Shop.Org recently released their Merchandising Report by Forrester Research.  The Merchandising Report was the second in a series called The State of Online Retailing 2009 and highlights priorities for online retailers either this calendar year or planned for calendar year 2010.

The report identifies the following areas which retailers are turning their focus toward:

• Checkout process redesign
• Improved product detail pages
• Site search results & controls
• Home page
• Better Help and FAQs

In order to help facilitate this shift in priorities, let’s take a look at how Commerce Server 2009 can be used in these areas.

Checkout Process Redesign

Retailers are looking to provide additional details around the checkout process to help prevent sticker shock once the customer arrives at the order review page.  Customers often feel that shipping costs and taxes are more than expected and sometimes fail to complete the order because of this.  One solution is to provide a mechanism to display proper shipping pricing, estimated shipping dates and estimated taxes within the shopping cart based on a customer’s zip or postal code.  Commerce Server’s new Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation provides ways that allow developers to integrate 3rd party applications and services into the same application context.  The use of Operation Sequences now allows developers to perform multiple actions on a Commerce Entity.  A Basket is an example of a Commerce Entity and also contains multiple operation sequences.  Custom operation sequences can be added to provide additional capabilities, which include adding functionality provided by 3rd party shipping and tax providers.

With SharePoint Commerce Services merchandisers can now reconfigure the checkout process using a SharePoint list.  This custom list is created when you install SharePoint Commerce Services and allows developers to provide the capability for merchandisers or content creators to change the flow of the checkout process with pre-built checkout controls.  In a production scenario, you may not allow business users to make these kinds of changes, but in the context of creating additional content, this could be quite valuable.  For example, you may want to provide content creators with the ability to create micro-sites and configure the type of checkout process used for these additional sites.  Another example might be to create vendor specific sites that include an easy one-step checkout process.

Product Detail Pages

Retailers are looking to provide the best possible product content to online visitors.  One of the best ways to achieve this is to allow customers to rate and review products.  Commerce Server 2009 now includes the ability to provide moderated product reviews using SharePoint.  Add the pre-built ratings and review web part to the product detail page and allow customers to rate and review the products they purchase and provide this valuable content to future site visitors.

Commerce Server has almost always provided an easy way to tie different types of content to your products.  Flexible and extensible product and category schemas allow you to create custom properties that could define additional product details, links to product manuals, warranty information and even links to product promotional videos.  In addition to flexible schemas, the Catalog API provides mechanisms for adding related items to products.  These related products could be cross-promotional products or accessories or take it a step further and use the relationship model for storing multiple product images or even colour swatches.

Search

Retailers are often looking to seriously beef-up their capabilities in the area product and content search; most of the time this calls for a best-of-breed search provider like Endeca or Fast.  The features provided by these 3rd party enterprise search providers are unmatched when using Commerce Server’s native search for product content.  However, not all retailers can afford the price tag associated with these types of packages and need to turn to something more cost-effective.

With Commerce Server 2009 and integration to SharePoint, customers can now leverage the power of SharePoint’s Enterprise Search and the combination of product content searching with Commerce Server.  A pre-configured web part can be used to easily configure how search results are displayed and whether to render either static content, product content or both.  This new web part is provided as part of SharePoint Commerce Services.

Home Page

The home page is a great place to display promotional ads, products on sale and other types of content.  Touching again on the flexibility of the Commerce Server catalog, merchandisers can create special product categories outside of their normal merchandising hierarchy that can be used to hold special products or sale items.  In the simplest example, a Product Query Web Part can be added to the home page and configured to only display items from the special products or sale items category.  Taking it one step further, data can be aggregated from Commerce Server Data Warehouse to display top-rated or best-selling products; these products can then be displayed and rendered to customers using specialized categories stored in the catalog.

Product segmentation can also take the form of a micro-site, to offer customers seasonal products or products designed for a special event.  SharePoint Commerce Services allows merchandisers to take advantage of SharePoint’s Enterprise Content Management features to create additional Commerce Server enabled sites with little effort.  Chose from the predefined list of templates or create custom templates specific to your brand.  This newly created site can contain products from an entirely new catalog, a subset of existing products and even offer the same products with an overall reduction in price.

Conclusion

The State of Online Retailing Report provides some great insight into what retailers are looking to accomplish next year.  Commerce Server 2009 can provide these retailers with some compelling features and flexibility to help them meet these goals.