This will be your primary source for ECF G5 product news and announcements.

It's located at http://ecommerce.mediachase.com.

According to marketing firm Netflare, smaller companies just aren't good at eCommerce and many of these companies across 19 small business sectors lack any eCommerce components in their websites.  In other words, a very large number of small businesses aren't taking advantage of their websites to generate sales and give customers an easy way to buy products online.

And with online sales to grow over the course of a few years, this becomes a major sticking point for smaller firms.

According to an article posted by emarketer.com, customers who directly input an URL or bookmark a page are likely to spend more and peruse a page longer than those who visit sites via paid and organic search results. 

The conversation rate for a direct visitor is 3.3% and the average order is $170, whereas indirect visitors are more more likely to bounce around from site to site, view them at shorter intervals, and spend less overall.

However, the general marketing strategy for any e-commerce site is to encompass various channels to increase overall traffic and sales.

Expect major growth in the mobile commerce space as Internet-enabled cell phones and cheaper carrier data plans become even more ubiquitous. Apple’s iPhone raised the bar—and damand—for intuitive, desktop-like browsing experiences on a pocket-sized device. The history of mobile web browsing has been anemic, to say the least. Mobile browsers, such as Palm’s Blazer and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Mobile, offer little more than rudimentary, dull, and often contemptible browsing experiences. While not perfect, Apple’s mobile Safari platform is almost revolutionary in scope—no need for a “mobile version” of cnn.com. With the recent improvements in Opera Software’s latest Opera Mini and the recent announcement of Firefox mobile, mainstream mobile web browsing will soon become a less excruciating experience. That means more consumers will use their mobile devices to browse the web as they would be in front of their desktop or laptop. And the convenience of shopping on the train, the subway, the park, or the toilet stall will be a boon for online retailers. Imagine ordering your groceries ahead of time right before you get there, or even better, get that hot latte just as you arrive at the front entrance. Mobile commerce, as phone software improves, will be a powerful motivator for the consumer on the go.

Using money orders and the usual slew of consumer credit cards aren’t enough. Why not, at the least, include a Paypal option? Or how about Bill Me Later. The folks over at Google are following the same trends and created Google Checkout to give online consumers even greater flexibility and purchasing power. Increasing the number payment options actually bolster online sales, according to a report by ecommercetrends.com. There was on average a 14 percent increase in sales by online retailers who offered three or more payment methods. And more and more online retailers are adopting alternative payment methods, with an average of 2.6 payment methods per retailer last year, as opposed to 2.1 in 2005. Expect an even greater jump in 2008 as Paypal, Bill Me Later, and Google Checkout, arguably the top three alternative payment methods, attract rapid adoption.

A Quick Summary

A recent business survey conducted last month involving participants from 347 retailers, manufacturers, agencies and high-tech companies worldwide revealed that quite a good number of companies are looking to enhance their customer’s online web experience in 2008. Findings showed that more than 50 percent plan to deploy new features and rich internet enhancements – including enhanced imagery, personalization and user-generated content – to their sites within the next six months and 93 percent say they will deploy these within the year. According to the survey, the greatest growth areas for planned features are mobile commerce, URL/widget sharing, personalized messaging and user ratings.

When dealing with an online sales presence, one major key is the company’s ability to differentiate itself from the rest of the pack. Respondents indicated that one of the most highly-effective features for online businesses is a 360-degree spin, which the survey found to be not yet widely deployed. Other top-ranking features and functionalities identified by respondents include: alternate views, user ratings, videos, blogs, product tours, online catalogs, personalized messaging, quick looks and personalized stores.

One-third of the respondents said they incorporated zoom and alternate view functionality in their sites. Twenty-five percent of the respondents said they have deployed the following features and functionalities: microsites, videos, online catalogs, personalized stores, blogs, color swatching, quick looks, RSS and product tours.

So What’s New?

Aware of this trend toward personalization focused on optimizing customer experience, Mediachase’s ECF G5 Asset Management subsystem is our attempt to provide a robust architecture on which to build unique personalization and other types of customizations that suit your uinque business needs.

