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Enterprise E-commerce and SEO / PageRank

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Enterprise eCommerce SEO

September 1, 2010

HotWax Media is the leading provider of enterprise e-commerce websites running on Apache OFBiz. We build enterprise e-commerce systems for a variety of different types and sizes of businesses, from online costume retailers to mesh materials and cutting service providers. Our enterprise e-commerce systems offer all the bells and whistles: completely custom front end designs, great merchandising features (cross-sell and up-sell, feature-driven navigation, robust pricing and promotion creation, multi-channel sales, etc.), custom shopping cart and checkout, shipping integrations with FedEx, UPS, and USPS, inventory management (receiving, stock management), order management and customer service, and much more. When it comes to robust e-commerce features, the Apache OFBiz framework combined with our unparalleled enterprise ecommerce expertise at configuring, customizing and extending OFBiz features means that our clients can have just about any e-commerce feature that they can dream up.

But a successful e-commerce enterprise requires much more than a whiz-bang system.

Perhaps more important than the site design and features is the marketing strategy that drives your online sales efforts. Let’s assume that you have a product line that makes sense — you manufacture or purchase your high-quality products at wholesale with plenty of margin to run a profitable business given reasonable sales volume. You have a great enterprise e-commerce site with all the great design and site features you wanted. Now what?

SEO (search engine optimization) is the crucial ingredient in making your online sales efforts bear fruit. Simply put, the best product in the world will not sell online if your customers cannot find you.

Online marketing is a dynamic field full of smart, ambitious professionals. Some are wildly successful on your behalf, while others will take your money for nothing. Some are hard working and forthright, and others are shysters. Ask any online business leader and they will agree: there are many aspects for a business to consider as it markets itself online and some are much more straight forward than others.

Good page content? Check. Good file names, alt tags, page titles, meta tags? Check. Site map and robots.txt file? Check. Now how to measure performance while still having time to run your business?

For SMB owners, dollars generally represent the most meaningful method for measuring progress, of course, but there are other useful indicators that can help along the way. A great place to start is Google’s PageRank.

In their paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page describe PageRank as “a model of user behavior.” They elaborate as follows: “We assume there is a “random surfer” who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting “back” but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random surfer visits a page is its PageRank.” They go on to state that “…a page can (also) have a high PageRank if there are many pages that point to it, or if there are some pages that point to it and have a high PageRank. Intuitively, pages that are well cited from many places around the web are worth looking at.”

For SMB owners, the bottom line is that a well known page (quantified by random visits and pointers from other well known web pages) will have a higher page rank. This page, in turn, will return more prominently in search engine results than lesser known pages with similar content. Step 1, then, is to create pages with higher PageRanks than those of your competition!

How does one go about measuring and boosting PageRank?

Measuring PageRank is relatively easy. There are toolbars and websites readily available that will tell you the PageRank for any given URL. For example, PR Checker gives you a web page for checking PageRank, and Google Toolbar runs right along with your browser.

Boosting PageRank takes more work, and happens by getting other pages with high PageRanks to link to your page. (For example, you can submit your site to directories like Yahoo!, and list your products on sites like Amazon.) There are many tactics and techniques to be explored, but we will not cover them in detail here. As with the rest of your online marketing strategy, boosting PageRank takes time and consistent effort. It requires good planning up front, and ongoing work to maintain and improve. But if you master the basics and keep working at it, you will see results.

HotWax Media offers online marketing packages for enterprise e-commerce businesses. Contact HotWax Media today to learn more!

Mike Bates is CEO at HotWax Media and will join other HotWax Media employees and advisers in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.
Mike Bates - OFBiz Expert

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Posted in Apache OFBiz, Enterprise eCommerce, HotWax Media, OFBiz, OFBiz eCommerce | 2 Comments »

E-Commerce and Digital Media Delivery: Interpreting the Market Signals of Piracy

Monday, August 16th, 2010

enterprise-ecommerce-piracy

August 16,2010

Since the early days of Napster’s popularity and subsequent demise as a piracy medium, we have been treated to the public spectacle of the awkward “cat and mouse” battle between owners of intellectual property and the “pirates” who live to steal it. It seems that with each new advance in technology for content delivery and file sharing, a new wave of legal efforts and public relations campaigns arise to counter its use as a method of unauthorized sharing of media. And then another previously unapologetic heavy metal thrasher first insists that we eff the man, then complains about digital piracy, and finally pirates his own music.

