The Universe of Centralized E-Commerce — SAP Commerce Way
This article is an attempt to throw a beam of light on the different elements of e-commerce for the reader to understand its vividity. Alongside are the basic elements to be aware of, while designing a consolidated e-commerce architecture.
This article draws parallels between some of the fascinating phenomenon of the universe and e-commerce best practices, for analogical purposes.
It is huge and ever-expanding. Endless and all-embracing. Brewing uncountable mysteries in its womb begetting immeasurable opportunities. Its “discoverable” veil has led thousands of explorers to “re” search and “re” fine the interpretations only to better their understanding of the way it works. Coronated with different names, it is the omnipresent cosmos or the universe.
Humans have a tryst with nature. Sometimes they embrace, sometimes they race against it. In the ’90s age of digital computing and creation has led to the birth of a way of selling and buying electronically, known as eCommerce. Creating a unique consumer experience with the leisure to purchase almost everything while in your pyjamas, It is ever-expanding with countless interpretations (implementations) only opening a new dimension of exploration and transforming the way business is done globally.
The universe is expanding at an accelerated rate — 70 km/sec, says the cosmic speedometer. ECommerce is trending skywards. In 2019, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to 3.53 trillion US dollars and e-retail revenues are projected to grow to 6.54 trillion US dollars in 2022. Online shopping is one of the most popular online activities worldwide.
The universe has various celestial bodies rushing all over in a random fashion with each body has its own composition. Likewise, Companies that focus on brand prominence also have different websites — each having a flavour of its own. In an age of mergers and acquisitions, large companies have ended up having more than one website for their line of business(es), often leading to a lot of cost of operations and maintenance. Their challenges are mainly –
1. Managing different sales catalogues — Different departments of Product offerings on different websites lead to different sales catalogues. A furniture item should neither be searched nor be listed the same as a food item. Different product lines demand different displays.
2. Different Master Data — The article listing of the products from different master data sources lead to complications. It only worsens if we have an overlapping catalogue. The supplier data system runs into the quagmire of duplication.
3. Single Views — Due to different transactional systems, it becomes very difficult to get a single view of entities. E.g.: For a company that runs both B2B and B2C formats of commerce, there would be a different set of B2B Customers that have to get into an agreement by the company to purchase (and get special prices), opposite to the B2C ones that allow anonymity in commerce with anyone can register on the go.
4. Feature Maintenance — The cost of maintaining different codebases becomes exponential where a feature has to be replicated to more than one implementation. With a definite chance of redundancy on both service layer and infrastructure costs.
5. Disjoint Channels — The sales channels (websites) are like parallel tracks, they get along but never converge. This is a missed opportunity and is complicated regardless of how simple it looks. The absence of a smooth transition nips the sales without anyone knowing it.
The universe deals with an asteroid in the same way it deals with a planet. It binds them with a weak (loosely coupled) central force — gravitation. The interpretation of that force depends upon the mass of the body yet bound by a universal gravitational constant. By doing this the universe ensures the systems are self-sufficient and stable. This arrangement provides long term sustainability and sometimes, life.
The analogic message is clear, to keep the diverse e-commerce landscapes gyrating there has to be loosely coupled centralization. A centralization that not only solves their challenges and makes the most out of the available resources. It is not just to save the reserves (sustainability), but to open the scope that the leftovers could incubate innovation (life).
For most of the organizations, centralization turns out to be a big challenge, mainly –
1. Inertia — The system and users have a way of working. They are familiar with the interfaces and their productivity. Centralization may result in fading away from the existing systems/teams with the emergence of new ones. There comes a natural resistance in adapting to the new ways of works.
2. Kinematics — Some of the developed features may be shelved due to obsoletion or suboptimality. This may include some of the features that are freshly developed or about to go live.
3. Conservation of Momentum — There is a loss in momentum that is expected in the initial stages of the transformation as this requires a complete focus and a lateral vision. To conserve the momentum there comes up a need for a separate team that works on the transformation while the existing team can support the live implementation.
4. Damping — There is a difference between the centralization ideology and the ongoing DevOps. This causes the creation of transient competing architectures/solutions that do not last long. To avoid this, phase-based approaches are the ways preferred by various companies.
5. Collisions and Recoil — Expect the rollercoasters during the implementations. Conflicts happen due to the change in ideologies, mindsets. The businesses face challenges to have an appetite to digest these collisions only to better future implementation. What got you here won’t get you there.
