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