In some cases, it is this very battle that seems to be driving innovation in methods of digital content transfer and delivery. The protective mechanisms of legal enforcement and civil liability, at least in theory, offer a safety net to the media industry, which would otherwise likely be more actively involved in driving these innovations in content delivery themselves. Potential consumers regularly face a choice between what is to them an inefficient, old-school method of obtaining their digital content (and the high price point involved therewith), or some new and innovative, highly efficient, yet criminal alternative. For every consumer who takes the step of pirating the content, furthermore, there are likely several with similar desires who simply do the most honorable thing and choose not to buy the content or illicitly download it.

In other words, not every digital content pirate is a black hat hacker looking for the thrill of putting one over on the big media industry, or a criminal at heart who simply wants to get a product without paying. Many are simply acting on a desire to obtain the content through a more efficient medium that is not offered legitimately; and indications are that many of these people would be willing to pay for the content, delivered efficiently, if they were able to do so.

In other cases, there is an unwillingness to pay the prices demanded but not a general unwillingness to pay for content. Digital content delivery affords manufactures significant savings in production costs, and yet even some of the most innovative channels for content purchase and delivery often price the digitally-delivered product the same as an off-the-shelf retail packaged copy. One striking example of this is IGN’s Direct2Drive service for computer games. To add to the problem, these services are often still slower methods of content delivery than a highly-populated, free pirate torrent download through BitTorrent.

Jerry Kirkpatrick, professor of international business and marketing at Cal State Polytechnic has illustrated this in his article, The Market Function of Piracy

“Message to the innovative marketer? Either drop the price of the new product or produce a cheaper version — or be the first to exploit a new technology, something the movie and recording industries chose not to do. Many, including these two industries, would rather sue than practice good marketing.”

Another striking illustration of this is piracy of television series. For many consumers, the desire to download the pirated media is driven primarily by a desire to view the content in the soonest format available because it is an episodic series that they are actively following. It is not at all an indication of unwillingness to use a legitimate channel, were it available and even modestly priced, instead of piracy. (A la carte cable channels on demand, anyone?) Often ill-timed release dates and regional conflicts delays delivery through Itunes or other legitimate channels and fuels this demand.

While these considerations may or may not justify the willful violation of a copyright (read: justify? they do not), or the consequent deprivation of monetary benefit to the creator of digital content (read: innovate or die), downloads of pirated products are a very real indicator of market demand. Consumers are indicating a demand either for a lower price point or a better method of content delivery, both of which are often only available through digital piracy. Manufacturers and marketers, as well as enterprise e-commerce professionals working on new strategies and business models would be well-advised to heed these market signals… as savvy ones traditionally have.

Speaking of savvy, it is only fitting to end with a mention of Radiohead’s 2007 album In Rainbows. They offered the album via their website as a pay-what-you-like download, and the album subsequently made them more money online than all of their previous albums combined. Wired featured a great interview of Thom Yorke by David Byrne at the end of 2007 discussing the topic. Yet it should come as no surprise to anyone interested in the digital piracy space that even the In Rainbows download story is not as simple today as it may have appeared in 2007. The awkward battle continues.

Mike Bates is CEO at HotWax Media and will join other HotWax Media employees and advisers in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.
Mike Bates - OFBiz Expert

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Posted in Enterprise eCommerce, HotWax Media, OFBiz eCommerce | No Comments »

OFBiz Tutorial:Use Dependent Selects to Manage Country-State Select Boxes

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Javascript components for managing Dependent Selects is starting to find use in ecommerce applications we are developing. It all started with need for updating contents of State field, on change of Country in postal address forms.

More then a year ago we started using Ajax for updating State select box options on change of Country select box value. It was a step forward but I wasn’t satisfied. Recently I had time to build a Dependent Select javascript component that takes the process of managing dependent selects boxes to the next level. Please read my blog post, OFBiz Tutorial – Dependent Selects for Prototype, to know more about it. If you are wondering about a scenario from real world, Here you go.

Below is the piece of code from the Freemarker template for the Checkout page in OFBiz ecommerce application.  It renders Country and State select boxes with their options.

