With scalability, security and reliability built in from ground up, APS e-commerce solutions are designed to enable you to conduct business-to-business and business-to-consumer Internet transactions. APS has accumulated expertise in a range of industries from years of working with healthcare companies, financial institutions and manufacturers. We can provide end-to-end e-commerce solutions that integrate with your existing systems. And they will fit into any environment, so you can easily build on existing hardware and software.

APS is able to build and deploy customer branded applications in as little as a few weeks; most projects are completed in the 60-90 day timeframe, end to end. Current APS applications are handling millions of customer accounts with daily activity exceeding 10,000 transactions.

We are a technology shop with an acute understanding of the individual business needs, position and their markets. Most other e-commerce projects fail typically due to over or under investment of resources due to the "hype". We propose a phased approach for e-commerce project development. The initial phases are designed to allow the customer to judge the market in reality, understand their customer base and how the e-consumers/e-businesses are reacting to their offerings. The following phases are then strategized and developed to get the maximum out of the e-commerce site.

A typical e-commerce project requires APS to understand the customer's industry and market, lay down the requirements and analyze them. It is at this stage that we also do an extensive search for an industry standard tool that can be minimally customized to present the customer with a quality solution. As a result the resources needed to deploy the e-commerce site are amazingly minimal driving down the costs. Add to that the fact that such products or software tools:

• Are much much cheaper than proprietary software code.
• Are standards based.
• Have been well tested by the industry and have a much better quality compared to buggy software code development.
• Come with upgrade features giving a much longer life to the commerce solutions.

With its strategic partnership with industry stalwarts like Microsoft, Compaq, IBM and @Work, APS can provide end-to-end solutions starting from software development and hardware deployment to Internet link setup. This reduces third-party dependencies and allows us to guarantee a good night's sleep to our customers.

The nitty gritty of an e-commerce site

(We strongly suggest that you include all the features of an e-commerce site to get the maximum out of this amazing technology. If done properly, the costs associated with such a setup are minimal and the returns are high. For further assistance please contact us at info@apstechnologies.com ). The e-commerce process includes:

• Developing an e-commerce site (front-end) - The amount of resources needed and the costs associated with developing the front-end vary, based on the business requirements. Of particular note is APS' unique strategy of using industry standard software tools to reduce costs. Based on our experience, we have been able to customize standards based tools and templates to create quality solutions for our customers. Some of the components of the site include:
  • Basic site: Although not a part of e-commerce, a basic web-site provides your site visitors with graphics, navigation, links and other features that may or may not relate to commerce. The content here is more informational rather than transactional.
  • Online Catalog: Electronic presentation of goods and services using an online catalog allows the businesses to offer the most current pricing information on the web with minimum maintenance hassles. A lot of business users try to "emulate" e-commerce sites by pasting pricing and product listing (including pictures) in static HTML code. This on the initial release may seem OK, but soon the site goes out of sync., as the pricing and product offerings keep changing based on specials and other business needs. A true online catalog is database driven so that the HTML pages are generated dynamically. Any price or product offering changes are easily maintainable through a customized interface to the database tables. An online catalog also allows your customer to easily search for product offerings using different criteria (e.g. product type, product name, part number, SKU etc.).
  • Easy to use shopping cart: Shopping cart is the most standard way to allow your customers to shop easily. Based on commerce industry statistics the abandonment rate of visitors to the site is directly (infact exponentially!) dependent on the ease of use. A shopping cart provides online order taking and bill presentation.
  • Online payment and transaction handling: Most commerce sites accept credit cards and also validate and process transactions over the Internet. Current technology allows credit card numbers to be transmitted across the Internet with strong encryption (so much that it may take trillion times trillion years to decrypt data!). By offering such a feature, businesses not only reduce the number of bogus credit card processing incidents but also reduce the overall internal costs in conducting a commerce transaction. Of particular note is a B2B feature wherein businesses may accept payments via Purchase Orders on the site.
  • Accounts and mailing lists: The e-commerce site can also be used to extend your customer base by creating mailing lists (or automatic notification messages) for customers interested in your offerings. The login feature allows interested customers to register themselves for change notification. The changes may be due to a new product being offered, change in pricing or any other sales lead that you may want to follow. This feature also allows businesses to analyze their customer base and change offerings accordingly.
  • Site traffic and sales analysis reports: E-commerce sites can provide really useful data to identify your "web customer" base, their taste, buying patterns etc. A lot of businesses put up a commerce site without caring for who is buying from their site, why and how. By incorporating site traffic and analysis reports (using OLAP), businesses can find for e.g., sales patterns and hence change their offerings accordingly. This is of tremendous value and gives you the cutting edge over your competitor.
  • Customer account based pricing (B2B sites only): Businesses that conduct commerce with other businesses over the web may want to offer customer based pricing. That is, based on the buyer the price and product offering may be different. Such features can be easily incorporated in a B2B site wherein pricing, product offerings and other features can be purely customer based.
  • Others:
    • Surfer favorites: APS works closely with businesses and provides solutions based on business needs. This was one of our innovations where the business' site visitors wanted to re-order the same products again and again. This in contrast to amazon.com 's business model is completely different. A lot of e-commerce vendors fall into the trap of replicating what sites like amazon.com and others have to offer. Here, we offered a new feature on the site that would allow web surfers to add their favorite products into their "My Favorites" list. As a result, next time when they come to re-order, they do not have to search for the product again, infact they go to their favorites and re-order with maximum ease.
    • Web voice integration: According to recent industry surveys, almost 60% web surfers abandon a shopping cart due to some reason or the other. Some businesses try to overcome this loss by publishing their toll-free numbers on the site. A better result can be achieved if we allow the customer to make a toll free call using a simple "Call button" on the commerce site. Instant access to a "live" representative reduces the abandonment rate tremendously.
    • One-click shopping: The e-commerce site should allow as easy to use shopping capabilities as possible. Registered users can be offered the one-click ordering feature, wherein to complete transactions they just need to click once. Since we already have their information stored in our databases, they need not re-enter.