The Asset Management subsystem is designed to support a variety of different types of binary data. This subsystem will be included as part of our G5 Enterprise version (ECF G5) and its conception was driven by years and years of customer feedback to have a unified way to store various types of data including: images, videos, software downloads, PDFs or whatever you need.

But ours is not an asset library in your traditional sense where things are mapped in a one-to-one relationship. Digital assets in our G5 subsystem can, for example, be used by other sub systems to associate a set of images with a particular category or product.

The Asset Management subsystem is built using technology from our Instant Business Network product, or IBN, called "Business Application Foundation," or BAF. This architecture is what allows for the flexible configuration of custom fields to an unlimited combination of associations to various types of binary data.

For example, let’s say you want to have width and height for an image and you want to record these attributes seamlessly. With BAF technology, you can create handlers so that these properties are auto-populated at the file metadata level and fields created in the database whenever an image file is uploaded.

High Level Feature List

• Provider-based storage
  • You can decide how and where the files are stored based on file meta type, location of the folder assets, the size of the file, and other attributes
  • By default, the file system and database storage providers are included
• Provider-based downloads
  • You can decide how the downloads are handled
  • By default, there are three providers: IIS, an http module and an http handler
• Provider-based security
  • You can intercept requests for downloads and enforce some security checks
  • This is especially useful for implementations that are based on subscriptions

For more info, please visit our Wiki.

For those who find implementing payment gateways intimidating, practicalecommerce.com offers some hints and tips for developers.  Just make sure your implementation is PCI compliant and secure, as we've touched on earlier.

We often hear of Web 2.0 being centered around the idea of social networking among friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances, and some guy you just met on the street five minutes ago.   Facebook, MySpace, and the rest of their ilk remain popular for one reason: they make it easy to communicate with a catalog of friends and other users in an often disconnected world outside of a desktop.  So much so, micro-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaiku are the current Silicon Valley darlings because they focus on the core communication element of Web 2.0 technologies with ease and simplicity (“What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less in Twitter’s case.)

How then, does social networking translate into the ecommerce sphere of influence?  There’s a lot of potential there.  Read user reviews on Amazon.com for instance; read the comment threads after each review.  Ask yourself this question: “After reading the reviews on the Zune, am I more likely to buy it or look at the other recommendations?”  There’s inherent value in a user review because potential customers acknowledge those reviewers used the product, tested it, and cared enough to post about their experiences.

That’s why you have Amazon and eBay opening up their Web APIs to allow developers to leverage their technologies and use their own websites as development platforms to create basic, customized storefronts.  When you add feedback forums, communities, chat rooms, discussion boards,  and dynamic buying guides, there is global customer interaction that cannot be emulated by a simple drive to the local brick and mortar retail store, where the primary advantage is actually being able to touch and test drive a product before purchasing it.

This is where the scalability and flexibility of our ECF product comes in.  No longer are you tied to an “out of box” solution that shovels you the features you don’t need.  But rather, you get a powerful .NET framework built with well written code that gives you a solid foundation to build the ecommerce solution you want it to be with the latest available technologies.  If you’re a company that sees social commerce as a way to drive sales far above the bottom line, then build and extend the ECF to leverage that functionality.  Or if you happen to like a third-party solution, such as Community Server, as your social networking tool, then you can integrate the ECF and CS seamlessly because you have the full source code at your fingertips to weave your own modular tapestry.

Communities and social network may not drive markedly increased sales for online retailers, as a July 2007 report from JupiterResearch found.  Only about 12 percent of online consumers purchased more because of community and social networking sites.  However, as Web 2.0’s de facto definition of itself is the era of social networking, social commerce becomes a critical marketing strategy for a burgeoning generation that sees the Facebooks of the online world as integrated in their lives as iPods, movies, and episodes of “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County.”

And that is why, with our ECF product, you work with your needs in mind.  Social commerce, then, becomes a reality.

A much talked about item in the commerce space is PCI compliance. It also seems to be a point of confusion for a lot of people depending on how educated you are on the subject.

