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Litium Scensum is a platform for building high performing, maintainable and extensible e-commerce solutions for large systems. This document provides an overview of the features in Scensum.
Scensum delivers a large set of shopping site features, such as content and site navigation management, price campaigns, search, A/B testing, product variations and relations.Scensum can be extended further by including third party components for collaborative search, predictions, rating and reviews, statistical analysis and more.
Scensums extensible architecture also enables partners and system developers to extend existing Scensum components and to implement customer specific business value.
By using a highly optimized database design, efficient data access strategies and effective caching mechanisms, Scensum is designed to deliver high performance with large product assortments under heavy load. The hardware and provider scalability strategy enables Scensum to handle millions of products and process thousands of orders per hour, and still maintain low response times.
For even larger systems, please contact Litium for recommendations on scaling strategy and required providers.
Scensum out of the box comes with provider implementations for credit card payments, invoicing, messaging, search, caching and media delivery. With Scensums extendable and replaceable business components, the system can be customized according to customer specific needs and performance goals, either by changing a provider, extending a Scensum component, plugging in a custom component or by combining any or all of the above. 3
New features in v2.1
Combine campaign conditions and actions to create powerfull price and offer campaigns, e.g. "10% on all DVD's" or "Free freight over 600SEK". The Scensum campaign plugin framework allows a customer project to create custom campaigns to extend the existing offer types.
Segment your customers into groups to apply targeted campaigns or specific price lists, e.g. student price list or VIP prices. Customers can exist in multiple and overlapping customer groups allowing you implement your business model.
Template FTP server enables integration with FTP enabled HTML/Text editor such as Abode Dreamweaver for even easier template design. Become more productive by using your preferred HTML editor with direct integration into Scensum. Extract templates as HTML files for storing in source control etc.
See real time site performance directly in the back office main view. Follow trends by hour, day, week, month or year. See search phrase statistics and monitor top search phrases and see number of hits and act on phrases with 0-hits. Integrated RSS reader enables you to spread business information to all users of the system.
Introducing the Store entity, allowing you to display Store information such as open hours, driving directions and contact information as well as physical product quantity per store.
Facilitate site structure management with the introduction of master pages, allowing sharing of content over multiple pages. Singel point of update cuts adminstration time and ensures site consistency.
The media gallery now supports any type of media such as pdf, docx, avi, zip etc. with thumbnail icons and preview directly from the gallery.
Existing features from v2.0
Multi-channel
Take advantage of the multi channel functionality to create multiple sites differentiated by language, currency, assortment and/or navigation and content. Product-, customer- and site structure registries enables shared or individual configuration of the channels to match the customer specifications.
Site structure
Design page content and site navigation using site structure nodes and blocks. Pre-build pages and blocks and display when ready using page status. Use block visibility to define user access.
A part from the Scensum standard block assortment the architecture encourages creation of custom blocks to implement customer specific business value. Apply graphical design to the content using Scensum template engine.
By using alternative templates, it is possible to create campaign unique design for different purposes. I.e. display a specific Christmas theme when visiting the new Christmas albums.
Template engine
Clearly decoupled design and content management enables administrators to work independently of each other without any programming involvement. Reuse existing design templates to new content or redesign existing content. Scensum enables and encourages the user, or third party vendor, to work actively with design and content.
A/B testing
The template engine enables A/B testing per channel. Using A/B split test, two designs can be evaluated at the same time to determine which gives the best conversion rate. 5
Scensum deliver images and other media content swiftly while under heavy load, by utilizing high performance caching on the web server and client.
Media gallery
Keep images, videos and documents organized in the media gallery. Support for upload of single and multiple images and zip archives.
Multiple images
Assign multiple images (or other media) to a product. Product images are also added and organized in the image gallery for future use.
Automatic image scaling
Let the system handle scaling of images to fit the defined design templates. System automatically supports changes to image size, resizes, and caches media as needed. 6
Product management
Scensum integrates with external PIM or ERP but also handles product management in the administrative interface for direct and easy adjustment of product attributes, SEO information and custom fields. Changes are reflected immediately on the site.
Price list campaigns
The system supports multiple pricelists and pricelist campaigns during a specific date interval. By utilizing Scensums price list management the price for individual products or product ranges can be temporarily or permanently changed.
Product relations and variations
Use relations for up-sell, accessories etc to increase product exposure. Use variations to group products to a single configurable product. 7
Friendly URL’s
Friendly URL’s for all product, category lists and content pages in the system. URL rewrites give full control of URL's from administration interface.
Product meta tags
Support for meta-information for products and categories. Imported from ERP or PIM or set from the administration interface.
W3C compliant
Full control of rendered HTML from template engine enables high site validation. No hidden links behind post back scripts supports search engine crawling. 8
The Scensum administration system uses roles and privileges to authorize access to different areas in the administration interface. Use roles for easier administration of group access and password expiration date to setup temporary user accounts. 9
Multiple payment providers
System supports multiple payment types and implementations. Default integration towards DIBS, Auriga and Kreditor. Create custom implementations using provider pattern implementations.
Search engine
The standard search provider for Scensum is the open source search library, Lucene. The Lucene implementation handles most implementations but where there are requirements for even better performance, the Scensums provider strategy enables replacement of the search engine with the provider of choice.
Messaging
The Scensum platform comes with a messaging framework that can be used to send single and batch messages, e.g. order confirmation, parcel tracking or product monitor messages. The provider pattern enables the possibility to develop support for a wide variation of messaging formats like email, SMS, HTTP etc. Messages are handled effectively but for extreme load message priority ensures that crucial messages are prioritized.
Caching
Scensum uses Microsoft Enterprise Application Blocks as a standard cache provider. For an even higher performance the provider pattern can be used to replace the cache by a provider of choice. 10
To cater for special customer needs, the product, customer, cart and order business components may be programmatically extended with added or replaced implementation or by using custom fields the existing business component can be extended only by adjusting the DB integration.
Open architecture
For functional requirements that are not catered within the realms of a Scensum provider or business component, additional custom made modules may be added to Scensum 11
Scensum is designed to be integrated with an external ERP or PIM, through SSIS and/or Web Services. Depending on the customer needs, integration packages may transfer orders, customers, products, prices and content, to and from Scensum.
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