Project Initiation for Social Commerce

Things you need to consider before initiating your social commerce project

Project initiation is one of the key phases in the project’s life cycle which if done in the right manner will help to reduce the overall time and cost of the project considerably. I would like to share some of the learnings achieved through key decision making during the project initiation phase of a recent B2B social commerce project.

Background

Typical of projects we do at Kuliza, this project too had quite an aggressive deadline and features to the likes of Ebay and Amazon. Unknown technologies in an unknown domain with unrealistic deadlines quite obviously a lot of nigh-outs, felt just like home for us. The project was very challenging since it had a lot of use cases on store management and workflow management with integrations with web services from who’s who of online payment and shipping industry. Time to market was the key for the client .We soon realized that to build project of this complexity with such time constraints we would need a very strong core capable of having a robust workflow management and being able to integrate with a lot of third party modules.

Here are some of the key things to remember when it comes to project initiation for social commerce tools and platforms:

• Avoid dwelling on an alien land

We had to evaluate a first attempt at implementing the project from another company. We had to see if we could salvage some of the code to reduce our implementation time. We came to the decision that we would not be able to leverage much due to the poor standards and architecture employed.

The conclusion was that using this code would only add to the long list of unknowns we already had. Criteria used to evaluate were coding standards, ability to integrate with third party modules, scalability of existing architecture.

• Build a strong workflow management (for your social commerce platform)

In order to build a robust engine to drive workflow we needed a good eCommerce platform. After evaluating some B2C implementations we concluded that Ubercart would ideally serve our purpose.

There were a couple of criteria that we kept in mind for choosing the right ecommerce platform. We wanted the platform’s architecture to be flexible enough for us to use it as a development framework rather than a out of box solution, that the framework had the right coding standards employed, availability of third party modules for integration and overhead in understanding and modifying Ubercart to implement custom use cases.

• Choosing the right CMS framework (to build your social commerce site)

The framework of our choice –Drupal, was primarily a CMS. Hence some of its core concepts like content types, cck etc were written from a CMS perspective. While implementing these data models seemed to be an easier approach and conforming to Drupal’s standards, we felt the architecture of content types and cck were very inefficient and inflexible for customization. These models were written with an intent that anybody interested in CMS need not have to code to achieve simple data structures.

Criteria used to evaluate these modules were scalability of application, flexibility offered by these models for customization, third party modules which would directly integrate with these modules. Based on these criteria’s we decided to employ data models like content types and cck selectively wherever the use cases were typical of CMS.

• Getting the application security right

User access framework was one of the basic building blocks needed for the project. The access framework had to be robust and flexible to accommodate a hierarchical set of access rules based on organization roles, membership levels and organization status. We decided to modify the access framework offered by Drupal which was primarily built for individual users rather than for organizations. This approach was taken against implementing from scratch because Drupal’s access framework was already being employed by Ubercart and a number of other Drupal’s core modules. This meant that we could leverage the access enforcement from it reducing our implementation time significantly.

Criteria used were ease of modifying existing framework, access enforcement effort, effects of custom access framework on Ubercart and on core Drupal modules.

The decisions that we took during the initiation of the project have helped reduce the overall development effort and time and have also helped to us to build a strong core. The important learnings have been to objectively establish criteria to be considered to make decisions and leverage available options effectively to achieve the objectives.

Stock Market from a beginners point of view

Hi all I am back with my second post as promised, today i am going to get all technical with you, I was thinking the other day, I am 22 all grown up,need to do something that grown up's do, so decided why don't i do some research in Stock Market after all i have been earning now and have stashed away some money for the rainy days, but now it seems these are sunny days and have enough for now, so now is the time to experiment. I have been doing some research now and have been able to understand a few terminologies.I will give some basic definitions and how to actually invest in stock market. Everyone says it's not good to for a beginner to invest in stock market, as it has a lot of nuances which can be understood and mastered only by experience, in short u will lose a lot of money before you start gaining.As I was in middle of writing this post i had an opportunity to interact with Aegon Religare relationship Manger Mr Sri Ganesh.He gave me details about the nuances of the stock market and which according to him would be an ideal way for someone to start with.


There are three ways u can get yourself involved in a stock Market.

1)Stock Trading
2)Mutual Funds
3)ULIP- Unit Linked Insurance Policies

So which mode to choose,from the research i have done through Internet and speaking to the concerned people i have come to the following conclusions.

Method of Investment --------- Returns ---------------- Risk

Stock Trading --------------------High ---------------Extremely High
Mutual Funds ----------------- Moderate ------------------Low
ULIP ----------------------------High ---------------Extremely Low

So why do i think ULIP has high returns and low risk this is because the way you money is handled. The way a ULIP works is something is like this, say u invest 100 Rs today in a ULIP, 10% goes towards your insurance premium as is mandatory by law and the remaining 90Rs is invested in the stock portfolio that the company offering ULIP thinks would give the maximum gain. So how is this different from mutual funds well everything is fine as long as stock market is on a upward rally the returns on your stock portfolio keeps on increasing but what happens once the stock market enters the negative phase,in mutual funds u have an option of exciting the stock market and wait till the market bottom's out and reinvest money in the stocks again once u see an upward trend,but this is a very costly procedure and cannot be done often or weather the storm and accept lower returns on your investment or even sustain losses, so this would be a like a dampened sine wave with ups and downs finally settling on a moderate return. Now how is ULIP different from this, well in case of ULIP u have two options(or several more depending on the issuer) either u can invest the 90% of your investment in stocks or do a fixed deposit, the way it works is say u have bought 100 units of ULIP share when stock market is 10000 and say after a year the market is looming at 20000 points u will be getting a very high return on your investment say 20% per month,now it so happens that the market starts falling down ,you can immediately shift the gains you had made to fixed deposit where the market wont effect your investment+gains and you will be getting a moderate return of 10% per annum. In this way u can whether the storm in the stock market and reinvest when u see a boom in the market. For further details regarding tax evasion on you gains read the following article http://www.rediff.com/money/2005/oct/15perfin.htm. Guys after having matured in investments I feel ULIPS is not the best way to invest. I will post more about my learnings in my next blog post

Hey all i have imagined this moment for long,my first blog post, i have been trying for six months now to publish one single post but somehow never found enough time to sit in front of my laptop for an hour and write some crap and publish it, well that is history now as u reading some crap i have written, i hope it's only the first blog that is so difficult, because i plan to write a lot more in the coming days, I have decided i am gonna make my life an open book, available to everyone who would like to have glimpse into my life. U get a strange feeling of happiness and confidence when u tell some one that u are like a open book and there is nothing to hide about urself . I am gonna write about myself and people i see around me and will try to awaken the writer and intellectual within me to give all my readers the glimpse of my life as i see it.