WebSphere Commerce V7 Social Commerce – Part I: Overview

Adding social commerce features to your commerce site can have many advantages. By building a sense of community around your brands, you can enhance customer loyalty and drive repeat purchases.

Social commerce capabilities enable online stores to support product ratings and reviews via integration with BazaarVoice, blogs, photo galleries, and user profiles via integration with IBM Lotus® Connections and Pluck Sitelife. These integrations are provided in a vendor-agnostic manner using WebSphere sMash applications, provided with WebSphere Commerce.

Key features

• Support for product-directed blogs, photo gallery, and user profiles
• Vendor-agnostic integration via WebSphere sMash
• Out-of-the-box WebSphere sMash applications for integration with IBM Lotus
• Connections, BazaarVoice Ratings and Reviews, and Pluck Sitelife

Key benefits

• Improves customer Web site experiences with brand engagement
• Increased flexibility with vendor-agnostic integration

Ratings and Reviews

• Blogs
• Public user profiles
• Photo and video gallery

Integration

• Uses WebSphere sMash as the integration technology
• Bazaarvoice for ratings and reviews

Social Commerce is built on sMash.

• sMash is integration layer to external providers like Pluck and Bazaarvoice
• sMash contains SPI layer for integrating external service providers
• AJAX is used to access sMash resources directly for most up-to-date content
• WC JSPs accesses sMash to cache a static version of the content for SEO (not as up-to-date)
• Dojo 1.3 widgets used for Social Commerce
  • will make separate AJAX request to WC to send events to Marketing Engine
• sMash is accessed through IHS proxy and managed by WAS application

WC Development

• RAD 7.5
• xml and properties folders moved into workspace
• JET replaces Design Patterns Toolkit for services development
  • JET comes with RAD 7.5, whereas DPTK is a separate download

New Management Center Test Framework

• Action based framework (procedural language)
• Tests written in xml
• 3g memory recommended
• No EJB 3, JPA, or annotations in WC 7

WC Build & Deploy tool

• Comes with V7, not separate download
• Highly customizable set of Ant scripts
• Deploys to toolkit as well as server (need to look into this, as it changes our current development practices)
• SCM -> build server -> deployment server -> WAS / WC / DB / webserver
• Build generates 2 deploy packages, one for server, one for toolkit
• All target environment specific files contained in a single deploy package (ie. Can use same package for different target environments)
• Best practice: backup prior to deploy!

Social Commerce Overview

• What is Social Commerce?
  • Attempt to bring online network, drive people have, to contribute content, and bring it to product marketing

• Investment (on our client’s part) in building community, will not happen by itself
  • Benefits of social commerce
  • Creates customer loyalty
  • Drives traffic to site (particularly product reviews)
  • Purchase Rates

• Applying Web 2.0 to WC
  • v6 added Dojo Widgets and richer shopping experience
  • v7 adds active participation and community concepts, shoppers come back, share their stories

• Social commerce features in V7 (added as custom Dojo Widgets)
  • Category Blogs
  • Photo Gallery
  • Social Profile – share minimal amount of non private info
  • Product Reviews and Ratings
  • Multi-Channel Precision Marketing – rewards for contributing to the community

• Category Page with Social Commerce
  • Category Blogs
  • Photo Gallery

• Product Page with Social Commerce
  • Share to Social Networks
  • Reviews

• Creating Blog Entries
  • Blog Entry Title
  • Blog Entry Content
  • Create Button – sends to third party provider, WC does not implement blogging, photo gallery, etc.

• Viewing Blog Entries

• Blog Listing
  • Blog Entry Recommendation – where the interesting blogs are
  • Blog Entry Comments

• Photo Gallery
  • Also have recommendations and comments
  • OOTB provided by Pluck or Lotus Connections
• Viewing Ratings and Reviews
  • OOTB provided by Bazaarvoice
  • Can sort by: highest rating, lowest rating, newest post, etc.
• Create New Review
  • Guest shoppers do not have right to contribute content, must register first
• Social Profile Creation
  • Entirely optional
  • Option when they register (new option in registration)
  • New screen name
  • E-Mail address is not shown, but used to identify
  • Optional fields: hometown, birthday
  • Not stored in WC
  • Stored in Pluck or Lotus Connection
  • Will not share registration info with third party
• My Account
  • Update social profile – can upload their photo
  • Can view: My Blogs, My Photos, My Reviews
• Administrative Tasks
  • Initial Configurations – are blog comments allowed?
  • Evaluate Widgets, style changes
  • Ongoing Moderation
    • Reviewing content before it is publicly displayed – pre-moderation
    • Modifying / removing offensive content – post-moderation
    • Responding to content flagged as inappropriate – community, reactive
  • Varies by provider

Stay tuned for the next topic – Social Commerce Architecture and Programming Model