Sample Syllabus

Introduction to eCommerce



Catalog Description:

This course is an introduction to the architecture, design, implementation, and management of eCommerce websites.  It covers topics including enterprise architecture, hosting and vendor management, outsourcing principles, challenges of multi-channel commerce, principles of design and usability of websites, licensing and ownership of software, business process, reporting metrics, Search/SEO, eCommerce fraud concerns, and some legal issues and regulations around eCommerce practices.

Prerequisite: none


Textbook(s)


Required:
None
Recommended:
Scrum and XP from the Trenches: How we do Scrum, by Henrik Kniberg
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B0bFmW4S7k7GYjY5NjAwNDMtMjVkMS00ZjBkLWExYTktZGQzOWNkNjdmMzEx&hl=en

Week-By-Week

 
Week
Topics Covered
Reading
Assignments
1
- Introductions & why you're taking this class
- What's ecommerce
- A little bit of history/timeline
- Our favorite ecomm websites. Why we like them? What do we expect in a good (and a bad) eCommerce website (speed, reliability, assortment, availability, delivery options, delivery cost)
- Types of ecomm websites (goods, services, data, marketplaces)
- Website vs. an application - where is the line drawn?
- What happens behind the scenes when we click the "Buy" button
- Explain the class presentation structure.  Students will suggest a list of topics and self organize into groups based on a particular topic they chose.


2
- Major differences between mom'n'pop and enterprise websites
- How do we grow a website? Scalability
- Maintainability
- Risk management and fail-over
- Disaster Recovery and planning
- Licensing and Cost of ownership
- Hosting and vendor management
- Hosting and vendor management Cont'd
- Call center and customer support
- Order management system


3
- Warehouse management system
- Tying everything together: Enterprise Architecture
- Enterprise Application Integrations, ESB
- Technology Selection (Java/.NET/PHP/Ruby-on-rails)
- Web 2.0 (flash/ajax)
- CDN, Akamai
- Community
- Ratings & reviews
- Cross-selling and recommendations
- Click-to-call
- Click-to-chat
- mCommerce


4
- Multi-channel selling and brand consistency
- Data consistency and single customer view
- Special orders / Drop ship
- Email campaign management and CAN-SPAN
- Traffic sources
    - Shopping engines
    - Affiliates
    - Amazon
    - Paid Search
- Alternative checkout
    - Paypal
    - Bill me later
    - Google checkout
- Measuring and reporting performance of different sources


5
Business Process
- Merchandising & Stock position
- Advertising
- Long tailing and endless Isle
- Promotional engines
- Couponing and offer abuse
- Free shipping
- Seasonality
- Direct Marketing and marketing strategy
- Upsell, cross-sell, out-of-stock, product bundles, and substitution
- Reporting: Conversion & AOV
- Google Analytics
- Student presentations: Q&A


6
Students presentations on the topics of choice (agreed on in class 1)

7
Fraud
- Types of fraud
- Credit cards: Address verification and standardization, AVS and CVN, debit cards
- Credit cards: Payment processing, preauth, settling
- Payment gateway
- Communicating security and good track record (BBB, Hackersafe, SSL)
- Processing returns
- A little bit on A/B testing


8
Search
- Site search, filtering, refinements, faceting
- Search Engine Optimization
- Paid Search
- Search Reporting
- Search Tuning


9
Guest Lecturer: Building a successful eCommerce business from ground up
Guest Lecturer: Managing eCommerce Marketing for a large enterprise


10
- Usability
- User Interface: Don't make me think
- What customer say they want vs. what they really want: surveys and focus groups
- Build vs. buy
- Software as a service vs. hosted


11
Management
- Change Management
- Release management
- New features, bugs, and roadmap process
- Virtue of templating and reusability
- Capabilities vs. make-it-work and just-do-it
- Team structure
- Creating YOUR process
- Value of SOP


12
- SCRUM Agile methodology primer

13
- Each students will present their website project

14
- Legal issues and regulations
- Privacy & security
- PCI/SOX compliance & credit card numbers
- Taxation
- Outsourcing
    - Types
    - Why/why not
- What can you outsource, how, when, and to whom
- Case Study
- Review for the final exam