Elastic Path Commerce 6.2
Customizable Ecommerce Framework of Rich Packaged Functionality and Open Source Components
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, January 14, 2010

NETTING IT OUT

Elastic Path Commerce is the ecommerce software platform offering of Elastic Path Software, Inc., a privately held, Vancouver, BC-based software supplier and ecommerce outsourcer that was founded in 2000. Release 6.2 is the current version of the platform that was introduced in 2003. To date, Elastic Path claims that 200 customer organizations have implemented ecommerce sites based on

Elastic Path Commerce

On the Customers.com report card for evaluating B2C ecommerce platforms, Elastic Path Commerce exceeds requirements in merchandising and channel support. It needs improvement in analytic functionality, and it’s missing support for customer segments.

The platform meets requirements for all other evaluation criteria.

If you are a large organization with specialized, or even unique, ecommerce requirements, and you have the resources and appetite for heavy customization and deep integration, then we recommend that you consider using Elastic Path Commerce as your ecommerce platform. While it’s as much a framework of tools and technologies as it is a platform, we think that you’ll be surprised at the richness and completeness of its out-of-the-box capabilities and the comprehensiveness of the tools that administrators and merchandisers can use to configure, customize, deploy, and manage ecommerce sites.

Top Sellers

© 2010 Elastic Path Software, Inc.

Illustration 4. This illustration shows an example of Top Sellers.

ELASTIC PATH COMMERCE 6.2

Product Introduction and Background

Elastic Path Commerce 6.2 is the current release of the ecommerce platform from Elastic Path Software, Inc. The product was introduced in 2003. To date, it has been licensed and implemented by over 200 customer organizations.

Elastic Path Commerce is a Java application designed for heavy customization of all ecommerce resources and deep integration with external applications. When you license the product, Elastic Path gives you its source code.

Elastic Path Commerce leverages open source components and frameworks. Its developers have focused their efforts where they could add value. They’ve reused proven open source components and frameworks over internal development throughout—Spring, JAX-WS/JAXB, Velocity, Lucene, and BIRT—to mention a few. The use of open source makes Elastic Path Commerce easier to learn, easier to use, and easier to customize and integrate for you. Open source makes the product more flexible and more quickly adaptable and upgradeable for its developers.

Organizations that will find Elastic Path Commerce most attractive are those with unique ecommerce requirements and the requirements, resources, and appetite for customization and integration. Organizations that might choose custom development of their ecommerce platform might consider Elastic Path Commerce first. Organizations that prefer to use open source platforms should consider Elastic Path.

Elastic Path has been quite successful marketing and selling Elastic Path Commerce in retail, telecommunications, software (high tech), and manufacturing segments. The product does not have any industry segment-specific technology or functionality, but implementation style has been very appealing in these segments.

What’s New in Elastic Path Commerce 6.2?

Elastic Path introduced Elastic Path Commerce 6.2 in December 2009. This new release has these three key new features:

•Product Bundles allow merchandisers to combine several Products in a single Product offered for one price.

•Price Lists separate pricing data from product data and allow merchandisers to offer different prices to different customers using pricing rules.

•Change Sets let administrators control changes to key ecommerce resources via workflow and locking.

This report includes our evaluation of these new features.

Company Background

Elastic Path is a privately held ecommerce software, consulting services, hosting, and outsourcing provider. The firm was founded as a 10-person services firm in 2000. Ecommerce services engagements led to the development of reusable technologies and, eventually, the Elastic Path Commerce product. A start-up loan combined with revenue from services has successfully and completely funded Elastic Path’s transformation into a profitable software company and its growth to 200 customers and 120 employees.

This past year, Elastic Path has begun another business transformation, this time to ecommerce outsourcer. The firm accepted an offer from the organizing committee of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics to provide end-to-end ecommerce services for marketing, sales, fulfillment, and customer service for Olympics merchandise through an implementation of Elastic Path Commerce. For 2010, Elastic Path expects significant additional revenue and income from its outsourcing operations for both the winter Olympics and other customers.

THE CUSTOMERS.COM EVALUATION FRAMEWORK FOR B2C ECOMMERCE PLATFORMS

The framework has five top-level evaluation criteria. We list them below and show them visually in Illustration 1 (see report). We’ll provide a little more detail about each of them as we go through our evaluation of Elastic Path Commerce.

•Showstoppers

•Supporting customers, marketers and merchandisers, and channels

•Configuration and customization

•Analytic functionality

•Viability

SHOWSTOPPERS

Showstoppers First

Showstoppers come first. So you’ll be able to determine quickly (and easily) whether or not an ecommerce platform is right for your ecommerce site. You won’t have to wade through detailed descriptions and analyses of product data models, Web content, search results, or management, for example, to know that you should move on to considering another platform because a given platform isn’t intended for organizations in your industry, for example.

•TARGET MARKETS. Suppliers position their platforms to support organizations of certain sizes, specific industry segments, and specific geographies. More importantly, their platforms have the technology that reflects this support or may lack the technology for supporting other organization sizes, industry segments, and geographies.

•DEPLOYMENT APPROACHES. Ecommerce suppliers offer on-premise, hosted single-tenant, and hosted multi-tenant deployment alternatives. No supplier offers all three. For example, if you want fast and low-cost deployment and you want your supplier to manage performance and availability, then select a supplier offering hosted multi-tenant deployment. Or, if you need to deploy your ecommerce site in your physical site using your facilities and staff, then select a platform with on-premise deployment. The scope and scale of you efforts will depend on deployment approach and on whether or not you’ll be migrating from a current implementation created from a different deployment approach. That’s big in an ecommerce platform evaluation

•ENVIRONMENTS. Environments are the server operating systems, RDBMSs, Web infrastructures, and clients that a platform supports. For on-premise deployments, if your IT standards are not included, then your consideration of a platform is over.

•IMPLEMENTATION STYLE. Your implementation of an ecommerce site will require customization and configuration of varying depth and complexity. This depth and complexity depends both on your ecommerce requirements and on what we’ll call the implementation style of ecommerce platforms. Some ecommerce platforms provide the facilities, interfaces, and tools to support deep customization. For example, Elastic Path Commerce provides source code. Other platforms provide lots of configuration but limited customization, speeding your implementation effort, perhaps, at the expense of flexibility. You should match your implementation style with the implementation style of an ecommerce platform.

Showstoppers for Elastic Path Commerce

In Table A, we present the showstoppers for Elastic Path Commerce.

Showstoppers for Elastic Path Commerce

Please download the PDF to see the table.

Table A. In this Table, we present the showstoppers for Elastic Path Commerce.

There are no significant showstoppers for Elastic Path Commerce. The only issue is the lack of support for mobile devices. Elastic Path plans to add mobile device support in one of the releases planned for 2010. So this is not an issue for long.

This report continues...