GRAVIT-E PRODUCT GUIDE Page 1 of 28
Introduction Gravit-e is a well proven third generation ecommerce platform serving the needs of Business to Consumer (B2C), Business to Business (B2B), and multi-channel businesses and retailers. With over ten years of ecommerce experience, the Gravit-e Centric team have used that platform to support Tier 1 retailers, SMEs, and start up businesses across a range of sectors. Originally created to serve the needs of ERP and CRM customers who required a new route to market, integration has naturally played an important part in many of our solutions over the years. The Gravit-e Centric team have vast experience in understanding, recommending. and managing the right processes for a growing business. We follow strong best practice to create a stable and robust platform on which to build your sites and business. The Gravit-e solution offers its customers a feature rich base with the ability to add bespoke functionality and scale up capacity as the business grows. Our team of web experts cover every skillset required to run a successful e-commerce or web business and we align our activities to fill the gaps which may or may not exist within your own team. Gravit-e Centric are here to support your business and work with you right the way through your online journey. In this Guide This product guide provides an introduction to Gravit-e Centric's core product and provides further details on our methodology and approach to key aspects of delivering a successful ecommerce environment to our customers. Page 2 of 28
Our Methodology A successful ecommerce provider understands that the design, development, and launch of a new website is just the start of their client s journey. The Gravit-e Centric methodology focuses on building a long-term relationship with all of our customers, working as them as their trusted partner. Pro-Active Monitoring and Reviews We pro-actively monitor all of our client sites and track their performance on a regular basis, including a quarterly review with our CTO to discuss technologies and trends relevant to the businesses future growth and success online. Our approach focuses on the four key steps in the purchasing process: Each quadrant represents one of the four key factors that contribute to online success. The Gravit-e platform provides you with the tools to maximise each of these factors, guided by the Gravit-e team s online expertise. A successful website is built on an understanding of the cost of quadrant one, the conversion rate of visitors to customers in quadrant two, the value delivered in quadrant three, and how successfully re-marketing to customers can bring them back to the website at a reduced cost. By aligning a strategy to this process, a virtuous cycle can be created. This best practice is applicable to both B2C and B2B environments. Today s customer is equally demanding in both environments, expecting excellence in the online services they encounter. Gravit-e Centric will support your business so that your team understand this process, how to monitor performance, and can provide future training on techniques to help improve your performance in all four quadrants. Page 3 of 28
Platform Functionality All Gravit-e Centric solutions are built from the same stable and scalable core product. The core solution takes into consideration e-commerce best practice and offers a strong platform from which to grow your e-commerce business. No feature list can be exhaustive and we encourage the customer to contact us for clarification on any feature that is not documented or that requires further definition. Core Product Features Design and Template Features Intuitive and easy to navigate page layout and design throughout. Basket preview which includes product name, quantity, price view, line totals and subtotal. Multiple expanding multi-level menus controlled through the CMS Rotating banners using images, animated images, and video as appropriate. Sidebar space for key messages, up selling and cross selling. Footer content and footer navigation. Copyright notification. Security and Credit/Debit card logos. Footer links. Terms and conditions, Privacy Policy, and Company Registration. Static content pages (can be used for corporate overview and B2B information) Products and Shopping Product name (with product code) and description Product images (thumbnails and lightbox zoom view) plus videos and attachments. Tabbed product content view with multiple configurable fields. Price List price and selling price with saving being shown. Accurate stock level with in/low/out customer view. Add to basket/buy Now button. Ability to make changes within the basket. Extensive discounting module with support for product combinations, discount codes, time limited discounts, first X to buy, etc. Highlight products. Special offers, latest products etc. Product reviews and five star rating with moderate before publishing management. Best seller product list. Show alternative product options. Page 4 of 28
