1. Frontend

Combing beauty & usability for your customers

Basket

  • Cart Summary

    The cart summary page shows an itemised list of products in the customer's cart as well as delivery costs, discounts applicable, and tax/VAT. Customers are able to enter coupon codes on the cart summary page, redeem loyalty points they may have earned (requires the customer to be logged in), enter in gift card codes, and also view a range of upsell products relevant to the items they already have in their cart and their current browsing history.

  • Multiple shipping methods

    Shipping methods may be specified by country or by country and region, and various brackets are available to specify shipping methods such as weight, price, order %, number of packages, and other generic criteria (e.g. all purple products have a 11% surcharge when shipped to Italy on a Thursday).

  • Mini cart

    The mini cart gives customers a snapshot view of items in their shopping cart at all times. Each time an item is added to the customer's cart, the mini cart is updated immediately and even allows 'on-the-fly' editing of their basket contents in any location on the website. The mini cart can also be set to display real-time shipping rates and even accommodate up- selling.

  • Order Splitting

    In order to fulfil the need for order fulfillment via multiple physical warehouses, or a single warehouse with multiple packages for a single order (e.g. two items refrigerated, one item non), we have the facility to automatically split orders into multiple sub-orders according to your business process requirements.

Checkout

  • Single-page checkout

    The mini checkout is a true single-page checkout, allowing rapid entry of all order data from a single screen.

  • Normal checkout

    The normal checkout is a 5 or 6 (dependent upon whether shipping is required) step process, although is presented in an easy-to use single-page layout. Both checkouts automatically populate with stored customer details, including credit card (stored in a fully PCI DSS compliant fashion (heavy encryption)), and allow rapid checkout for returning customers.

  • Guest checkout

    Customers can opt to checkout as a guest if they wish. Upon completing their order, they are provided with the opportunity to create a full account, simply by adding a password. We have found that this increases both sales conversions and account creation conversions.

  • Repeat orders

    On the final step of the checkout process, customers can choose to their order automatically repeated in x number of days. An email reminder is sent to the customer and with one click, they can complete the order again or add further items to it.

  • Multi delivery destinations

    Customers can opt to have their order sent to separate delivery addresses and even choose different delivery methods for each address.

Customer account area

  • Order history

    All orders are tracked in a central location. Customers are able to view the full details of their order (e.g. which billing/delivery address it is being sent to, which items are in the order), and see up to the minute order tracking details. Any action taken in the site order admin area can be relayed through to the customers account area so they are kept fully informed of their order status.

  • Re-orders

    A popular feature for sites that sell perishable goods is the 're-order' feature. The re-order page lists all products the customer has ever purchased, and the customer can manually specify which items they would like to order again. With a couple of clicks, their shopping cart is populated and they can begin the checkout process.

  • Address book

    Customers can create as many billing and delivery addresses as they wish and at any point can edit or delete them. Each address created can be specified as the 'default' address to save time when checking out.

  • Wish list

    Customers can save products on your site to a either a public wishlist, or a private wishlist both of which are managed through the customers' account area. The former creates a unique URL that the customer can email or otherwise send to their friends, guests or family (e.g. www.storename.com/wishlist/blubolt/xyz) to show their current favourite products. Personalised descriptions can also be added along with ratings and the option to add the item to the shopping cart. Private wishlists work in a similar way but can only be viewed by the user who created it.

  • Recommendations

    Recommendations currently work on an analysis of a number of factors related to the customers' activity on your site: past products purchased, browsing history, and products customers with similarly activity have purchased or added to their wishlist. Recommendations can be further customised depending on the market-sector. For example, for footwear stores, shoe size and favourite colour can be saved as a preference.

  • Saved card details

    Customers can opt to save their credit/debit card details when they first place an order on the site. All details are encrypted in a fully PCI DSS compliant fashion using modern cryptographic algorithms.

