ecommerce

Why Ozon.ru loses business

Published on November 28, 2013November 29, 2013 by Yakov Fain9 Comments

Yesterday I decided to purchase some audio books in Russian language. Buying paper books is a nuicance, and what can be easier that downloading an mp3 file right after you pay for it?

Ozon.ru is the #1 Russian e-Commerce portal (they call themselves “Online Megamarket #1”). It’s almost like amazon.com here in the US. Kinda. So I found the audio I wanted, added it to the shopping cart and was ready to pull out my wallet, but got this message:

In English it means the following:
“Yakov, You’re planning to order a shipment of an item, which is not a printed book. Unfortunately, it’s not possible. To continue, please remove the items, which are not books. Currently we’re working on increasing our inventory avalable for the international shipments. We hope to offer you better inventory and service in the future.”

I was surprised to say the least. International delivery of the audio files shouldn’t be overly complicated for the #1 online store in Russia.

The story was not over. Next morning I got the following email from ozon.ru:

It reads, “Hello Yakov, Sometime ago you’ve added goods to your shopping cart, but didn’t complete the order. You can return to these goods at any moment, but remember that our stock is limited, and you can reserve these goods only after the order is complete.

I’m a subscriber of Amazon’s service Audible.com and buy audio books from them all the time – it’s great and easy to use service. I guess, Audible spoiled me.

My first thought was that ozon.ru has only a CD version of this mp3 file. But if this is the case, they simply loose business by not offering direct downloads. Does it mean that they don’t know how to run business?

Then I applied Sherlock Holmes’ science of deduction and figured out that most likely ozon.ru decided to sell only a CD version of the the mp3 just to have a tangible item to ship. Otherwise they’d need to create an infrustructure for the digital right management, which is mission impossible in Russia.

No hard feelings, ozon.ru. I know, you have to operate in a tough environment. Let’s wait for the better times.

Update. After I published this blog one of my readers suggested to try this service: http://www.imobilco.ru/music/audiobooks. I tried. Very little variety, but when I found the audio book I wanted to buy it displayed me a message “Currently not in stock”. The mp3 file is not in stock? God bless America! Happy Thanksgiving!

Nontraditional Android Phones

Published on September 28, 2013September 28, 2013 by Yakov Fain2 Comments

Google gets creative. Apparently some Android devices may have nontraditional sexual orientation. They started selling T-Shirts where two happy male or female Androids are holding each other’s hand while waving the rainbow flag.

The next logical step is to clearly mark the sexual orientation on the packaging of the devices. So the AT&T customers could clearly request, say a black gay Nexus 10 tablet. Or you can simply walk into a Verizon store and say, “Could you please give me two lesbians: Samsung Galaxy 4 and Boost Mobile Galaxy Rush. Make sure they come with the verision 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.”

For many people smartphones become the best if not only friends. Even more so, most of the people sleep with smartphones or tablets. Buying a smartphone becomes an important event in the life of many people. Like getting a puppy. Or adopting a child. Luckily, it’s possible to find out Android’s sexual orientation in advance, if Google agrees to clearly mark their devices. In the end of the day we’re entitled to know who are we going to bed with, aren’t we?

Revolutionizing Internet Marketing

Published on April 11, 2013April 22, 2013 by Yakov Fain7 Comments

I was listening to the internet music on pandora.com. Sometime ago I was thinking of buying a $40 a year license, but never did. Now, after playing several songs Pandora forces me to hear some commercial ads. It’s a typical model – purchase a license and we won’t be showing these ads.

This got me thinking. If I’m a cheap bastard who doesn’t even want to pay for really good Pandora’s service, what’s the point in showing me all these ads? I’m not going to buy anything anyway! Don’t they use something called “target market” anymore? Why wasting money for showing products to the people who are cheap?

I want to offer something that will revolutionize internet and mobile software markets. Let’s turn it upside down: give the software for free to people who don’t like buying licenses, and those who paid will enjoy the ads! Sounds stupid, right? The question is what’s more stupid: advertising to penniless losers or to people with money who are accustomed to pay for stuff?

Update. Ten days after writing this post I paid $36 for the yearly subscription to Pandora radio.

e-Commerce with Hybris: 10 Million Product Catalog?

Published on February 22, 2013February 25, 2013 by Yakov Fain10 Comments

Last month a prospective customer called our office.
“We know that you have a team of software developers that build e-commerce applications with Hybris software. Can you help us with developing our online store?”
“Sure we can – we have a solid expertise in developing e-commerce applications with Hybris software”.
“But our store will have pretty large catalog: ten million products”.
“We didn’t have a chance to develop online stores that have more than a million products. We know how to approach such a project to minimize your risk, but so far we didn’t deploy such an application in production.”

