Alfresco E-commerce Platform

Skip to main navigation
Skip to main content
Skip to secondary content

Breadcrumb

You are in:

Products

View All Products

Navigation

Alfresco E-commerce Platform

When one of our clients; a global supplier of integrated communications approached us and asked to 'build an Amazon.com' on top of their Alfresco ECM platform, we embraced the task.

E-commerce is one of the most important facets of the internet to have recently emerged, and with over 8 million consumers worldwide shopping at any given time; it’s no wonder many companies are seeking to expand their online presence.

To be specific, e-commerce consists of the buying and selling of goods and services and transfer of funds through digital communications. It allows people to carry out business but without the barriers of time or distance. For example, one can log on to the internet at any point in time, be it day or night and purchase or sell anything at the click of a mouse.

The direct cost-of-sale for an order taken from a website is much lower than through traditional means and this mainly due to the fact that there is no human interaction during the purchase order process. Furthermore, electronic selling virtually eliminates processing errors, plus is faster and more convenient for the visitor. The strategic benefit of making a business ‘e-commerce enabled’, is that it helps reduce the delivery time, labour cost and cost incurred in the following areas: document preparation, error detection and correction, reconciliation, mail preparation, telephone calling and data entry.

Additional benefits from implementing an e-commerce platform include:

Builds customer loyalty and satisfaction
Allows for easier delivery of information
Allows for smaller market or niche targeting
Collection of customer data
Expand geographical or customer reach
Available 24/7/365
Increase brand or product awareness
Increased traffic through search engine optimisation (SEO)
Potential to increase company profits
Potential to increase overall business sales

The issues you may be facing:

The cost of the licence or licence maintenance fees do not justify what you are getting out of your current e-commerce solution
You’re worried about spending budget on an e-commerce platform when you don’t even know if it is going to deliver what you want
Your current e-commerce platform doesn’t have desired features and is not flexible and customisable enough
You have a very tight budget for your e-commerce website, but you still want something that is going to meet your specific needs
You can’t integrate your current solution with other systems, either in-house, or with partner companies
You want to be able to integrate your e-commerce with other business functions such as financial data repositories, reporting applications, purchase orders, invoices etc
Your business is growing and your current e-commerce platform can’t scale to handle the increased traffic on the site
You fear you can’t keep up with competitors who are already offering customers an e-commerce platform
You want enhanced communication with your customers

Introducing our Alfresco e-commerce platform:

Our e-commerce platform provides an easy way to create rich, accessible e-commerce websites. Components can be easily modified or replaced without affecting stability because the architecture is open source and thus, flexible. This is in stark contrast to the huge deployment and maintenance costs of being locked into traditional proprietary e-commerce systems. 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.

Open source also means that best practice is shared and you can be confident that the e-commerce platform that we deliver is changed and developed based on our continuous access to Alfresco product management and engineering teams. The free open source model means that we are able to spend most of your budget on the things that matter, not on an expensive upfront software licence. If you are already paying out for proprietary e-commerce software and you choose to switch to our platform, then you save before we have even built the platform because the software itself free. You switch, you specify, and our consultants spend most of your budget on customisation, upfront design, architecture, build, configuration, system test, user test, deployment and support.

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