in MBA-speak translation for programmers catalog engine Oracle table ( ec_products
) plus extra tables for mapping to categories, subcategories, and subsubcategories; bulk upload from structured datae-recommendation engine Oracle table ( ec_product_recommendations
) mapping products to categories, subcategories, for everyone or only a particular class of usere-review technology Oracle tables for professional reviews and customer-contributed reviews shopping cart Oracle tables ( ec_user_sessions, ec_orders, ec_items
)real-time credit card billing CyberCash and CyberSource interfaces user tracking log every page view and search integrated customer service (telephone, fax, email, and Web) all interactions logged into same Oracle table; inbound email handler (Perl script); call center staff sit at Web browsers and use the /admin/ecommerce/ pages CRM write custom rules for standard ACS CRM module intelligent agent Oracle query for "users who bought X also bought Y" content management with visual interface Web forms plus auditing of all changes discounts for different classes of user Example: MIT Press wants to sell journals at different rates for individual, institutional, and student subscriptions cross-sales platform Oracle table of "if you're interested in X, you probably also should buy Y"; links are unidirectional object-oriented design per-publisher custom fields table to add arbitrary attributes to products intelligent parametric and free-text search engine pseudo_contains
if you want to have an easy Oracle dbadmin life;Contains
(Intermedia text) if you don't; limit to category at user's optiongift certificates auditing and mandatory expiration enterprise-scale e-business solution add more processors to your Oracle server highly scalable transaction engine orders are inserted into Oracle table XML-enabled download free Java XML libraries from Oracle
If you're even tempted to adopt a commercial ecommerce system from a company other than IBM, Oracle or SAP (three enterprise software vendors that seem likely to be around for awhile), read the iCat story towards the end of http://www.photo.net/wtr/using-the-acs