Stanfords Case Study (Lecture 4)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

October 22, 2008 [6201 views]

Outline

1. Show the complexity of professional ecommerce projects
2. Examine the work involved in creating the system
3. Describe the technical infrastructure
4. Introduce some of the business and marketing issues
5. Show how the site is integrated within the wider business
6. Demonstrate how ongoing work is needed to support the client

Basic information

1. Client: Edward Stanfords Ltd
2. Site: Stanfords.co.uk
3. Project start date: May 2006
4. Site launch date: December 2006 (and again March 2007)
5. Scale of project: 12 person months
6. URL: http://www.stanfords.co.uk

Goals from original proposal (Feb 2006)

1. Create a site that supports the business to drive significant revenue
2. Develop a confident, fast loading and engaging Stanfords online design
3. Reorganise the presentation of the content around “landing pages” (places, audience needs, technologies) that meet identified customer needs
4. Improve the site navigation to reflect the hierarchical nature of geographical classification
5. Optimise the shopping process and encourage purchasing. This involves creating a smooth customer journey
6. Provide full content management, store management and reporting
7. Integrate the site into the existing business processes
8. Work to make the site accessible to all audiences
9. Optimise the design and the content for search engine indexing
10. Help experiment with site features to drive increasing traffic and revenue
11. Provide long term support and hosting
12. Provide foundations for expansion of on and offline marketing activities

What we actually did for Stanfords?

1. Redesigned the “look and feel” of the site to match their branding
2. Introduced a radically different way of searching for products using modern AJAX technologies
3. Optimised the site for search engines through the introduction of landing pages and improved tagging
4. Provide content management tools for magazine and general interest content
5. Integrated with the company’s retail system Trilogy http://www.trilogygroup.com/
6. Provide ongoing marketing, hosting and systems support
7. Developing a new additional site for the business-to-business aspects of the company
8. Help Stanfords track visitors through their site and monitor effectiveness of their marketing

The challenges of this project

1. 30,000 – 100,000 specialist products (maps, travel guides, travel accessories) most associated with one or more geographic locations
2. Product taxonomy is highly complex because a product (or a series) may be associated with continents, countries, subregions, super-regions, cities as well as with product categories
3. Some product categories have many products while most have very few
4. Uneven global distribution of product titles presents navigation problems
5. “Product quality gradings” need to allow better products to be featured higher up search results than less highly rated products
6. Spider activity seriously affected first version of new site

Technical infrastructure (simplified)

1. Stanfords web site built on scalable J2EE framework
2. Webserver to serve main site (running OTHERobjects CMS)
3. Website database running on separate hardware
4. Web services (XML) provide communication between retail system and web site
5. Transaction server supports web services on web server end (synchronisation, order passing, payment)
6. Web services server (on client site) provides XML wrapper for Trilogy retail system
7. Trilogy retail system running on Microsoft architecture over multiple sites/servers
8. Web server architecture mirrored to create development environment
9. Payment taken by Trilogy (via their interface with payment gateway Commidea)

1. Definitive database held within Trilogy (products, orders, customers, promotions, images, classification system) – this is used within the whole business (shops and online)
2. Softer marketing information held within content management system on web server
3. Data synchronised periodically with web site database depending on volatility (product catalogue updated every few hours)

Helping the customer find products

1. Three interfaces proposed: “free text” search, location/product taxonomy and mapping
2. Text search implemented by internal “relevance” based search engine (Lucene) modified to detect “direct location/product” matches and for product quality (reputation)
3. Location/product taxonomy implemented using AJAX widget - relies on behind the scenes calls from the web page to the database
4. First version (December 2006) was too slow due to number of database queries and has been optimised through extensive caching
5. Mapping interface prototyped but much more difficult than it appears because of uneven distribution of products (Peru and Paris have 100s but France 10,000)
6. Many customers will start their search on Google rather than on the site

What are we doing now?

1. Continuing to optimise the site to allow fuller indexing by search engines
2. Promotions, affiliates and further integration with Trilogy
3. Designing Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
4. Analysing traffic and looking for clues as to how this should inform marketing
5. Improving content presentation for Christmas and seasonal campaigns
6. Rebuilding separate B2B site
7. Providing ongoing strategy and marketing support

General lessons

1. Modelling products is often more complex than you will imagine
2. Helping customers find best, most relevant products is key
3. Integration with existing (or developing) retail systems can be complex
4. Web services provide clean industry standard interfaces between systems
5. Search engines can be key to a business

The changing market for maps online

1. Consider the effect of Google Maps and mashups
2. Lonely Planet recently bought by BBC Worldwide
3. Guardian Travel Blogs
4. Customised digital maps and satellite images
5. Impact of mobile

What do you think?

Add your comments