After this conversation we’ve never heard from this person again. We know why: he was looking for another answer like, “Sure, we did it before and will do it again!” This is not to say that creating a responsive online store with 10M products is not possible with Hybris, but we didn’t do it. In any online store product catalogs have to be indexed from time to time. For example, a store needs to add a new line of products. How much time is required to re-index a store with 10M with Hybris software? How about importing of the CSV product data and synchronization? We simply don’t know.
Hybris does several passes over these IMPEX to resolve referential integrity, in fact – many passes. In may take a day and finish or a day and break/start over. Then either SOLR (Lucene) or Endeca full text search index will need to be built. Then, there is a task of synchronizing the staging catalog with its production version. Indexing of itself is not Hybris specific, but the import and synch are. Hybris has yet to show that it’s a high performing solution and publish the appropriate case studies.

In fact, if you do not provide indexing information, importing of a mere half million records may never finish on Hybris server. We do not have any metrics of the synchronization process yet, but the good news is that Hybris is build on Java servers and careful clusterization, cacheing, and fine-tuning of the database will produce acceptable solution to large inventories. Wall Street application written im Java handle huge amounts of data in timely fashion. But Wall Street managers understand that they have to hire the right people. Large-scale e-Commerce projects have the same level of complexity.

We’d be happy to set up a lab (parallel merging while loading, finding deltas, proper Java clustering, stress tests) with the appropriate hardware and create a pilot to answer these questions and to optimize the process to get rid of the bottle necks, but this prospect customer is gone.

What will happen next? I’ll tell you: the deja vu of IT consulting. Some brave salesman of another consulting company will explain to this customer that working with large product catalogs is their bread and butter and will get this project. Six months down the road the customer will see a lot of hours billed to the project and detailed explanations of “unforeseen circumstances” followed by new promises.

We’ve seen this scenario several times – it doesn’t depend on the technology in use. Today it’s e-commerce, but six years ago I wrote a blog about a similar scenario, but that time it was about redesigning a portal for a major publisher. Software developers hate working on such projects. They don’t know that the customer has these unrealistic expectations because of some over-promising salesman.

What’s the moral of this story? We value a moral dimension to consulting, which costs us dearly.

E-Commerce with Hybris

Published on July 31, 2012August 7, 2012 by Yakov Fain4 Comments

People are accustomed to buying goods online. If a company sells products to individuals, we call it B2C for Business To Consumers. If a business sells to other businesses – it’s B2B. Having an online store allows to sell around the clock regardless of the consumer’s location (at least within the country) as long as he or she is connected to the Internet. People spend some substantial time online and sellers are trying to reach their clients via all possible channels and devices being that a regular HTML Web page, a social network, a mobile application on any device with embedded browser. Still, some people aren’t Internet savvy and business will continue using more traditional channels like printed mail order catalogs. This is what the multi-channel marketing is about. Ideally, a business should be able to combine marketing the products with selling them right there. If you’ve seen the product commercial on Facebook or your mobile phone the storefront should be there too.

Ingredients of an online store

If I’d ask you to give me an example of an e-commerce site, most likely you’d answer Amazon or eBay. Agree. But what’s needed for building an e-commerce system? Let’s come up with a list of building blocks and solutions that Joe Smith, a CIO of the Best Stuff, Inc. would need to create an e-commerce portal:

– A shopping cart
– A catalog
– Integration with several payment systems
– Order management system
– Full text search
– High-load solutions
– Selling through social networks
– Ability to create UI supporting variety of desktop and handheld devices
– Integration with warehousing software
– Data feeds from external systems
– Consumers reviews, locator services, Web analytics
– Live video chats with customer supports

This list is not complete. Starting developing such a complex system from scratch would be insane unless you have unlimited budget and no deadlines to meet. On the other hand, trying to find a Swiss army knife solution usually translates into purchasing super expensive software with 80% of the functionality that you’ll never use. The truth is somewhere in the middle, especially in the age of Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) where you can subscribe to only what you need.

Hybris ingredients

Our company, Farata Systems has an e-commerce team that works with the Hybris software suite. For detailed comparison reviews of the e-commerce solutions refer to Gartner or Forrester. I can just offer you a Hybris review based on our real-world experience.

When we were offered to work on our first Hybris project we had to google this name up. Still, we were hired because of our solid expertise in enterprise development using Java and Spring framework, which are pre-requisites for developing software with Hybris Multi-Channel Suite.

Hybris is a well designed modularized software built on top of Apache and SpringSource components, containers and servers. We’ve been given login credentials to be able to access product Wiki and rolled up our sleeves. The software comes with an installer that includes modified Apache Tomcat servlet container, Spring modules and a home-made ORM framework for data persistence.

