Thursday, June 02, 2011

Enterprise ecommerce through a software technologists lens…

..three years ago i embarked on a great digital voyage, tasked with consolidating Liz Claiborne Inc’s portfolio of brands on a common ecommerce platform.
The first to go online on the new platform was luckybrand.com. We then launched kensie.com, and katespade.com. I am still working on juicycouture.com and jackspade.com
This blog post series is my attempt at sharing my experience and overlaying it with lessons from this digital marketing class.
What is “enterprise” in an ecommerce platform? To me an enterprise ecommerce platform is the infrastructure required to run a multi channel business, with sufficient redundancy to ensure smooth business operations, through seasonal peaks.
What are various components of an enterprise ecommerce operation? I have broken it down into three broad areas: technology, operations and marketing.

Technology encompasses the technical infrastructure to support the operation. It includes the transaction and merchandizing engine (some call it the website, but it is a lot more), the order management system, the warehouse management system, the enterprise resource planning system, and technology used to support the call center and marketing.

Operations include business functions like merchandizing, photography, content creation, logistics and fulfillment, risk management, customer service.

Marketing besides the obvious outreach activities, includes managing consumer facing creative, packaging and user experience.

Please watch out for more details next week….

1 comment:

Anand said...

Prof. Kagan spoke about URL shortner's bit.ly and others..
Google has introduced a URL shortner service too http://goo.gl

I have used this shortner in the blog post above.
More details on this shortner service at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/beefing-up-googl-with-new-features.html