sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

(This is a piece I wrote for the retail solutions conference guide.)

If you’re a retailer or a consultant involved in choosing an e-commerce solution, the approach you take, and in particular where to start the process, is critical. You might start with a decision on the underlying application server (Microsoft or Java, for example). Some look for something that fits well with a system they already have (like their ERP or warehouse management system), or with a “must-have” application or consumer offering, like facet-based navigation. Others start from the ownership or implementation model: are you looking for a hosted solution or something you can host and support yourself? Perhaps you would like your own unique instance of the application you can adapt totally to your needs? Do you need to be live in 12 weeks, or will you be doing a detailed analysis and customisation project? Subjective feel about fit with the vendor or vendors often carries a lot of weight, and budget is always a deciding factor.

In practice, many people come out of this process with a solution that is quite complex: the level of flexibility and integration offered by many products today, and the long lists of existing integrations seen in so many vendor presentations make choosing a hybrid solution a normal outcome. This raises some difficulties that must be considered when choosing the partner or partners who will deliver the project, but it also raises some real issues about the nature of the solution for the people who have to operate it once it is live.

The problems around project delivery relate to responsibility and complexity. Let’s say you’ve chosen a search product, a base commerce application, an image and video delivery tool, and a payment service provider, and you need integration with your existing warehouse and ERP. Who’s going to take responsibility for making all of those pieces fit together? Do you have the right people in-house to do the complex technical management that’s required, or will you use a consultant? Will you appoint one of your vendors to manage the overall implementation? Who will lead and manage end-to-end testing of the fully integrated solution? If you don’t consider this basic governance and accountability, problems are certain to arise. Aside from these questions, you need to consider who will manage the technical integration of all the pieces. All sorts of different interfaces are required between systems: these need to be specified, developed (or adapted from existing ones) and tested. Someone needs to make sure all the interfaces click together. This isn’t trivial, and it seems it’s sometimes assumed to happen by collaborative means: our experience is that it’s a lot simpler and a lot less risky for all partners if one party to the project is explicitly identified as being the lead for management, integration and verification of the solution.

If you’ve completed a successful multi-vendor e-commerce project, there remain questions about the integration of management tools, and their impact on the efficiency of your back office. I was recently at a presentation for a site content personalisation tool, and it became clear that whatever the benefits the tool had in terms of user experience, conversion and basket value, it was going to make the retailer’s management task a lot more complex. When a retailer chooses different vendors for different parts of the solution, it adds many steps to the management processes. Workflow for these tasks sometimes seems to be under-played in solution definition, and end-to-end documentation and testing seem to get lower priority than they ought. Let’s take  the  example of adding a new product and putting it on promotion – this really should be quite simple and yetthe merchandiser might have to use the base commerce platform, the search management console, and an image management console to get everything up and running.

This is a problem that some of the big vendors with a comprehensive offering would suggest they have the answer for: if you buy their product, it all fits together, and all the tools are integrated, so management is easy. It’s worth remembering that several of these products have been built by acquisition, and weren’t designed in an integrated way, so the reality may not be what is promised in the literature. We would recommend customers to choose a base product, like Microsoft Commerce Server, that works well for most of their requirements, and only add to it in really high value areas: most people should challenge customisation and additional complexity wherever it’s introduced into a solution.

In the longer-term, we would expect much easier integration between all the diverse products that are on the market. The evolution of web services as a standardised and flexible way for applications to talk to each other already makes it easier for applications to integrate in many ways. For example, putting data into the big search products today is a matter of generating some XML from your product catalogue and firing it into the index server. We’ve built our own management tools on top of web services so that they can be integrated and re-used in all sorts of ways, but it would be really exciting if we could integrate the management tasks of multiple vendor products in this way: as vendors expose more of their management capabilities to systems integrators as web services, we should be able to turn my new product example into a single page transaction in the future.

E-commerce continues to be an exciting and innovative space to be involved in technically, so we can expect to see a host of ideas coming forward to manage complexity, both in project delivery and management of the solution once it’s live, in the coming years.

Earlier today, I was trying to book a train ticket when one of those “Verified by Visa” prompts appeared on the screen. If you buy much online, you will probably have seen one of these by now. They’re supposed to prevent fraud, because they use a password in addition to the 3-digit security code on the back of your credit card, and in theory only you and Mastercard or Visa knows what that password is. But there’s a problem:

• I keep forgetting my password
• It’s actually pretty easy (too easy to be secure) to reset it online
• But when you do forget it and fail to reset it, it locks your card for online use, and you have to phone the bank

What this leads many people to do is to stop using websites that have the “Verified by Visa” logo showing on them, maybe because they don’t have the patience to remember and re-key an extra password, maybe because they’ve forgotten it, or perhaps they’re locked out and can’t be bothered to call their bank when it’s easier to buy the thing you were going to buy somewhere else, which isn’t signed up to this scheme.