A Quick Background

First things first--the problem is simply that over the last few years there has been a lot of effort by retailers, banks, service providers, and credit card companies to protect their customers and instill confidence in online retail. As a result the PCI standard was born from the original Mastercard and Visa SDP (Site Data Protection) plan, Cardholder Information Security Plan (CISP), and the International Account Information Security (AIS) standard. Then in September 2006, five of the big guys, American Express, Discover, JCB, Mastercard Worldwide, and Visa International formed the PCI council and released V1.1 of the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

The PCI Standard

This standard is universally known and has a key focus on six categorical requirements with a collection of 12 distinct requirements across those categories.

Here they are:

• Build and Maintain a Secure Network
  • 1. Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
  • 2. Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters
• Protect Cardholder Data
  • 3. Protect stored cardholder data
  • 4. Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks
• Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program
  • 5. Use and regularly update anti-virus software
  • 6. Develop and maintain secure systems and applications
• Implement Strong Access Control Measures
  • 7. Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know
  • 8. Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access
  • 9. Restrict physical access to cardholder data
• Regularly Monitor and Test Networks
  • 10. Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data
  • 11. Regularly test security systems and processes
• Maintain an Information Security Policy
  • 12. Maintain a policy that addresses information security

Is Your Product Compliant?

Wrong Question!

Our ECF commerce framework is simply an application that enables compliance and fits into an overall strategy that your company follows for compliance. By default we protect stored cardholder data and enable encryption of cardholder data appropriately. However, if you choose to not adhere to the PCI standard and decide to implement the ECF differently, then guess what? You have violated a part of the PCI standard. It is that simple. Meaning: it's your strategy and responsibility to adhere to PCI DSS.

People call and ask us if we are compliant and we always have to explain that compliance is a matter of adhering to the standard which is clearly outlined.

The Correct Question: How are we going to ensure that we are fully PCI compliant as an organization?

It Can't Be that Simple?

Its not. Like everything in life, if you want to do it right you have to think it through and ensure that you are doing everything in a way that ensures the standard is met.  In addition, there are levels and qualifications required on an annual and quarterly basis also outlined in the standard.

Ok, I Get It.  How do I find out More?

There are all sorts of sources on this subject and there are a lot of other companies that specialize in helping your organization hit the mark.  One company we like is the folks at Qualys who have a great background in this and other matters. If you want a great starting point head on over to http://www.qualys.com/products/pci/qgpci/.

They also have a great whitepaper you can register and download called "Winning the PCI Compliance Battle," located at http://www.qualys.com/events/guides_wp/.

Go get 'em!

Focusing on Architecture and Re-Use

In keeping with our overall goals of the ECF G5 we spent a lot of time on thinking through the architecture of everything. As our customers and partners have pushed us over the last few years, we know that our primary value proposition is to accelerate the delivery of multi-faceted ecommerce implementations.

How do we do this? By providing a solid architectural codebase, smart packaging of a comprehensive starting point (Front End and Backend), and well written and structured .NET code. In a nutshell, we provide a couple hundred thousand lines of well baked code developed using the best practices.

It's not for everyone. Meaning, if you are looking for a mere "shopping cart" or trying to slap up a commerce solution then the ECF is probably not for you. It is and always has been designed for professional-grade organizations, seasoned .NET developers, systems integrators specializing in end-to-end commerce solutions, and IT organizations looking to unify on a common platform for re-use.

Adapting Architecture to Reduce Code and Increase Quality

The ECF 5 has been re-architected to take advantage of the latest .NET capabilities. Simply put, imagine if Microsoft releases a new .NET framework (.NET 3/3.5) with new capabilities and technologies. Now imagine that you were designing a commerce solution that has to be usable by companies around the world, for different commerce solutions (B2C, B2B, B2G), and has to be able to live as a good citizen within a myriad of technologies. What do you do?

