A Service Oriented Architecture to develop e-Commerce

Trying to meet the needs of nowadays users, increasingly inclined to buy online, one of the major European Chains of Great Distribution has significantly changed its sale online channel relying on Reply to redesign its portal and its sale support applications.

SOLUTION

To realize a portal able to meet the needs of nowadays and future online customers is a very complex activity. The portal has to manage properly the customer relationships, allow integration with external content providers, provide data for marketing analysis, guarantee performance, security and service continuity, and it has also to be perfectly integrated with the back-office applications and with the logistic stream management in the real chain.

Thanks to the introduction of a "services over-layer", the existing IT assets have been excellently exploited, even if they were spread on different legacy systems, with no need to modify the core applications. Actually, the Service Oriented Architecture model allows the implementation of the Business Logic components in shape of atomic services not bond to the employed platforms.

The solution has been carefully designed also in terms of the user interface: browsing the portal simulates a real visit to the shop, the specialized departments in the most of stores have been virtually reproduced (perfumery, newsagent, wine shop, ticket office, photo shop, etc…) Products are organized in order to be easily and rapidly consulted, so optimizing the seeking-out times.

The success of an e-Commerce portal is essentially due to the perceived level of the quality of the experience users have. Beside an immediate graphic interface, to satisfy and fidelize customers, Reply provided a solution which guarantees the functionalities continuity, a high reliability and very good performances and response times.

Reply studied the parameters to obtain the system Quality of Service and of Experience the user perceive. These parameters provided the basis for the development of the used methodology, executing stress, load test and system monitoring after its start-up.

The needed pre-requisites, the guarantees when successful, the start-up, the time-out, the number of web pages and the scenario for the user and the system were defined for each transaction. The Service Level Agreements were defined according to the average costs to support the Target service level, while the working load was defined for each single transaction.

REPLY VALUE

Thanks to its expertise in the field of complex systems management, to its deep knowledge of business processes and to its experience in developing service oriented architectures, Reply supported one of the major European Distribution Chains in re-designing its online presence. Reply provided a portal that enables new commerce multichannel and multidevice strategies.