Which is probably why most retailers who implement what the industry calls 3D Secure are losing customers when they do it.

Bill Gates has bought a stake in the UK carpet retailer Carpetright, according to this article. A strange choice of business, at first sight, but what if he’s working on interactive floor coverings? Put the Carpetright story together with this one, and all becomes clear.

I have a fairly complicated personal IT set-up. We have a Mac at home, I use Vista on my “work” computer, and I carry my Asus eee (running Ubuntu in its eeexubuntu flavour) practically wherever I go. Gradually, little by little, Google is stitching it all together for me, creating a little ecosystem of applications that mean I have my stuff wherever I happen to be.

The latest thing is Google Docs, Google’s online word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software, which has been developing well for a while now, but which has just rolled out offline functionality. This uses something called Google Gears to store copies of the documents I work with on Google Docs in an offline cache, with the code they need to work, so that I can edit all my Google Docs on the train, and they just get updated automatically next time I’m online.

My personal email account (for my own domain, not a gmail address) is now Google driven too. And I at last have the ability to sync my Outlook calendar with Google Calendar, which allows me to share my free time with anyone who has a web browser, ending all those daft unsolicited meeting requests I get at a stroke.

How’s Google going to get the money back for all this? The application development might be a one-off, but the storage bill (and the electricity for the data centres is the big one nowadays) must keep going up and up. Theorists will point out that a central storage infrastructure replacing all those local ones in peoples’ personal computers is more efficient in the long run, but where’s the money going to come from? Advertising seems somehow inappropriate as a revenue stream for this kind of service. My bet is they’ll end up charging for it directly somehow, but I’m sure they have some interesting ideas in the pipeline for monetising the Google desktop.

When it happens online, apparently. This article reminded me of 2 meetings I’ve had recently. A fashion brand which is seeing enormous attempted fraud on its website showed me a spreadsheet, each row of which represented a fraud or attempt at fraud. There were thousands of rows for one month, and most were from addresses in the UK. Will the police do anything to address these cases? I’m sure every online retailer experiences the same things, and they’re essentially on their own as far as the government and police are concerned, which is why companies like Third Man and Cybersource are so valuable to them.

The second conversation was with the website manager at a retailer about the factory outlet in the building next to his office. Someone ran out with a pair of trainers a few days before our meeting, and there were security guards, dogs, he was stopped and apprehended at a barbed-wire fence, and arrested when the police arrived. The trainers were worth £14.99…

So physical crime is definitely getting priority at the moment, yet the value of online crime seems to be so much greater. Are the police (and the government) lagging behind everyone else? Criminals are channel-shifting, just like the rest of us.

Last week I bought an Asus eee laptop. It’s a tiny machine, weighing less than 2 pounds with a 7 inch screen, and it runs Linux as its operating system.

The experience so far has been really good. The machine works well, the software’s great, and for £250 I’ve got a machine that’s faster and more enjoyable to use than my very expensive work laptop. But what’s really impressive is the way that support, enhancement, improvement, has been taken up by the users of these machines.

Asus themselves provide some support, but the really good stuff is on blogs and wikis that have been set up by people who have bought the machines themselves.

If you compare http://vip.asus.com/ with  http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ it’s obvious that the open source offering is better, more up to date, and more responsive than the manufacturer’s. This is a very interesting trend. Actually, I’m happier that there is this community developing and that so much open information is out there than if I was reliant on a secretive, commercially sensitive company. Probably it’s so noticeable here because the eee is a Linux (i.e. open source) machine. You don’t see wikis cropping up for all products, so what makes one more or less likely to be a community hit?

Google have started selling print ads in the US, which is an interesting venture in its own right, but the most interesting thing in this example is the extent to which they’re using the ads to drive potential customers online.

Aside from the URLs in the ad, we’re also encouraged to search Google for specific search terms (doubtless incredibly well optimised for this advertiser). There’s also a QR code, or 2-d bar code, which is a machine readable image that contains a link or other information. The software to read these isn’t widely available yet, but the more organisations like Google support them, the more people will install the software. Next year, a large number of phones will probably have the QR code reader installed at the factory, so we can expect use of QR codes to become a lot more common.
Thanks to Blognation for the story.

