Key ideas in modern ecommerce (lecture 10)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

December 9, 2009 [1209 views]

In this final lecture I want to draw together all the themes of the course and ask you to reflect on what you have learned.

Please note that there is no video for this session (due to camera operator error). However the notes below provide a good summary of what was discussed.

1. Systems are interconnected through web services: payment, postcodes, fulfillment, availability etc
2. Most large retailers have already built effective ecommerce. Many smaller retailers are catching up. http://www.johnlewis.com/
3. Focus now is on improving the customer experience: personalisation, decision support, rich media
4. Ecommerce systems are built using sophisticated software frameworks; from low cost hosted systems such as Shopify through to scalable, multi-tiered architecture systems from IBM, Microsoft and specialist vendors
5. Marketing and promotion has become key including use of social media, search engine marketing. PPC advertising and reputation building. This demonstrates the dominance of search engines and especially Google
6. Amazon is particularly interesting in developing competences in many new areas: third party markets, personalisation, hosting and hosted services
7. eBay’s auction model is proving much less resilient than expected and eBay is trying to re-invent itself as Amazon but may be too late
8. PCI compliance http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/ makes designing and building secure ecommerce more difficult as measures are taken to try and stamp out Internet fraud
9. Business intelligence is growing in importance as conversion rate optimisation using analytics becomes central to any business that wants to maximise its results online. A/B testing will become commonplace for sites.

Consider ecommerce as a career

1. If you are interested in developing your own business and are prepared to get behind the scenes (Shopify + mashups + marketing + CSS + business)
2. If you decide to specialise in the development of ecommerce software (decision support, search, web services, personalisation)
3. If you are interested in marketing (SEO, reputation, PPC, analytics, social computing)
4. If you could be a good systems administrator (Linux, Cloud computing, virtualisation, performance tuning, system configuration)
5. If you are interested in designing great visitor/customer journeys as an information architect or usability engineer
6. If you would make a good strategist/analyst (competitor research, analytics, business intelligence, A/B test design)

Take away from this course

1. Ecommerce is both easier and harder than it looks
2. Reputation is everything
3. Web services connect systems and partners
4. Landing pages form the starting points for visitor journeys
5. Google makes the most from PPC
6. Learn to prototype and create mashups
7. Create outline budgets
8. Develop skills for analysing the good and bad features of sites
9. Be prepared to make recommendations for changes
10. Effective PPC campaigns need to be designed carefully and monitored

What do you think?

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