from scratch, will expose a custom BL and DAL.

Interfacing with Community Server’s and AspDotNetStorefront’s API allows us to work outside the framework of classes/methods provided by both products, as well as build our own custom layer of methods/classes to define and produce entities that consume/provide data apparent to the application as designed. The presentation layer, will be modeled around the common ASP.NET practices of .aspx files, custom controls and a selection of controls from ComponenetArt’s WebUI product.

The single sign-on architecture has changed slightly since my last post. The approach taken now, for the sake of simplicity and ease of management, is to have Community Server act as the central point for account management/creation using ASP.NET’s membership provider, and have back-end processes that replicate billing/transactional data to AspDotNetStorefront. This allows us to collect all the data we need about a user in a User entity from the Community Server and AspDotNetStorefront databases.

The project is currently undergoing the initial stages of development, with a target date for launch of mid-2008. Stay tuned for more updates…