  • Support tickets

    The support ticket system is designed as a central location for all customer communications. Whether it be a general question about an aspect of your site, or a specific query about a recent order they have placed. With a simple ticket creation 'wizard', the customer can get in touch and have it automatically routed to the most suitable member of your customer service team.

  • RMA system

    From the support ticket system, customers can request RMAs (Return of Material / Merchandise Authorisation) on any item they have purchased from you. Your customer service team can then confirm the request, and the system will automatically create new orders for items that require re-dispatching to the customer.

Category & landing pages

  • Flexible designs

    bluCommerce gives a great deal of freedom in how you present your main catalogue category pages. From displaying rotating promotional banners, featured products, to multiple 'mini' banners, how you present these pages is up to you.

  • PPC campaigns

    Similarly, promotional landing pages (e.g. for a PPC campaign or magazine promotion) can easily be created and customised to suit your requirements.

Product pages

  • Promotions & bundles

    Grouping products together is a great way to increase customer basket spend. With the bluCommerce discount system, you can create product 'bundles' easily and even offer discounts if all items are purchased together. Product sets operate by creating a single "Virtual SKU" of which other SKUs are members, which can then have its own price, description and other information defined. Bundles and promotions typically work by simply applying promotional prices to groups of defined SKUs.

  • Quantity discounts

    Setting up pricing structures where 'the more you buy, the more you save' applies is simple and is yet another tried-and- tested method of improving average basket spend. You can either set up global pricing levels (e.g. on every item in the catalogue, the price decrements 5% for each item added), or product-specific price breaks.

  • Images & effects

    bluCommerce offers a variety of ways in which to present your product images and product image close-ups. From 'mouseover loupe' zooms, a click to zoom in, or the classic image zoom pop-up. bluCommerce also offers a great benefit in how you upload images to the system. Only one high-resolution image is required and all resizing can be done dynamically and effortlessly to whatever dimensions you require. The table below represents how flexible the system can be.

  • Customer reviews

    As well as integrating with a number of 3rd party review systems such as Feefo and Power Reviews, bluCommerce has its own built-in system. Customers can leave reviews on any product in your catalogue and it can even be tailored to capture more extensive information pertinent to your product range. All reviews are fully moderated in the admin before being set live.

  • Customer questions

    Displaying customer questions and expert answers is an excellent way to encourage customer confidence about the product they are looking at. If a customer can't find the answer they are looking for, they can simply create a new question and this will be routed through the admin to your team to answer. Customers are notified via email of any replies to their question and you can choose whether or not to make it a permanent fixture of the specific product page

  • Up-selling & cross-selling

    Up-selling and cross-selling should never be overlooked on an eCommerce site. bluCommerce offers a number of alternate upsell and cross-sell methods to ensure you show the best match of products as customers browse your site, from intelligently showing products based on their browsing history and what other customers have purchased, showing related products from the same category the customer is viewing, to giving you the flexibility in the admin to overwrite this and show your own choice of products.

  • Pick up in-store

    The logistics of a customer placing an order in this way is similar to how an online order is normally placed - the only difference is the customer can choose which of the retail premises to collect their order from. This system does rely on regularly updated stock feeds from the retail premises, but it's a standard feature of bluCommerce.

The Frontend

The Frontend

The frontend of bluCommerce is extremely extensive and offers the functionality and flexibility your online presence requires.

Whatsmore, bluCommerce is unabashedly fantastic looking to customers, and is completely limitless in terms of design customisation and can be tailored to exactly suit your brand.

Product listing pages

  • Navigation

    Whatever you call it, faceted navigation is unrivalled in its ability to allow customers to find the products they seek, fast. We leverage the power of Apache Solr to allow extremely rapid filtering of products on all conceivable dimensions, such as colour, shape, brand, dimensions, type, and so-forth, as well as allowing more traditional hierarchical navigation in tandem. The upshot of this facility is that conversions are improved significantly through the application of intelligent faceting, and well-organised navigation - both of which are without limit in bluCommerce.