Customer Account Features Customer my account access with secure password access. Automated account registry and password renewal process. Checkout and Payment Features PCI DSS compliant payment gateways used. Standard integration to Sage Pay and Paypal. PCI DSS compliant environment for secure hosting used. Navigate from within the basket continue shopping, update basket, checkout. Shipping matrix for various shipping options. Secure checkout with single or multi stage checkout process. Card holder address details and alternative delivery address features. Discounts and voucher codes module. Capture delivery notes. Search Features Category search with simple navigation Search box with full text and phrase search. Facet search navigation to narrow and filter search results. Predictive search which pre-empts what the customer is typing against the data that exists within the website. Ability to sort the search results. Recently viewed list. Paging. Social Networking & Customer Contact Blog/News management and publication from within the Content Management System (CMS). Social Network links. Contact us and how to find us (map). Captcha integration to reduce spam. Integration to MailChimp for email marketing, customers can sign up via the website, through their account, and during checkout. Page 5 of 28
Search Engine Optimisation Clean URLs Proper use of titles and meta-descriptions Proper use of canonical URLs Optimised page construction with proper use of headers Control to create 301 redirects Proper use of robots.txt XML Sitemaps Google Analytics integration. Content Management Features Standard support for static pages, news posts, blog posts, and forms. Support for events and other dated content. Add/edit product and price lists. Add/edit discounts and sale prices. Add/edit static pages and content. Add/edit news and blog posts. Moderate comments and reviews. Add/edit a category. Add/edit menus and menu items. Add/edit URL redirects. Add/edit user roles and permissions. Order administration. Business to Business Features Business to Business Secure Dashboard. Secure customer log-in. Dashboard view for news, events etc. Order history. Customer Specifics Management. Customer specific pricing. Customer specific shipping rates. Only show specific products/ranges. Page 6 of 28
Screen Views. Targeted news. Enhanced Payment Processes. Pro forma payments. On account payments. MOTO payments. Account status profile. Quick Order Pad Module. Rapid order entry. Order import. Replenishment order from a previous order. New order creation from full order history. Page 7 of 28
Customer Configuration and Bespoke Development This guide highlights the features and functions that are available as part of the core product as well as additional and optional features and functions that are not necessarily suitable for all e-commerce businesses. No function list can ever be truly exhaustive, particularly with a platform as highly configurable and customisable as Gravit-e. For this reason, the heart of any site build is our process of creating a Customer Manifest, a clear document of how your requirements will be mapped to our core functionality or, if necessary, implemented as bespoke functionality. Our approach to delivering bespoke changes is detailed in Hosting, Support, and Change Control, below Our Approach to Design Above all, our approach to all aspects of design is to be as evidence-driven as possible and to use analytical data from your site to understand what users want and how they want to achieve it. By delivering these two things, we can improve conversion rates and increase the profitability of the website. Combining this approach with an understanding of your brand values, collaboration with your team, and constant review of the impact of design (and design changes) on the user experience and conversion rates ensures that designs facilitates the business of the website, not the other way around. Our technology cleanly separates the design implementation from the functionality of the system. This enables us to work in tandem with any in-house or third party designers that are a part of your project team and empowers these team members to make changes to the look and feel of the website without risk of compromising security or functionality. You can find a portfolio of existing sites that showcase the flexibility of our platform in design terms at http://www.gravit-e.co.uk/portfolio We have included sample designs based on our standard system in Appendix 1. Page 8 of 28
Back Office Integration The Gravit-e Centric API is a RESTful interface that accepts XML messages, pushed from the back office that: Create and update products on the web, including pricing and stock levels Create and update customer accounts on the web Create and update web discount matrix entries Download orders Download new customer registrations Update Order status We have proven back office integrations with: Sage 1000 Sage 50 Sage 500 Microsoft Navision Sage 200 Epicor Integration Security All communications between the back office environment and the Gravit-e system are encrypted using SSL. Access to the API itself is controlled by client IP address and Gravit-e Centric and Prosys Computing When integrating with the Sage 200 platform, the Gravit-e Centric and Prosys Computing teams work as a single entity. By integrating not only our best of breed platforms but also our consultancy and development processes, we ensure that it is never the client's job to work out an integration issue between providers and that our holistic view of the end to end business, including ecommerce performance reviews, enables us to provide advice and guidance that maximises our client's return on their investment and identifies opportunities that other providers miss. Page 9 of 28