?View Code LANGUAGE
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<div>
      <label for="shipToCountryGeoId">Country</label>
<select id="shipToCountryGeoId" class="required select dependentSelectMaster" title="shipToCountry" name="shipToCountryGeoId">
        <option title="${country.geoId}" value="${country.geoId}">${country.get("geoName")?default(country.geoId)}</option>
        <!--#list-->
      </select></div>
<div id="shipToStates">
      <label for="shipToStateProvinceGeoId">State</label>
<select id="shipToStateProvinceGeoId" class="required shipToCountry" name="shipToStateProvinceGeoId">
        <option class="${country.geoId}" title="${stateAssoc.geoId}" value="${stateAssoc.geoId}">&lt;#if shippingAddress.stateProvinceGeoId?has_content &amp;&amp; shippingAddress.stateProvinceGeoId?default("") == stateAssoc.geoId&gt; SELECTED <!--#if-->&gt;${stateAssoc.geoName?default(stateAssoc.geoId)}</option>
            <!--#list-->
          <!--#if-->
        <!--#list-->
      </select></div>

Following Javascript code will unobtrusively manage the relationship between Country select box (master) and State select box (slave),

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$('checkoutPanel').select('.dependentSelectMaster').reverse().each( function (elt) {
  new Dependent( $$( '.'+elt.title ).first() , elt );
})

Where ‘checkoutPanel’ is Id of wrapper div that encloses checkout html form. Apply ‘dependentSelectMaster’ class to select boxes that have dependent slave elements, making them the master. Slave select box is related to its master using title and class attribute of elements, A select box is slave if it has a class applied to it that is equal to title of master select box.

The javascript code snippet traverses DOM tree looking for master select boxes. Using title attribute of master select it finds all the slaves and creates Dependent select relationship between them. Its all clean and simple.

Needless to say, you’ll need to include Prototype.js and DependentSelect.js in your webpage. I hope you will find this short OFBiz tutorial useful.

- Anil

Anil Patel is Chief Development Officer at HotWax Media as well as an OFBiz project committer, PMC member, and active community contributor. He also studies karate! Anil will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.

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Posted in Apache OFBiz, Apache OFBiz Development, Enterprise eCommerce, HotWax Media, OFBiz Tutorials, OFBiz eCommerce, Prototype Tutorials | No Comments »

Pricing Enterprise E-commerce Services

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Enterprise-e-Commerce

The enterprise e-commerce space is broadly varied, and the boundaries constantly shifting. Features and capabilities only available to huge players just 10 years ago are now more affordable and available to SMBs around the world.

Sometimes just using the term ‘enterprise e-commerce,’ however, can be difficult or misleading. Is enterprise e-commerce the right term to use for a company with 10,000 SKUs, doing a few million dollars a year in online sales? In the event that they manage their suppliers, inventory, warehouse, and fulfillment using an integrated system, for example, I would say yes — this counts as ‘enterprise e-commerce.’ Although clearly no Amazon or Zappos, these companies and their systems take it far beyond the simple eBay auction or basic storefront.

At HotWax Media, we provide enterprise e-commerce consulting services. Our core services are based around Apache OFBiz, but we regularly find ourselves integrating with 3rd party systems like NetSuite, Endicia, and many others. One day it could be SAP with multiple users, and the next day it could be QuickBooks piloted by the business owner herself. The very nature of an enterprise e-commerce system suggests that the consulting services can be quite different from one client to the next, and we have certainly found this to be true. We can find ourselves building systems that are similar in fundamental intent for companies whose revenues are separated by two orders of magnitude.

So the question comes up, what is the right way to go about pricing these services? Constructive Cost Model? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO) Probably not. Simple menu of services with some attention to psychology? (http://bit.ly/NLo3V) That’s better because it is more easily understood by the client, but it is not always easy to do on our end.

In fact, when doing unique service projects, you might say that with a fixed price, someone always loses. (http://bit.ly/9E0bbP) Either the vendor pads the cost to cover any surprises, and he wins, or the vendor fails to anticipate (and build in money to cover) the surprises, and he loses. The only thing for certain is that those surprises will come up, and someone will have to pay for them.

The next option is straight hourly work. This should be great for the vendor, but can lead to problems of its own in terms of project and cost management. When vendors are working on a straight hourly arrangement, they have less incentive to plan. While the idea of paying the vendor for his time is fair and honest, hourly projects (that lack planning) can end up costing more than the customer originally planned, and the projects can look expensive in hindsight. When the project is complete, lacking adequate planning, the tendency is to look back and say “All they wanted was X and it cost them Y!?” The problem is that the curvy, flexible path made possible by the hourly arrangement is overlooked in that simple analysis. By the way, this happens all the time with contractors, attorneys, and everyone else who offers services for an hourly rate; it’s not just software developers.

So this brings me to my method of choice for pricing projects: fixed team project planning and pricing. This approach can allow for the best of both worlds. In practice this ends up looking a lot like phased pricing, except that the cost does not vary month to month (except by mutual agreement). Rather, the dedicated team comes at a predictable expense and works off of a well formed project plan. (The creation of the plan is paid work as well, and can be more or less detailed depending on the size of the project and the client’s preference.) Then, the flexibility that real life requires comes in the form of more or less work being completed in each month (or phase).

