E-business site

An e-business site is an externally facing site designed to market a company's products and services to consumers and allow them to purchase these online. The focus of the site is on helping a consumers match their needs to the appropriate product or service and maximizing their purchases.

The site provides:

• press releases about the latest news relating the company's products and services.

• a promotions area with information about products and services including sales, special package deals and discounts.

• a products and services catalogue area with the entire catalogue displayed as a searchable taxonomy.

• a shopping area where users can see:

  • a searchable list of available products and services available for purchase online.

  • a summary of the items they are intending to purchase.

  • an area to calculate tax, shipping and other costs.

  • an area to purchase these items online, via mail order, or via a follow up call from a salesperson.

  • an area to track orders they have already initiated.

• articles where the organization can help customers using articles discussing their products and services.

• a support area with technical documentation, contact numbers, support request forms, FAQs, and downloads.

• a service for subscribing to a newsletter where the user will be sent a regular update highlighting new promotions, products or articles.

The home page of the site is used to highlight the latest promotions, and to give a strong sense of the brand of the organization. Throughout the site, collaborative filtering is used to help suggest products and services to consumers based on their purchasing and navigational activity. A discussion system may also be used to allow users to build a community where they can comment on and rate various products and services. A number of components are used together to build the e-business site:

• WebSphere Portal is used to provide a platform for the integration of content and applications that form the e-business site.

• The overall theme and top level navigation of the intranet is also managed using WebSphere Portal.

• Web Content Management provides the micro-level layout of the content within the site, and is also used to directly build the press releases, FAQs, articles and promotional content.

• The catalogue and shopping areas are being run using Websphere Commerce.

• Personalization is used to suggest products to users based on collaborative filtering, and to email the newsletter.

• A third-party discussion system is used to deliver collaborative forums in the communities section of the site using a custom portlet.

An e-business site can generate a very large amount of traffic with a relatively small amount of content.

Parent topic:

Web site examples

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