Hosting, Support, and Change Control All Gravit-e solutions are hosted on Gravit-e Centric's purpose-built hosting infrastructure. Housed in the Next Generation Data Centre, one of the largest in Europe, and maintained 24x7 by our hosting partners (Certus TG), the Gravit-e Centric hosting platform gives every customer a flexible virtual environment on our own dedicated hardware. This gives us the capability to increase the amount of resource available to a client if ever required without excessive hosting costs. Our hosting environment is fully backed up, shadowing our environment to a data centre in Bristol. The hosting infrastructure is compliant with ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 27001, and has PCI DSS Compliance. Performance & Scalability Gravit-e Centric's platform has been extensively load tested, working hand in hand with Tier 1 retailers. Key to achieving, and maintaining, this great performance is ensuring scalability in the system. In any hosting environment, the key limitation on concurrent users is the amount of available system memory. Rather than simply increasing the amount of memory, and therefore the hosting costs, for customers, Gravit-e Centric have ensured that they are making the best use of all available resources by minimising the memory footprint of their software. Our memory footprint is just a fraction our competitor products: Gravit-e Magento Wordpress Drupal 8 Drupal 7 Drupal 6 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 Mb/Concurrent User Platform Recommended Mb/Concurrent User Drupal 6 16 Mb Drupal 7 32 Mb Drupal 8 128 Mb Page 10 of 28
Wordpress 64 Mb Magento 512 Mb Gravit-e 7 4 Mb Source: https://www.drupal.org/requirements/php#memory Source: http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/ce-ee-install-ubuntu-prereq#php Source: http://codex.wordpress.org/editing_wp-config.php#increasing_memory_allocated_to_php By ensuring the scalability of our product, Gravit-e ensure that their customers are well positioned to deal with peaks in demand. Performance also has a major impact on Search Engine Optimisation and Conversion Rate. A recent study showed that a 1 second increase in page load times could decrease conversion by up to 7 percent. We are currently in the process of adding Google's PageSpeed module for Apache to all of our servers, and are aiming to achieve a perfect score for all sites in Google's PageSpeed module. Reliability, Change Control, and Quality Assurance The Gravit-e Centric platform is tried and tested, having served millions of pages and millions of pounds worth of revenue across our varied client base. We maintain our strict quality standards using a simple, but robust, approach to managing change in our environment. All new work is subject to specification and specifications must be agreed by both Gravit-e Centric and the client before proceeding. All completed development work is tested internally (our alpha test) before being referred to our client for User Acceptance/Beta testing. Our internal testing includes assessing any potential impact on search engine optimisation (that has not been covered as part of the specification process) and the performance impact of the new functionality. The customer must complete User Acceptance Testing and approve the deployment of any change. Changes are never deployed at the end of the working week or after 3pm, except where circumstances demand and approval has been obtained both internally and from the customer. A rollback process will always be in place for any change, should it fail unexpectedly in the live environment, and every change to our software is strictly controlled through our change control platform. Testing Environments All development and testing takes place on a dedicated test site, which is held separately to the live environment. The test site can only be accessed from approved IP addresses and is invisible to search engines. After your go live, the testing environment will be maintained and used to test any changes or amendments, before these are scheduled for deployment to the live system. Transparent Change Control and Fault Ticketing We have an online ticketing system (Bugzilla) which all customers have access to. Customers can raise and monitor support tickets in this completely transparent environment. Page 11 of 28
SSL Certificates A valid SSL certificate is vital for securing credit and debit card transactions online. SSL is also an SEO ranking signal of increasing importance. Gravit-e would recommend that an Extended Validation (EV) certificate is purchased. An EV certificate turns the client's browser address bar green when the site is being accessed securely and is perceived as the gold standard when securing credit card transactions. Obtaining an EV certificate requires additional checks on the purchaser to ensure that they represent the organisation behind the website. Whilst there is no anticipated issue with this in customer's case, the length of the EV process (which can take some weeks in some instances) is always factored into the project plan. Gravit-e Centric are an approved reseller of SSL Certificates for Symantec and Thawte and can provide a range of SSL certificates. Constant, Ongoing Improvement & Phased Projects Gravit-e work with customers for the long term. To ensure success, a website must be reviewed regularly and improvements and alterations applied to ensure that the site is obeying the current industry best practice and guidelines and is also responding both to the changing needs to consumers and to moves by competitor sites. Gravit-e do not believe in projects that end when the website goes live. For us, this is when our work truly begins helping our customers to analyse and understand the user activity on their website, ensuring that the site is optimised for search, and constantly striving to improve the enduser experience to maximise conversions. After the initial launch of any website, we review data with our customers on a weekly basis for the first four to eight weeks of activity (depending on the customer's requirements) and then offer a quarterly review as part of our standard ongoing support arrangement. Outside of this, reviews can be booked at any time and our team of ecommerce developers and consultants are always on hand to discuss queries and future opportunities. Page 12 of 28
