Situation
The world’s largest publisher’s e-commerce sites were overwhelmed
with visitors. As a result of high demand and the sites’ limitations,
down-time was frequent. Furthermore, business units had to satisfy consumer
requests for additional functionality and a quicker response time.
Partner
The client needed a partner who could stabilize the current platform
while beginning an initiative to redesign the entire e-commerce infrastructure.
eRichards was chosen as this partner because of its extensive experience.
eRichards supported the client for more than six years through numerous
system iterations.
Objectives
The project’s objectives were complex: launch an e-commerce
presence for the client and it’s 120 different imprints, integrate
customer orders into four different fulfillment systems, provide a subscription
model for institutional clients, all while maintaining a high level of
consistent branding and service to both B2B and B2C clients.
The solution had to fit a template framework so that new storefronts
could be generated quickly and efficiently. Time was critical because
amazon.com was gaining market share.
In addition, with multiple fulfillment systems to integrate, scheduling
was critical. At the time the client was involved with a large ERP implementation.
High level requirements were as follows:
| • |
Create an e-commerce framework
that supports selling books, digital content, and parts of books
(chunk selling) |
| • |
The framework must resemble
a template solution to facilitate the rapid creation of new storefronts |
| • |
Provide a subscription
framework for companion Web sites in an authentication model |
| • |
Architect the site for
reliability, availability, security, scalability, manageability,
interoperability, adaptability, ease-of-development, affordability,
and ease-of-use |
| • |
Maintain 99% production
site availability |
| • |
Mentor client staff with
the new technology |
Approach
To confirm the needs of the different business units, the eRichards
team identified and analyzed the gaps between the current state and the
desired state. Following this gap analysis the eRichards team completed
a technology assessment, identified best-of-breed products, and selected
a software vendor.
Since this was the largest publisher in the world, with over 120 different
imprints in multiple currencies, the architecture had to be flexible
and responsive to multiple business models. In addition, all levels of
security had to be addressed to protect against denial-of-service attacks.
After careful analysis, eRichards selected the Netscape Merchant and
Netscape Publishing System, the Oracle database management system, and
the Verity search engine.
Priorities were outlined, a project plan was developed, and implementation
began. Weekly update meetings kept the project’s multiple initiatives
aligned. eRichards used best practices and proven methods from previous
successful implementations to avoid the pitfalls traditionally associated
with large e-commerce integrations.
Results
Site was launched on time with all required functionality.
Corporate storefronts were in production in less then four months. A
template solution was established so accommodating new requirements was
a quick and painless task. A monitoring system was in place to handle
all “system events”. All order feeds were integrated into
the back-end legacy systems. The e-commerce platforms were stable and
responsive, and traffic increased to over 4 million hits per day from
the previous 600,000. |