• Hosting the commerce site
  • Self hosting - This typically is a costly option. We would strongly suggest that you host your site with a third party unless your transaction volume is too high or your backend systems are integrated to the front-end using proprietary software. Typical costs may include:
    • Cost for Internet link (T-1 ~ 1100/mo. or xDSL varies from $200 - $ 700/ mo. based on bandwidth requirements)
    • Cost for hardware setup (for the front end and backend servers ~ $ 8000 + costs for setting up internal LAN, if needed. Also, if you choose to deploy a separate dB server it may add to this cost)
    • Software costs - OS and web server costs ~ 4,000 + dB software, if needed.
    • Environment setup costs - Costs associated with putting up a LAN (Local Area Network), firewall for security etc.
  • Hosting it at a third party location - This is a much cheaper option compared to self-hosting. It also offloads you from a lot of maintenance hassles that creep up due to Internet link, hardware failure and other OS related problems. The typical costs may be around $300 /mo. APS also offers site hosting facilities.

• Integrating the site with existing systems and processes (back-end) - The cost and the resources needed for integrating a commerce site front-end to the backend vary considerably. The variable factor typically is the existing system being used by the business. Standards based systems are easy to integrate while the non-standards based systems require considerable efforts. The biggest advantage of integration is the reduced internal costs. Imagine a setup where the customer's order go straight from the web and automatically generate a "picking" ticket for the warehouse. This not only reduces the human intervention costs but also brings down the error rates. APS specializes in integrating systems running on different environments including ODBC compliant databases to mainframes and PICK databases. Of particular mention is our ability to bring mainframes to the web by using the Microsoft's SNA Server and IBM's LU6.2/APPC technology. Some of the features of legacy system integration include:
  • Automating order-entry from the site to your system
  • Online real-time shipment tracking and order status information.
  • Online real-time inventory information.
  • Online customer account information.
  • Automatic integration with partner and vendor systems (B2B sites only): This feature provides a seamless integration between your web-site to your partners. Thus for example, if you are a manufacturer of a product A which needs a part P. Each order on your web-site may automatically trigger buying of part P from your vendor based on current inventory levels.