6. Rolling Motion — To set the ball rolling, is the most difficult phase and requires a definitive strategy of cutovers, data migrations with an adiabatic fidelity. The new platform must bring mandatory changes so that the customer journey is least impacted.
MVP — Most Valuable Postulates
1. Centripetal Dynamics — Remember, the centripetal gravitational force that sustains galaxies, solar systems are just enough to keep the bodies revolving around their centre. Excess of force can result in either a spiral collapse or a centrifugal dart. The final vision must be crystal clear and the KPIs should be clearly defined. All implementation must be driven through a few central guiding principles to avoid going overboard. Any aberrations would lead to a distorted implementation.
2. Calculating the Acceleration — The value of “g” is different for different bodies. Not all features require equal focus and strive. Therefore, prioritization is very important. There must be a vision of what is required and when it is required.
3. Center of Mass — Identify a core that will control all of the development. This can either be a proprietary solution that provides services out of the box, or a set of in-situ home-brewed core services that can power up the lighthouse.
4. Theory of Relativity — Understand the pulse of the customer, learn to unlearn. It is okay to let go off certain design/features that are individual favourites but do not fit the future puzzle. Remember, that the solution is for the customer and what sounds affinitive to you might not be the same story with the customer.
5. Leverage the universal constants — Refrain from reinventing the wheel, wherever possible. Leverage from what is already discovered and established as a fact, or as a solution. This will help in keeping the costs at check.
6. Relative Motion — It is always better to study what the competitors are doing. Not necessarily to copy them in some sense but to keep a check on where the trends are going. Remember, the current of the river always causes an involuntary drift in the swimmers’ motion.
7. Survival of the fittest — Be open to feedback. Open channels so that you can hear back from people you intend to serve. Try to modify and adjust as per the need of the hour and not just the initial compilations and discoveries. Remember — Neither it is the strongest that survives, nor it is the most intelligent that survives. It is the most adaptable that survives.
Centralization using the SAP Commerce
SAP hybris commerce is a powerful eCommerce suite that helps in faster time to market by inbuilt industry-specific accelerator mechanism that conjures up a running website with basic features that can be easily extended as per the business requirement.
Created by a spectrum of state of art open-source technologies, SAP commerce allows to decouple its offerings* so that best of both worlds, SAP inbuilt as well as open stack could be leveraged. This product supports hosting on most of the application servers like Tomcat/JBoss/Weblogic etc.
For further understanding of SAP (Hybris) Commerce, please visit here.
The above honeycomb outlines the way by which centralization can be achieved by using hybris commerce as an eCommerce solution for a multi landscape (or multi-country) implementation.
The very core of this implementation is very much similar to the centre of mass where the out of the box services like login, cart/checkout, responsive web, order etc. is concentrated with easy modes to integrate with SAP/Non-SAP backend landscapes. Any custom implementations are mostly built on top of the service layer of this core. The implementations are business specific and easily pluggable via suitable extensions/addons. There are different layers chained within the core product offering which allows the businesses to deep dive and choose the layer of their concern.
The concept of centralization involves –
1. Identify the Commonality — Identify the central components. These components are usually those which are commonly occurring between the landscapes. E.g. — Search, Integrations, SEO, SSO etc. The layer with the green background explains some of the possible central components.
2. Respect the Idiosyncrasies — Registration of a customer on a B2B website would be different from a B2C companion site. It is important to outline here that the login process would be mostly the same where the authentication happens against a password or OTP but the authorization depends on the privileges associated with the customer group while the registration process. It is important to draw a line between generalization and specifications. It will help in a modular architecture layout. The outermost layer talks about format-specific implementations
3. Trajectory Agnostic — It is advisable to resort to a decoupled presentation layer to ensure mutual exclusion of the implementations
4. The Binding Force — The web services framework caters for the responsibility to deliver lightweight content. The responses could be cached by suitable frameworks in place.
5. Double Click — Always maintain a double click or a zoom-in view of this architecture upon what would it mean to the individual businesses. This helps in getting them confident and aligned with the big picture
ARCHITECTURE
Conclusion
The universe is an abode to endlessness, and so is eCommerce. It is easy to get lost in the universe than find a way. Similarly, it is comparatively difficult to chalk out a perfect eCommerce solution. But it only gives rise to human imagination and endeavours, the very reason for its existence.
The quote from Bhagavad Gita where Krishna says to Arjuna –
अभ्यासेन तु कौन्तेय वैराग्येण च गृह्यते
“O Arjuna, It is by practice and non-indulgence that perfection can be achieved.”
