CUSTOMERS.COM® RESEARCH FROM THE PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP
B2C ECOMMERCE EVALUATION FRAMEWORK
How to Evaluate Software that Supports Consumers’ Shopping,
Buying, and Account Management
By Mitchell I. Kramer, April 24, 2008
NETTING IT OUT
Many of your customers prefer doing business with you online. They go to
your Web sites to learn about your products and services, to find products
and/or services that address their needs, to configure and price the products
and/or services that they’d like to buy, and to purchase those products
and/or services. They also set up and manage accounts with you.
When those customers are consumers, we call these activities B2C (business
to consumer) ecommerce. From the perspective of your business, your B2C ecommerce
site can be a significant marketing and sales channel, driving significant
revenue at lower cost of sales than assisted-service channels.
B2C ecommerce software provides self-service facilities that let organizations
implement and deploy Web sites that support these consumer customer activities.
In this report, we present our framework for evaluating B2C ecommerce software.
The framework has these six top-level evaluation criteria:
- Operational functionality
- Analytic functionality
- Architecture
- Product viability
- Company viability
Use the framework to reduce the time, cost, and risk for evaluating and selecting
the B2C ecommerce software product that is best for your organization.
B2C Ecommerce Evaluation Framework
© 2008 Patricia Seybold Group, Inc.
Illustration 1. This illustration shows the evaluation criteria and sub-criteria of the PSGroup B2C Ecommerce Evaluation Framework.
B2C ECOMMERCE
A Framework for Evaluating Ecommerce Software
This report presents our B2C ecommerce evaluation framework. The framework
is a set of criteria that you can use to help select the ecommerce software
product or service that’s best for your organization. We’ll use
the framework to evaluate and compare the leading ecommerce products and
services, giving your selection process a jump start.
We based the criteria for the framework on our long and continuing ecommerce
experience in three critical areas:
- First, in our work with your customers,
speaking with them to understand their issues, requirements, and visions
in doing business with you and by encouraging
them to communicate those issues, requirements, and visions with you.
- Second, in our work with organizations
like yours, helping you become more customer-centric by helping you understand
how your customers want to do business
with you and then helping you redefine your policies, processes, and
technologies to address those requirements.
- Third, in our work with ecommerce
software suppliers, helping them understand the benefits of customer-centricity,
encouraging them to view their market
from their customers’ (your) perspective and to build systems to
meet their customers’ requirements.
Like all of our evaluation frameworks, the B2C ecommerce evaluation framework
can deliver significant benefits to you. It can reduce the time, reduce the
cost, and reduce the risk in your process to select an ecommerce offering.
We explain the key decision factors, focusing your efforts of criteria that
differentiate competing offerings. Our framework-based product reviews identify
the leading ecommerce products and services and deliver apples-to-apples
evaluations and comparisons of them. Use these reports to get to a short
list quickly.
We’ve been publishing evaluation frameworks since 1993. Back then, we’d
written them for RDBMSs and client/server application development tools. The
first version of a B2C evaluation framework dates back to 1998. Currently,
you can use ?? of our evaluation frameworks to help evaluate and compare all
the products and technologies that comprise your customer experience.
Framework Terms and Context
Let’s define the terms and the context of our B2C ecommerce evaluation
framework.
- Ecommerce is the set of activities
that customers perform on the Internet channel to learn about your products
and services, to find products and/or services
that address their needs, to configure and price the products and/or
service s that they’d like to buy, and to purchase those products
and/or services. Ecommerce also includes customers’ activities to
set up and manage accounts with you.
- B2C ecommerce is ecommerce between
business and consumers. Consumers are individual end-customers and their
households who act as agents for themselves.
- B2C ecommerce software provides
self-service facilities that let organizations implement and deploy Web
sites that support these customer activities for consumers.
- The self-service facilities of ecommerce
software comprise: 1) services and tools such as product comparisons or
gift registries used by customers to perform
ecommerce activities and 2) technologies such as Web content and product
data that you customize and deploy to support to support these services
and tools.
With these definitions in mind, let’s examine customers’ ecommerce
activities and the self-service facilities of ecommerce software a little more
closely.
CUSTOMERS’ B2C ECOMMERCE ACTIVITIES
Cross-Channel, Cross-Lifecycle Customer Experience
Your customers do business with you through all the channels that you support
across all the activities of the lifecycle of your relationships with them.
Your have self-service channels through which your systems support customer
activities, and you have assisted-service channels through which your agents
perform customer activities on behalf of your customers. Customers’ activities
occur within a lifecycle that starts with their first interaction and ends
with their retirement (or desertion). We organize those activities into lifecycle
phases, and we name those phases explore, select, purchase, install, use,
and manage.
Shopping for and Buying Products and/or Services Online
Your B2C ecommerce system is a component of your cross-channel, cross-lifecycle
customer experience. These systems support self-service channels for customers’ activities
within the explore, select, purchase, and manage lifecycle phases—your
customers’ online shopping and buying activities. In Table A, we list
these activities within each lifecycle phase in a little more detail.
B2C Ecommerce Activities
Please download the formatted PDF to see the table.
Table A. In this table, we list B2C ecommerce activities within their lifecycle
phases.
The Customers.com Perspective
B2C ecommerce systems are sometimes described as your online marketing and
sales applications. That’s not our perspective. We’re the Customers.com
company. We always have a customer perspective. We believe that if you make
it easy for your customers to do business with you… they will! If you
implement an ecommerce system that, for example, makes it easy for them to
find and learn anything they want to learn about your products, they’ll
buy more of your products online and build strong and profitable relationships
with you. The measures of all of the systems of your customer experience
should be customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability.
This report continues...
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