The first thing is you make sure is that you design it in such a way that everything as a whole offers all the core capabilities and plumbing that match the base of most commerce implementations. The net effect of this is that companies and engineers who develop and integrate have a fantastic starting point. Next, you ensure that the front end and backend is completely adaptable to a myriad of possibilities using core architectural principles and implemented in such a way that a professional .NET engineering and implementation team can engage. Finally, you factor in the best of breed product selection, mixed technology environments, and the ability to enable extension and added features so that the people implementing the solution can do what they want, the way they want. This is what we did with ECF G5 and it provides one of the best platforms for choice, re-use, flexibility--and if you're a systems integrator specializing in commerce solutions a base by which you can repeat and solve end-to-end problems for your customers.

The thing that binds this approach together is that anyone who understands .NET, implements user controls, understands ecommerce, and understands the notion of loosely coupled subsystems with independence can have the freedom to rapidly extend, integrate and modify the source in meaningful ways.

Acceleration Leading to a World of Choices

Gone are the days of "Write your Own" solution. If your organization has adopted .NET there is absolutely no reason you should spend your time trying to write a commerce solution from scratch. The real challenge is to find the right solution that you can extend, customize, and leverage for your unique business requirements and needs.

The ECF provides a killer base of code and architecture and then tees you up for a number of choices all starting with the simple fact that when you purchase the ECF you have the full source code, VS projects, and everything you need as a base. If you're a seasoned pro/systems architect with .NET, then you'll recognize that if you had the budget, hours, staff, et cetera, you would probably have designed it the same way we did.

• Well written code, stored procedures etc.
• Powerful set of front end, API, and backend features and capabilities
• Modular Architecture with Replace ability and Re-Use at Forefront
• Adaptable Data Structures
• Use of Latest .NET Technology (WWF, AJAX, etc.)
• Advanced Foundational Technologies (Mediachase Biz App Foundation(BAF) and .NET)

All of this provides you with an Acceleration point without compare. Now you can focus on the choices and implementation elections that you need to succeed.

Let's Talk about Choices

When you deal with commerce solutions you will have a lot of choices; you will need for your code base to adapt to those choices. Sometimes the choices are tactical, sometimes strategic, and sometimes a combination of both. The ECF shines in these situations as outlined above because of the way in which we architected it. We did not, and do not, focus on beating our competition with a pile of features because then you may have to retrofit the way someone else chose to implement a specific feature if it doesn't work the way you want. Rather, we spent the time thinking about what needs to be done, look for patterns, and enable the implementation choices to fold over.

Here are a few example scenarios of how the ECF works as a good citizen in the integration world:

1. You already use a great .NET CMS from a company like SiteCore or Ektron or whatever floats your boat. You dig the fact that the ECF has a baseline CMS but in this case why worry about it since you have made your investments. Because you want to add the commerce capabilities, you can simply leverage the ECF core subsystems and APIs to implement the biz logic.
2. You are big on social commerce and love the community functionality from Telligent. You want to use the full ECF including CMS and asset management, but you need to adapt the blogs, forums and other capabilities with a unified membership profile/SSO. No sweat. You can even cross pollinate UI elements and commerce capabilities from ECF directly into the community server presentation layer.
3. You have a big bad ERP (homegrown, SAP, Dynamics, SAGE, etc.) and you have a bunch of other platforms to integrate into such as CRM, BI, and reporting. You have multiple sales channels, multiple brands, multiple catalogs, and multiple business processes. In short, you're trying to figure out how to pull together an integrated platform with enough flexibility to improve your enterprise flexibility. In this case, the ECF becomes another part of an overall enterprise architecture in which it is used in multiple ways. The best part is that its flexibility allows you to adapt and change aspects of it and re-use in multiple ways.
4. You want to differentiate in your solution space as a systems integrator. You have a vast array of experience in a particular vertical and specialize in a particularly useful bit of functionality that everyone in your vertical needs. The catch is you want to surround that functionality and expertise within the framework of the backend and front end of the ECF. Cool. You can easily add an entire subsystem visually in such a way with ECF G5 that you can plug in a whole new set of functionality so that visually the new capabilities render themselves as part of the interface on both the front and back.