Our Approach to Search Engine Optimisation Overview Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a key requirement to any successful ecommerce project in both B2C and B2B environments. Search Engine Optimisation is also a constantly changing field and one that Gravit-e Centric are actively involved in, working with all of our clients. Whether a client chooses to use Gravit-e Centric as their primary SEO consultant, uses one of our trusted partner businesses, or uses a third party, Gravit-e Centric provide SEO support and guidance as part of our standard support package. Core to our approach to SEO is ensuring that our customers are as self-sufficient as they can possibly be when it comes to managing the content of their site. No text or content is beyond the reach of our users, including the content of our templates themselves which we provide customers with access to where required. Gravit-e Centric use a best-practice approach to SEO that ensures that the website is: Technically accessible to search engine spiders and can be indexed. Built in line with accepted best practice Properly monitored on all target keywords. The Customer's Role In Search Engine Optimisation The following table documents the Gravit-e Centric approach to Search Engine Optimisation and whether the customer is able, through the CMS, to control this ranking factor and ensure that appropriate activity is taking place to fully optimise the site. In all instances, Gravit-e Centric are able to provide advice and consultancy to ensure that the customer is well versed in the requirements of the particular task. SEO and CPC (Cost Per Click) Training is available on a chargeable basis. # Importance Task Supported? HIGH Quality: Is all content well written? Does the site have substantial quality content? HIGH Research: Have the targeted keywords been properly researched? Are these the phrases that customers will use to find your content? HIGH Crawl: Can search engines easily crawl the pages on the site? HIGH Speed: Does the site load quickly? HIGH HTML Titles: Do the HTML titles of the pages contain keywords relevant to the page topic? MEDIUM HTML Descriptions: Do the HTML meta-descriptions of the pages describe what the page is about? MEDIUM Keyword Density: Do your keywords and phrases appear frequently in your content? Page 13 of 28
MEDIUM Freshness: Is new content added and updated frequently? Do you cover hot or trending topics? LOW URL Construction: Do the page URLs contain meaningful keywords related to the page topic? LOW Use of Headings: Do the headings on the page contain relevant keywords? How the Gravit-e Platform Supports Content Creation Creating unique, well structured, quality content is fundamental to any Search Engine Optimisation process. With search engines constantly evolving, it can be difficult to ensure that everyone who is writing content for your website has your search engine optimisation goals in mind. To help with this, Gravit-e Centric have built SEO monitoring and advice tools into the very heart of the Gravit-e CMS. Whenever a piece of content is saved to the CMS, our SEO guidance tool will check the completeness of the article, that titles and descriptions are appropriate lengths, and will check the article content for correct structure and use of keywords. The dashboard of the Gravit-e CMS also automatically reports content that has key SEO data (such as meta titles or descriptions) missing. These checks can also be applied to data that is integrated into the system, providing an extra level of verification on data quality and helping to guide you forward with your SEO. Off Site Ranking Factors In order to achieve their aims, we would also recommend that any customer who wants to enhance their online profile work on the following SEO-positive activities: Link Building: Whilst paid-for links are now a negative ranking factor, obtaining links from trusted, quality, respected websites is still a very positive ranking factor. Social Signals: We would strongly advise that clients integrate their presence on social networks into the website itself. Negative SEO Factors Gravit-e Centric specifically do not engage any of the following techniques that are documented to damage Search Engine Optimisation: Content Hiding: Using colours or design to hide content on the page. Cloaking: Showing search engines a different page to the page shown to humans SEO Updates Search Engine Optimisation is an ever changing discipline and what is correct today may not be correct tomorrow. With this in mind, Gravit-e Centric update their core platform in-line with best practice on a regular basis and make these updates available to all customers. Chargeable time may be required to install and configure specific updates. Page 14 of 28
Appendix 1: Sample Designs Page 15 of 28
Accounting Software Direct Page 16 of 28
Certus TG Page 17 of 28
Skogstad Page 18 of 28
DecTek Page 19 of 28
Candles At Home Page 20 of 28
Eurofoods/Caterer's Depot Page 21 of 28
George Twist/GeeTee's Page 22 of 28
Litho Supplies Page 23 of 28
Nelsons Pharmacy Page 24 of 28
Percy Doughty Page 25 of 28
Oxford University Page 26 of 28
Ruby and Ed Page 27 of 28
Mad Group Page 28 of 28