More and more of our clients are seeking to expand their online presence and as such we have received a number of requests from various clients to add an ecommerce platform on top of their installed Alfresco ECM platform. It makes sense I suppose, especially given the fact it allows companies to carry out business without the barriers of time and distance and has a lower direct-cost-of-sale. In light of the above, we made a decision to add the Alfresco E-Commerce Platform to our portfolio of products.

Our e-commerce platform provides an easy way to create rich, accessible e-commerce websites and components can be easily modified or replaced without affecting stability because the architecture is open source and thus, flexible. The Alfresco e-commerce platform delivers all the basic functions you would expect, but offers much more due to the fact we can extend features easily in an open source environment.

Key features and benefits

The current iteration of our e-commerce platform includes the following features listed below:

Product:

• Browse multiple product catalogues
• Basket
• Support for downloading, renting and purchasing digital content
• Multiple product images can be assigned to a product (including large detailed images shown in a light-box)
• Support for product variants. Each variant can have different price, delivery requirements, etc.
• Search
  • Advanced search
  • Results refinement
• Product rating and reviews
• Customisable product attributes can be assigned to products

  • e.g. size, weight

Payment/delivery:

• Checkout
  • Simple one page
• Multiple delivery method/cost and sales tax calculations
• Delivery cost calculated on product type, weight, size, etc.
• Credit card payment gateway

  • Includes integration with Google Checkout, Paypal, etc.

Customer/Order Management:

• Customer account management
  • Login/registration
  • Password control (security for password strength, auto generating passwords, etc.)
• Sophisticated profile management
  • Manage multiple contact information including email/postal addresses and telephone numbers
• View in-progress and completed orders

• Manage order workflow from creation through to posting and delivery

Content Management:

• Localisation for language, currency and dates

Future roadmap:

Further advancements that are coming on the Alfresco e-commerce platform are featured below:

Product:

• Shopping list management
• Product comparison
• Support for product configuration (e.g. configure a PC)
• Poll creation and management
• Promotion and special offers engine

Payment/ Delivery

• Multi-stage checkout (similar to Amazon)
• Split orders across multiple payment methods

Content Management

• System to target customer specific messaging
• Forums and blogs
• Mailing lists
• CMS integration i.e. Alfresco