  • Product view-type

    Customers are able to quickly switch the presentation of the product listing pages to a variety of views: grid, list, quick buy, and window shopping.

  • Sorting

    Products can be sorted by a variety of dimensions, such as best-sellers, A to Z, Price, Best Average Review, relevance to search term, and so-forth.

  • Quick views

    bluCommerce lets you easily enable the option to let customers 'quick-view' your products. On each location where products are displayed, a small quick-view button is displayed and when clicked, will bring up a snapshot view of the item; product image (with zoom), description, pricing, as well as the option to purchase the product or add it to your wishlist.

  • Infinite scrolling

    The infinite scrolling feature has been designed to replace the standard 'pagination' system which can be a laborious process when there are many products to browse through. Infinite scrolling allows users to keep scrolling down to see more products, which are only loaded when the user scrolls down. This allows for even quicker navigation.

Content managed areas

  • Content boxes

    Within defined content boxes, you can edit copy, upload images, create image-maps, change markup, insert HTML, add custom javascript (within safe limits!) and so-forth. An example of a content managed area would be a site homepage, whereby it's possible to change images in rotation, add text, switch between multiple layout options, and customise the site to suit your marketing and aesthetic needs. An additional example of a content box might be a chunk of copy shown in the left navigation about delivery, which you could manage to suit your needs. This system allows us to straightforwardly create new areas which can be self-managed without the need for technical skill.

  • Content pages

    Similar to the "landing page" feature, these allow the editing and management of the various pages of static content any eCommerce website requires, including, but not limited to; FAQs, T & Cs, About page, Press releases, recruitment, and more.

  • Store locations

    Your store locations are also entirely self-manageable, and are presented in a visually appealing fashion to the customer, consistent with your brand. This includes the ability to manage opening hours, physical location, and a unique image for each of your locations. The locations system can additionally incorporate recruitment information.

Search

  • Our strong point

    One of bluCommerce's many strong points is search. Whether it be through our faceted navigation system or keyword search, customers are able to find the products they are looking for in a matter of clicks.

  • Quick search

    Search results as you type are becoming a mainstay of many large sites. This search system comes as standard in bluCommerce with products results appearing adorned with thumbnail photo, name, and price. The quick search can also provide search results for the more content-rich areas of your site, such as blogs and articles, and customer service pages

  • Fuzzy search

    Fuzzy search is a core feature of Apache Solr, and using fuzzy search means your site can return results even when customers have made small or common spelling mistakes. This ensures search results still capture relevant products. In addition to spelling mistakes, Solr caters for synonyms, word roots (footing would return results for "feet"), and phonetic matches (tynten rokkit figgerene would match "tintin rocket figurine").

Gift vouchers

  • Introduction

    Gift vouchers always make a fantastic gift! Should your online store wish to accommodate for the purchase and redemption of gift vouchers, this can easily be enabled in bluCommerce

  • Variable amounts

    You can choose whether to give customers a 'free-form' price entry field, i.e. they can enter in the exact amount they want the gift voucher to be worth, or you can force them to choose from a predefined list (e.g. £10, £20, £50, etc). Gift vouchers can be made available in any desired currency.

  • Delivery methods

    Customers can have the choice of having their gift voucher emailed to their chosen recipient, or have it physically sent to them in your own uniquely presented way. Both methods cater for a personalised message.

  • Redemption

    Upon placing an order for a gift voucher, the recipient is either emailed or posted their unique 12 digit code in which to use on your site. The gift voucher can be redeemed in one go, or a set amount can be used on their order (e.g. £10 out of £50). Any credit left on the gift voucher is saved so the customer can redeem it again off future orders.

B2B Support

  • Introduction

    The bluCommerce platform has been designed to allow for multiple different user-access types, from regular customers to trade customers and many of our clients have multiple user-access types set up concurrently on their sites.

  • Trade interface

    In order to gain access to the trade area, users are presented with a log in page where they can sign in via username/email & password or - if they don't already have an account - they can request access. All applicants are moderated through the admin area before being granted full privileges to the trade section. The purchasing interface can be specifically tailored for trade customers to allow quick- purchasing and browsing of the site.