The list goes on and on, but the concept is the ECF is designed to be changed and changed the way you want to. Use all, use some, replace a subsystem, add a sbsystem--It's all there for you.

A Quick Summary

For businesses with multiple sites, multiple languages, and multiple access levels, site administration for ever-changing e-commerce sites can be quite a challenge. There may be instances when the marketing team controls promotions and content, the product team focuses on the product catalog, and the IT staff configure and maintain the site so setting up roles with different access levels on a back-end admin site becomes one strategy to streamline business processes.

Furthermore, companies looking to leverage a platform for consolidation of multiple online commerce sites can offer/drive different experiences for customers, dealers and distributors.  This could include different brands, different pricing schemes, and even different approaches to order capture.  Factor in the added complexity of multiple catalogs, multiple sites and even multiple organizations managed from a single admin site and one quickly sees the necessity of having a system with the flexibility to handle all of these business scenarios.

What's New

The Customer Management subsystem of the ECF G5 handles user access controls by roles within an organization to restrict access to portions of the front-end public site or back-end admin site. So whether you are a site administrator, catalog admin, CMS admin, marketing admin, or just a registered user with site viewing privileges, granular control even at the page level can be implemented. Furthermore, after a new account is registered from the front-end site, a back-end administrator can regulate the user's access level and grant additional access levels. This configurable workflow by role is one of the greatest strengths of the Customer Management subsystem.

High-Level Feature List

• User access control by roles within an organization
• Support for multiple organizations
• Content security control
• Customer groups for tiered pricing

Software as a service (SaaS) adoption is on the rise among small and medium-sized businesses, according to a published report by pcw.co.uk.  Current numbers say that 21 percent of small businesses and 31 percent of medium-sized businesses use SaaS, doubling the percentage from four years ago.

For those unfamiliar with SaaS, it is essentially the business-oriented equivalent of so-called “Web 2.0” applications targeted at consumers, such as Google Docs or Windows Live Workspace.  SaaS providers allow software to be installed in their own servers, which then customers will access through the Internet and pay for use, rather than pay for software licensing.  The model has proven to be cost-effective and efficient for small to medium-sized businesses with more constrained IT budgets.  However, as the report suggests, SaaS has yet to hit the “mainstream,” but there is continual growth as more established vendors begin to leverage the SaaS business model.

According to a report by searchCRM.com, spending on CRM technologies will remain steady or increase in 2008.  Another survey suggests that CRM budgets from various organizations will either remain the same or increase, highlighting the value of CRM software in the enterprise/corporate space. CRM technologies are the top choices because they are more likely to be have a positive financial impact--maintaining current customers will be easier than trying to woo new ones into the fold.

Laxed security and the looming threat of identity theft have a growing number of consumers worried about transactions made on-line.  However, e-commerce sales appear to be growing according to analysts, so the threat of stolen credit card information doesn’t seem to deter from on-line sales that much.  But to give consumers some peace of mind, ecommercetimes.com offers several important tips to make on-line shopping safer for the everyday consumer.

• First and foremost, always make sure you have a secure connection to the Internet. As tempting as it may be to sign onto an available WiFi connection -- whether it be your neighbor's or while stopping for coffee at the local coffee shop -- don't do it!

• Make sure your computer has the most up-to-date antivirus protection to make sure that hackers aren't stealing your passwords or credit card information through Trojans, etc.

• Check to see if the shopping sites you frequent are protected or hacker safe. Look for guarantees of protected shopping, where retailers are taking the initiative to have their sites scanned daily for network vulnerabilities.

• Avoid clicking on links from e-mails hawking products, and never send any credit card information or checking account numbers via e-mail. Make sure that you are on the actual retailer's Web site itself when you're buying, rather than navigating there through e-mail links that could lead you to a phony phishing page. Never respond to spam e-mails, as this will notify the senders that they have located an active account!

• Understand the dangers of pirated software and file sharing. In addition to downloading viruses that shared files could contain, you could be breaking national copyright laws. You could also be downloading spyware - which gathers personal information about you without your knowledge, giving hackers access to your personal files and programs.