A01 chaf6542 06 se fm indd

Selecting e‑commerce servers

E-commerce servers provide many of the capabilities of a CMS, but they focus on the needs 

of promoting product information and supporting the purchase process. The basic facili-

ties of display of product content in different categories will be similar, so many of the most 

important requirements will relate to integration with other internal and external systems. 

Specific requirements of e-commerce servers include integration with:

● 

Product catalogue systems to import the latest products.

● 

Feeds to support shopping comparison engines such as Google Product Search or 

Shopzilla.

● 

Advanced shopping search or faceted browsing systems such as Endeca (

www.endeca.

com

), Mercado and Google Mini Search appliance (

www.google.com/enterprise

).

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Part 3  Implementation

  

● 

   Merchandising systems  which recommend appropriate products and promotions to visi-

tors, for example ATG (

 www.atg.com

 ).  

  

● 

   Customer service solutions  including click-to-call or click-to-chat systems (e.g.  

www.atg.com

 ).  

  

● 

   Customer reviews and ratings systems , for example BazaarVoice ( 

www.bazaarvoice.com

 ) 

and Feefoo ( 

www.feefo.com

 ).  

  

● 

   Payment systems , for example Netbanx ( 

www.netbanx.com

 ), Verisign ( 

www.verisign.

com

 ), Worldbank ( 

www.worldbank.com

 ) and consumer systems Google Checkout ( 

www.

google.com/checkout

 ) and PayPal ( 

www.paypal.com

 ).  

  

● 

   Enterprise resource management systems  for supply chain management and order 

 fulfi lment, for example SAP ( 

www.sap.com

 ).  

  

● 

   Testing and web analytics systems  since retailers will want to optimise their pages by 

 trialling  diff erent  versions  to  increase  conversion  rates.      

  Testing 

  

Testing

  has two main objectives: first, to check for  non-  conformance with the business and 

user requirements, and, second, to identify bugs or errors. In other words, it checks that the 

site does what users need and is reliable. Testing is an iterative process that occurs through-

out development. As  non-  conformances are fixed by the development team, there is a risk 

that the problem may not have been fixed and that new problems have been created. Further 

testing is required to check that solutions to problems are effective.