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Tags: google, qr codes

Amazon used to be one of the text book examples of usability in e-commerce. Famously, “Don’t Make Me Think”, an excellent introduction to user centred design by Steve Krug, includes a chapter called “If you love Amazon so much, why don’t you marry it?”

Recently, I was given an Amazon gift voucher, and I’ve been using the site a fair bit as a result. I’m afraid the experience hasn’t been very good.

Firstly, the Amazon stock and the market place are mingled in the most confusing ways. I can only use my voucher on Amazon stock, and the fact that I’m going to have to pay cash for something isn’t made clear until very late in the checkout process. In fact, it isn’t really made clear in the late stages: I had to look very closely to see what happened, and in one case had to cancel a market place purchase after I realised they hadn’t used the voucher.

Secondly, tracking missed packages has become incredibly hard. You’d think clicking the “where’s my stuff” link in your account would help, but you have to go so much deeper than that, and the navigation is impossibly unclear. I felt like I was testing the site for them, and in fact the tracking didn’t work when I did find it.

Generally the whole site feels a lot more complex and clunky than it used to.

What did work well was the tool that sets up calls to their call centre, facilitated by estara (owned by ATG, who compete with Amazon in some regards).

When you compare amazon.co.uk with Amazon’s excellent Endless shoe site (still actually a beta) you can see what they are capable of, so why is the main UK site so poor?

http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/11/ad-zappers-for-facebook.html lists a variety of plug-ins for Firefox that will remove contextual ads from your Facebook experience.

It might get a bit tricky charging for ads that are being removed at the browser. Whether they’re counted as valid ad impressions before they’re removed isn’t made clear in the article.

I heard a terrific story at last night’s Roger Needham lecture, organised by the British Computer Society.

Mark Handley, who gave the lecture, asked his audience why the rockets on the side of the Space Shuttle are the size they are. It turns out they’re that size so they will fit through a train tunnel on their way from Utah, where they’re built. Train tunnels are the size they are because train tracks are a fixed width more or less worldwide: 4 feet 8.5 inches. Train tracks are that size because George Stephenson decided so when he built the first public railway in 1825. He settled on that size because it was the width of horse-drawn carriages, which had more or less been that size since Roman times, because that’s the width of 2 horses when put side by side.

So the rockets on the Shuttle are the size they are because of the width of a horse’s rear-end. Snopes (the popular urban myth debunking website) describes this story as “True, but for trivial and unremarkable reasons”. Mark Handley was using it to get us thinking about how things we are designing today are often constrained for the most peculiar reasons.

The Internet today is an example of that. Designed for a small number of military and academic computers to be connected together, it’s becoming the home for all data, voice, TV and mobile communications. It has real limitations around its security, how it routes traffic from one place to another without congestion and how to scale it to meet current and future needs.

We can’t just replace it by building and switching to a new, improved Internet, because there’s too much to move in one go. In the past, we’ve switched everyone’s phone number in London, we’re in the process of switching everyone in the UK from analogue to digital TV (a 10 year project in itself) but switching everything to a new, better Internet is never going to happen. So change happens incrementally, patch after patch.

Software developers know what this will eventually lead to: a system that falls apart because of the unplanned, undesigned interactions between all those patches. But change on a large scale to a better designed alternative seems impossible, so the questions that academics in this area ask themselves are very difficult to answer.

• What should the next evolution of the Internet look like?
• What’s the smartest way to migrate to that state?
• How can the change be best managed?

These questions are particularly difficult when network operators don’t really see the commercial imperative for change, when they’re so busy dealing with immediate, short and medium term problems.

For the non-engineer, there were some interesting observations about successful and unsuccessful innovation. Successful innovation generally seems to have obvious financial benefits attached to it, to be easy to implement and pick up, to be flexible enough to accommodate unexpected uses, and to be extremely well-timed. Timing seems to be the most important element for success: too early and nobody will want it, too late and something else will already meet the need, and the best solution isn’t always the one that wins.

I’ve been to 3 BCS lectures this year, and every one has given me something new to think about, but they all also deal with some common themes:

• The unplanned effects of technologies once put into large-scale use
• The complexity (generally unnoticed) of the systems we are building today
• The need to make ethical decisions about how we use and control technology

On this last point, we only have to look at how the Internet was effectively shut down in Nepal recently, and how Yahoo! have been accused of providing evidence to support persecution in China, to see how non-neutral technology has become.