  • Trade pricing & discounts

    bluCommerce allows for multiple levels of trade customer pricing. This means you can grant different trade customers different pricing & discount privileges. Available set-ups include wholesale pricing (i.e. the customer will pay the exact wholesale price you specify), a % discount (e.g. 40% off the RRP price), fixed price discount (e.g. £100 off the order), plus more. Trade customers can also be forced to spend over a certain threshold (e.g. the order total must exceed £400), be given VAT-exempt status (e.g. if outside the EU), and even be granted special delivery methods.

  • Payment terms

    Additional payment methods, such as Purchase Order, Invoice, and Credit Account are available to trade customers, if so desired.

Drop shipping & Quick buy

  • Drop shipping

    Dropshipping is a great way to extend the reach of your product catalogue. The system is simple: allow certain users to sign up to the system, purchase products on behalf of their own customers, and have the orders fulfilled by your customer service team. It effectively becomes a whole new stream of revenue that requires very little work on maintenance. Customers who can access the dropshipping system can either be set up manually or they can apply for access. Once access has been granted, they are able to use the dropship area on your site.

  • Quick buy view

    The interface for catalogue quickbuying is relatively similar to that of dropshipping. One difference is that any customer type can access this page. The interface uses bluCommerce's quicksearch feature and allows customers to search by product name, keyword, and catalogue SKU. Items can quickly be added to their basket and they can proceed through the checkout as normal.

Internationalisation

  • Multiple languages

    bluCommerce is built to be fully internationalised, either using automated translation tools, or through manual specification through the admin or CSV language file import/export. Product & other such data is also fully internationalised and the design of the site can also be made flexible enough to vary from language to language (e.g. a French site could be themed in different colours).

  • Currencies

    This is a standard feature of bluCommerce, and operates in either a completely automated fashion (daily refresh of mid-market rates for desired currencies +/- a percentage margin) or manually (either on a per-product basis, or with global manually specified FX rates).

  • GEO-IP tracking

    bluCommerce also uses GEOIP lookup in order to automatically present a customer with the most appropriate available currency and language, and can also be used to intelligently select a customer's nearest store location.

2. Backend

Easy-to-use administration management

Integrations

  • ERP/CRM/Warehouse

    bluCommerce currently features integrations with the following back-office systems, and can support anything which can be exposed over the internet or VPN.

    ● Microsoft Dynamics RMS
    ● Microsoft Dynamics Navison
    ● Futura
    ● Opera 2
    ● MOM
    ● ESellerPro
    ● Navision (Legacy)
    ● PFS
    ● RetailIT
    ● Sage 50
    ● Sage 200
    ● StoneEdge
    ● Tradebox
    ● And many others

  • Ebay

    Full support for automatically listing items within Ebay platform an/or custom eBay store. Support for multiple categories, auction types, listing templates, domestic and international shipping, and both product push and order pull.

  • Amazon

    Full support for automatically listing items within Amazon platform an/or custom store. Supports both product push and order pull.

  • Payment service providers

    bluCommerce integrates with virtually any PSP, allowing you complete flexibility in your choice of payment partner. Current integrations include

    ● Authorize.net
    ● BACS
    ● Commidea
    ● Card Capture
    ● GE Finance
    ● GlobalCollect
    ● Google Checkout
    ● HSBC
    ● PayFlowPro
    ● Paypal Direct
    ● Paypal Express
    ● Paypoint.net
    ● SagePay

  • Email marketing

    Please see Marketing tools » Email marketing

  • Affiliate feeds

    Multiple feeds for meta-shopping platforms, including Google Base, Channel Advisor, Affiliate Future, Affiliate Window, LinkShare, Shopzilla, Webgains, Shopping.com, Shop.com and others.

  • Review systems

    Current available integrations include Feefo, RatePoint, and Power Reviews.

  • