As a customer perspective we all know that what we look for when we visit an online shopping site through any channel like mobile, tablet or a computer. The key factor is that every customer would look for how easily can I find my desired product and how easily can I complete my checkout process.
In any online shopping, business objective is to attract more users and convert those users into customers. When an organization tries to improve their online shopping experience, the first priority is to enhance the customer experience through personalized offers and pages, quick navigation and search (Faceted Navigation) and easy checkout by providing various checkout features like express checkout etc.
When everybody striving hard to improve customer experience, are we not thinking about the business users like Content Admins, Merchandisers etc.? Most of the organization must be having a legacy eCommerce application and most of them want to migrate to a latest eCommerce engine that can satisfy the new generation customer needs by using improved technologies. While organizations are putting all the efforts to do the same, most of them try to skip or de-scope the requirements from their business users. Is that fair to do so since business users needs to play a key role to make the site much more interesting once it is ‘on live’.
One of my previous customers, which we were decommissioning their legacy eCommerce application and replacing with a new eCommerce engine powered by ATG Commerce, I got an opportunity to have detailed discussion with their business users includes Merchandiser and Content Author. They were so excited that a new application is going to be ready and that will improve their experience and reduce the manual work that they are currently doing as part of the legacy application. Highly motivated business users were giving requirements and explaining what they want to see in new system and what are the improvements they want in order to ease up their daily workload.
After analyzing the business user’s requirements, we came up with effort estimation and submitted to the business leads for approval. As I said earlier, business leads’ focus is to spend money on improving the customer experience and generate revenue to the organization. They found meeting business users’ requirements is not important and decided to either de-scope or implement it on a later point of time. That means it is not going to get implemented in a near future and as a result the business user experience will not be better than the current, in fact it will not be as good as their current system.
As a business user concerns, the requirements that he had given are valid for him as well as organization. We can classify these internal requirements except the Catalog Management, Pricing etc. in simple statements.
- Change of business rules like maximum order total, maximum number of items to checkout etc. without any code release
- Change of content inside marketing slots, promotional contents etc. without any code release
- Change of static labels and instructional text without any code release
- Control over the content displayed on the site like order of appearance, style etc.
- Flexible integration with Content Management system and Merchandising Tool
Most of the business users are asking for flexibility in terms of running and controlling the online experience. When we think that in their point view, these requirements are fairly genuine. If a new version of iPhone is getting launched, no business user wants to raise a ticket to the support team and wait to get the carousel changed on the home page after a server downtime; even Business Leads don’t like that.
It is really up to the business leads to take a decision based on the value addition that the organization is going to get by implementing these business enablers. Service Provider’s business consultants need to go an extra mile and help the Organization’s business leads to understand the priority and benefits of these requirements. Business Users are also an integral part of any eCommerce application as well as the organization.