Finding goods

Finding goods in your online store has to be easier than in a brick and mortar one. Say you want to buy an engagement ring, but not sure if it has to be made of a white gold with diamonds or something more modest. Writing strict SQL queries is not overly flexible, but the full text search (FTS) technique allows examine all words in each document in your database rather then specifying the column names in the database table. The FTS feature give lots of flexibility in creating stores which allow to quickly find the products that closely match your customer’s needs (e.g. diamonds of certain shape, size, price range etc.) Hybris ships with the FTS module based on the fast search engine Apache SOLR (a Lucene extension). The system periodically (say, every minute) runs the data indexing process. You write queries not in SQL, but in a special query language.

Customization

This tightly integrated software allows you to create and release in production a simple online store in less than a month. But a typical store or an auction requires implementation of lots of custom solutions. For example, let’s take order fulfillment. Hybris offers off the box the basic solutions supporting order management and consignment. But in our projects we had to implement fulfillment algorithm that would take into account the distance between the warehouse and the consumer and minimize the number of shipments. For example, the customer wants to purchase twenty large screen TVs. The system has found six TV’s in one of your stores and four in the other. Since we need another ten TV’s our custom algorithm sends a request to a warehouse to order these additional TV sets. As a result – the customer will get a shipment of all twenty items shipped in a least expensive way.

Such customized business logic is implemented in Java as beans of Spring framework, which is literally a fabric of the entire Hybris software. Your code always has access to Spring context object. By adding custom extensions you create the child context object with your Spring bean containing custom logic to place a distributed order of 20 TVs.

From the software architect perspective, the ease of extending existing Hybris entities is very appealing. For example, if you need to add customer reviews features, just add a couple of fields to the Product entity, create a new entity for ProductReview and link them together. Then add a row of those yellow stars to the storefront UI and you’re set.

User Interface

With Hybris you have a complete freedom of selecting the UI platform for your online store. So far we’ve been using HTML, JavaScript and JQuery framework. But we could have used Java, Flex, or Silverlight for the UI if this would meet our needs. Hybris uses Spring MVC that can present the data as JSP pages or send the raw data as XML or JSON to the UI tier – just parse the data and display them any way you like. If you prefer an easily customizable solution, Hybris includes a CMS module, which allows you to specify the Web page layout and change it dynamically during the run-time.

Product Maintenance

Yet another interesting Hybris module is called Cockpit, which becomes quite handy in environments where the information changes quickly and the customers need to see the latest product information. We even customized Cockpit for building our own administration tool for the online auction project.

Launching Server

The launch of your Hybris server can be configured to load only those modules that are needed for your store. Our fully loaded server starts within 2 minutes, which is not bad at all. The initial install of the Hybris server comes with the in-memory HSQLDB, which is fast, but not suitable for the real-world applications. We started with MySql Server and then switched to Oracle with very minimal manual tuning.

Payment processing

Integration with the payment gateway is probably the most critical component of any online store or auction. Hybris has its own payment module, but we’ve been asked to integration with another payment processing engine – Litle.com using XML as the data exchange format. Little accepts all kinds of credit cards, PayPal, eCheck, mobile payments, and bill-me-later option. Introducing another provider in your payment workflow can make a lot of business sense, but be prepare to find yourself in the middle of the finger pointing game until you finish the payment integration. Add some more cushion there if you are making project estimates.

Scalability

Hybris comes with a clustering solution from the box. Each node of your cluster can be configured to include only those Hybris extensions that it needs. For example, you can configure a cluster with one more for the administration module, three nodes for the store UI, and one node for the data indexing.

In March of 2012 Adobe has announced its partnership with Hybris. Adobe’s CQ5 will help in creating multi-channel digital marketing campaigns and building strong brands for online stores created by Hybris.

Room for improvements

Although our overall impression after using Hybris on a couple of projects is very positive, this software has room for improvements. I’m sure, Hybris management has their reasons for keeping its community closed, but it may hurt the adoption of the software. The product documentation is not too detailed and up to date. Hybris technical experts have to pay more attention to the developer’s forum. In many cases we’ve been using the source code de-compilers to find the answers to our questions. Since Hybris is built on top of Java EE, I’d like the future versions to include a JPA-based solution that would allow using the data persistence solution of our choice rather than a proprietary ORM.

Conclusion

While finding solutions in developing software with Hybris was difficult at time, we never hit the wall, which can be credited to the engineering team. Overall, it’s a solid platform for creating modern online stores and auctions.

When we started our first e-commerce projects with Hybris, we couldn’t find any publicly available online materials about this software written by people in the trenches. I really hope that this article will help anyone who’s still in the process of selecting the right e-commerce software package for their next generation online store.