News and Insights_

Appointment Service Design for eCommerce Applications, Part 2 – Technical Considerations

Designing an appointment service for your eCommerce application requires a comprehensive understanding of your business, close cross-team collaboration, and thorough technical architecture. In my last post about appointments, I introduced a couple considerations that would help frame your thinking for the technical design for such a service, including the importance of the race condition, as well as […]
Live Chat

Live Chat is not a Panacea for UX Problems

If you’ve been on the support page of a company’s website lately, you’ve probably been introduced to a live chat widget. “How can I help you?” it probably said, from the bottom corner of your browser. There was probably an avatar of a smiling customer service representative, and maybe even their name in the chat […]

Marrying the Digital and Physical Shopping Experiences: Buy Online and Pick Up In-Store

As more and more consumers opt for a digital shopping experience, businesses with a brick-and-mortar presence are faced with a critical question: how do they maintain the relevance of their physical stores while managing to compete with their online competitors? Increasingly, retailers with a foot in both worlds are experimenting with a creating a shopping […]

A Fractured Landscape: Global Data Privacy Regulations and Digital Commerce

As web-based technology has grown and matured over the last decade, a glaring gap has emerged in the digital privacy strategies of many businesses who operate online. As these strategies have diverged, the distance between how customers view their privacy rights and how businesses view their privacy obligations has similarly grown. With the media and […]

Considering an online marketplace? There’s no time like the present.

Ever since Amazon and Ebay established themselves as two of the internet’s first true eCommerce titans, business leaders around the world have studied the trailblazers, looking for insights that can be applied to their own businesses. In recent years, particular attention has been drawn to the business model that serves as each company’s foundation—the marketplace. […]

eCommerce Equalizer: Avatria Convert Featured on DM News

We’re excited that announce that Avatria Convert has been featured on DM News! In the profile, Avatria partner Harry Thakkar explains the problem Avatria Convert solves for eCommerce sites, and highlights the significant improvement Convert’s customers have seen to their conversion rate when using the product. Read the full article here: https://www.dmnews.com/data/ai-machine-learning/article/21040662/ecommerce-equalizer

Maximizing the Value of Minimum Viable Product

When enterprise software projects fail, it is usually not from a lack of skilled developers, detailed requirements or meticulous controls. They fail when development efforts are not focused on achieving clearly defined solutions to tangible business challenges. They fail when the internal stakeholders they purport to benefit feel no connection to or ownership of the […]

The Keys to Healthy Dev-QA Relationship

Any successful software project requires two things: quality developers and quality testing resources. Even the best developers will make mistakes, and it’s critical to have a team on hand to find bugs before users have a chance to. However, given that the nature of the QA role is to find issues in the developers’ work, […]
SAP Commerce Cloud

Migrating to the SAP Commerce Cloud – Notes from SAP CX Live 2018

SAP just wrapped up their annual CX Live event in Barcelona, Spain. We were excited to see that a good portion of the event was focused on the new SAP Commerce Cloud. The value proposition of Digital Commerce in the cloud has always been the same: improve operational efficiency, reduce time to market, scale on demand to meet […]

Salesforce Acquires CloudCraze: What it means for both companies and their customers

On March 12th Salesforce entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Chicago-based CloudCraze. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with events in the enterprise eCommerce space over the past several years. Indeed, as early as June of 2016, when Salesforce announced its acquisition of Demandware, Avatria’s Anando Naqui suggested that one next […]

Appointment Service Design for eCommerce Applications

There are appointments in many different eCommerce scenarios. Whether it’s in the form of a movie ticket, an airplane ticket, or an oil change, each appointment scenario requires specific business rules and technical decisions to properly design its system. Assuming that you’ve chosen a service to serve as the appointment master, this design will outline the necessary steps […]

Why Online Retailers Should Care About Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is once again in the headlines as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) prepares to vote on repealing open internet rules on December 14th. With this vote, the previous rules set by the FCC may be overturned, revoking Net Neutrality, and allowing internet service providers (ISP) to prioritize web traffic and offer services based on […]

Staffing: Delivering with Your Implementation Partner

Commerce implementations are fast paced and require a lot of time and effort from the implementation team. However, the time and effort is equally as important for the companies that bring in this team of consultants. These companies often need a well thought out division of labor and work-stream ownership to support the overall project. […]

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Self-Service: Impact Beyond the Customer

When customers are unable to interact with a business’s digital storefront in an autonomous manner, it can often cause frustration for the customer and lead to unnecessary customer service overhead for the business.  If you shop online think about why you do so and what you expect from the sites where you shop; there’s a […]

Commerce Solutions and the Creative Process

During commerce implementations, technology companies and technology teams often focus only on just that: technology. The emphasis is on the platform, the code, and its development and testing. While these are critical elements of all commerce projects, it is important to not overlook the creative process. This vital track of work consists of team members […]

Elite BAs may not Develop Code, but are Pivotal to Project Success

In my experience, there has been a misconception that solid Business Analysts are pretty easy to find and are interchangeable within an eCommerce project. What I have come across is that finding very strong BAs that are difference makers on a project is not so easy; and having a great one is essential to overall quality […]

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order-automation

Want to improve operational efficiency? Increase order automation.

Every business strives to improve operational efficiency in an effort to reduce overhead and free up resources for strategic initiatives.  One of the ways that retailers accomplish this is by reducing or eliminating the number of times a person has to interact with an order before it is fulfilled.  This concept, often referred to as Order […]

Considering upgrading SAP Hybris 5.x to 6.x? Read this first.

Companies consider upgrading their software for many reasons.  Whether they decide to upgrade to take advantage of new functionality, address platform defects, or maintain platform support from the vendor, each company that upgrades can improve their chances of success by following the guidelines below for upgrading from SAP Hybris 5.x to 6.x. Guidelines for Upgrading There […]

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What Salesforce’s Acquisition of Demandware Means for Commerce

On June 1, Salesforce announced its $2.8B acquisition of Demandware, the market leader in cloud-based eCommerce. In doing so, Salesforce launches Commerce Cloud, part of Salesforce’s cloud ecosystem and jumps headfirst into the world of digital commerce. The deal is expected to close on July 31, 2016. The platform commerce space has seen a number of […]

Find Your Match: A Look at Purpose-Built Commerce Solutions

You are a company that is looking for a new commerce solution, and you don’t know where to start. How do I pick the right product? Can I narrow down my list of potential suitors right off the bat? Most likely, and it’s possible to find a product that is built closer to your specs […]

Mitigating the Causes and Effects of Scope Creep

Even well-executed eCommerce implementations that are launched on time and budget fail to meet client expectations. Often times no single group (client, consultant or third party) is at fault, and the root cause can be traced back to either differences in the understanding of the body of work to be implemented or changes to that […]

Cloud Infrastructure Automation Shows Promise in Infancy

Many of today’s retail companies are no longer interested in hosting and maintaining their own digital storefronts, preferring instead to focus their resources on innovation that drives a channel-less experience for their end-consumers.  This has created a rapidly expanding opportunity for technology implementation companies to provide Managed Services for their customers.  In fact, it has […]

Why Bad Product Data Disrupts eCommerce Implementations

There are many challenges in “getting it right” when it comes to product data, and we will dive into this topic in the context of an eCommerce implementation. This may be a refresher for some, or a fair warning to others that may not have the experience, but in either case it should provide valuable […]