So we can say, “We have a list of 10 items. We can be very confident that we will complete 5 of them, somewhat confident that we will complete 7 of them, and only slightly confident that we will complete all 10 of them.” At the end of each month, we reassess our plan and make adjustments based team velocity and client priority, leveraging the things we have learned while working on the implementation.

In conclusion: we do a lot of deals each year, and our approach to pricing varies a bit job to job. But whenever possible, we like this fixed team approach. It gives the client and provider both a fair deal, and encourages all parties to plan responsibly. We encourage you to try it out; if you would like us to help you with your enterprise e-commerce project using our fixed team approach, give us a call today!

Mike Bates is CEO at HotWax Media and will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.
Mike Bates - OFBiz Expert

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Posted in Apache OFBiz, Apache OFBiz Development, Enterprise eCommerce, OFBiz, OFBiz eCommerce | 4 Comments »

eCommerce Software Market Musing

Friday, May 28th, 2010

eCommerce Software Market
B2C Partners estimates the size of the total US market for online retail software last year to be $415 million. (http://bit.ly/NSzsg)) That seems too small to me.

B2C Partners uses the following method for arriving at their estimate:
$ 166 billion online revenue (2008)
A. x 3% of revenue for development & technology
B. x 50% of dev/tech for site improvement (v. support)
C. x 50% of eCommerce platforms third party (v. in-house)
D. x 33.3% of Year 1 costs on software (v. services to deploy)

(I have added the A. – D. line labels for ease of reference.)

Let’s start with A. — the percentage of revenue spent on software development and technology. According to B2C Partner’s very respectable sources (SORO Report 2007, Forrester Research and Shop.org) the range is actually 3% – 5%, and I suppose using 5% would have a large impact. In fact, it pushes that $415 million dollar market size up to over $690 million, which I like better.

Moving on to B., apart from the difficulty that sometimes comes with distinguishing between improvements and support, I do not see any big problems there.

When we get to C. and D., however, things start to get interesting. At HotWax Media we have an enterprise software services business that specializes in Apache OFBiz, which is a suite of open source enterprise e-commerce and ERP applications. As we have worked with a variety of businesses on many different types of projects over the years, we have found that some customers think of Apache OFBiz as a 3rd party platform, while others think of OFBiz as the root of their own in-house platform. Both concepts can work out great, and it generally depends on the client’s internal technology staffing as to whether the client’s behaviors are more inline with a traditional 3rd party platform project, or more what we would expect with a traditional in-house platform project. We regularly see projects that blur the line.

As OFBiz implementation experts, I suspect that this would have the effect of making the market relatively larger from our perspective (given that we could theoretically count revenue from the 50% who implement a 3rd party platform as well as the other 50% who use an “in-house” system). Great, we’ll take that extra $2 billion dollars in market opportunity!

Then there is the question of line D., which divides the software spend by 1/3 to differentiate between the cost of licensing versus services to deploy. Apache OFBiz is free and open source, so our service engagement customers do not need to think about it this way (nor do they need to sacrifice 1/3 of their year 1 budget on licensing fees). So for HotWax Media’s enterprise software implementation services business, we can really leave line D. out of the equation, since there are no licensing fees.

So when we add in the extra $2 billion to cover the 3rd party versus in-house distinction, and we refrain from pulling out the 33.3% to represent licensing fees, using the 5% of revenue number mentioned above, our enterprise e-commerce and ERP online retail software services market size is actually well north of $4 billion. (And that’s just in retail.) Quite a big difference from $415 million estimate with which we began.

I see a 3-part moral of the story:

1. a system has an advantage if it offers the client the options of in-house development or 3rd party reliance;

2. software that does not require a licensing fee can present a huge opportunity for increased returns on project investment; and

3. vendors that are well positioned to deliver implementation services on open source enterprise systems have a lot of budget to go out and win if they can make the case effectively to online retail business owners and corporate CIOs!

Author’s note: I realize that over the course of the post I have transitioned from “online retail software” market size to “online retail software services” market size, but I hope the transition was instructive in some ways, especially as it relates to the potential value in using open source software to reduce or eliminate licensing fees.

Mike Bates is CEO at HotWax Media and will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.
Mike Bates - OFBiz Expert

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Posted in Apache OFBiz, Enterprise eCommerce, HotWax Media | No Comments »

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