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
I thing WSC 7 is the feature…
I am from Greece and I want to upgrade my eshop cart software to WSC 7.
What do you thing about WSC7 stability? Because it’s rather new….