E-commerce - Putting it all together

I ndustry views differ sharply on how closely any new e-commerces and marketing systems may not make e-commerce transactions any more exact. website should integrate with an organisation's existing applications and processes.

On the one hand, for instance, there is the view held by Richard Goodley, managing director of Davidson-Richards, developer of Dragnet Internet sales order processing software. Goodley maintains that integration with exist-ing applications is "paramount". Meanwhile, Derek Scanlon, creative director at design and web development specialist IXL, said it is pragmatic to get the website working properly before integrating it gradually with the business.

To illustrate the point, Scanlon cited the e-commerce site he designed for music and video retailer HMV. Six months after it went live, the HMV website is only now being integrated with the rest of the business. Scanlon said keeping HMV's e-commerce site separate from the conventional retail business made good sense.

In contrast, Goodley said integration should be part of the design process.

"Orders made over the web should be integrated automatically into the sales and stock ledgers," he commented. With the right software tools, said Goodley, the impact on the existing application is slight and demands minimal effort. "The level of integration depends on the target market, but there is no reason why orders for products and services cannot be taken over the web and processed by the business accounting system in exactly the same way as a physical, verbal or telephone order - and from the time the website is implemented," he commented.

Goodley said that having two parallel systems, one manual and one automated, can lead to confusion and complication and it is better to aim for a fully-integrated e-commerce system from the start.

Scanlon's view is supported by Clare Delaney, client services director of new media specialist Clarity Communications, that has created an e-business website for The Carphone Warehouse. Every day, Carphone Warehouse staff manually pick up customer orders or enquiries logged via the website.

Dona Hammond, who handles the business created by the website, said she processes enquiries, responds to queries and passes purchases to the sales desk for fulfillment in the usual way. "We find we are still able to give customers the support and service they want without the risk of full integration before the business is ready to deal with it," commented Hammond.

Delaney said the reason for this manual approach is partly that the Carphone Warehouse product portfolio is huge and the choices complex, but also because it means the website can be changed and tweaked on the fly without having to make changes to critical business systems.

Mark Byatt, marketing director of corporate reseller, the Morse Group, takes a pragmatic view somewhere in the middle. He pointed to the Tesco Direct site, that involves some human intervention and some integration with business systems. "The orders are collected from the Tesco website and printed out for a picker who wanders around a local store selecting the goods," said Byatt. "The orders are processed through the conventional sales order system, but the orders are fulfilled manually, even though they could be done automatically at one of the central depots."

Byatt said this system gives local stores some flexibility and enables them to make intelligent decisions about substitutions, which might not be the case if they were left to an automatic process. "This solution obviously works for Tesco, even though it ignores the possibility of greater integration with automatic applications and processes," he commented.

"It would be possible to have a direct link to the Tesco back office stock control and warehouse management system, but it was not deemed the best option for this particular application."

Despite what Goodley said about the ease of integration between new e-commerce and existing applications, Byatt said the most effective e-commerce solutions are not just a matter of automating existing processes. "Sometimes the e-commerce application can completely re-engineer the existing processes and require new applications in order to process the e-business leads efficiently," he commented. "E-commerce often requires significant changes to existing applications, at the very least."

Ray McCann, marketing development manager at ICL, agreed with Clarity's Delaney and said it is possible to implement a very successful e-commerce site without any integration at all. "Mail order companies have been doing it for several years," he pointed out. "It was four years ago that we first implemented the Innovations online catalogue and at the end of each day the system printed out the orders and sent them by fax to the fulfillment point. Until the number of orders grew substantially and reached the point where it made sense to do things differently, it was cheaper and easier to process the web-based orders along with all the others."

The type of business and the type of service an organisation wants to offer will dictate the level of integration needed when the site is new, and how much can be integrated over time as the site becomes more established.

"If it is a mail order firm, there is no real advantage in being able to process the orders within minutes of them being placed. Provided they are processed within 12 hours and the goods mailed the next day at the latest, that is good enough," commented McCann. "If you run a banking service, however, you obviously need to create a website that offers customers the opportunity to look at their current account and see exactly what their account status is. For that, you need full integration between the accounts and the web."

Richard Smith, system engineer at independent information provider The Smith Group, said degrees of integration also vary with the maturity of e-commerce. "We are at the early stage of a rapidly-changing world, and at the moment the web is great for finding out what's available, and that's what most people are using it for," he said. "As time goes on, and culture changes, more people will use the web for actual purchasing not just for research. Then, it will be best to have complete integration with all back office systems. But at the moment there is nothing wrong with creating a web site, and then following up enquiries and orders with more conventional modes of communication and marketing."

THE PRO-INTEGRATION VIEW

Chris Hibbert of MSG Business Systems, that creates websites and e-commerce applications, said the benefits of integrating e-commerce sitesfully into back office business applications are:

- To widen the pool of people who can manage orders

- To make a complete list of current products and services available at all times to a wider audience

- To reduce the use of human resources by allowing customers to do all their own data entry, freeing up data entry clerks to do other work.

Hibbert said the front-end design considerations are important for customers to use the system without problems. He advised using a "shopping trolley" environment, which is becoming common and therefore will be familiar and easy for people to use from the start.

"The application needs to be much more visually attractive and inherently helpful than traditional data entry screens," said Hibbert. Tailoring can also include response to frequent visitors' requirements so that response is quicker on subsequent visits. "The screen can be tailored so that they don't have to enter all the same data time and again," he said.

Hibbert accepts that some legacy applications may be hard or impossible to integrate with e-commerce applications and that some replacement may be required. "It may be possible to leave the core function-ality of the back office systems in tact and just integrate with the data input screens and the way data is displayed," he said. It is imperative to use the right integration tool. "If data is correctly entered by the customer, you are halfway there," he said.

FIVE STEPS TO INTEGRATION

Pauline Dunne, European marketing director of integration software specialist Constellar said that what ever the degree of integration you aim for, there are five major considerations to ensure that integration is successful:

- Data currency - make sure data is processed quickly and reaches its destination without delays

- Data volumes - consider the amount of data that e-commerce will generate, how it will move around the organisation and where it will be stored

- Data staging - consider whether there will be a need to merge data from multiple sources into one logical block. If so, will some data need to be held to wait for all the source data to be collected? Data movement will need to be co-ordinated and may also be constrained by non-system issues, like differences in time zones between locations

- Interface management - consider how the interfaces will be managed and set up mechanisms to support error detection, plus auditing, performance analysis and general administration

- Scalability - make sure the e-commerce system and the integration infrastructure is able to cope with the ongoing need to integrate new applications, such as data warehouse or customer relationship management systems.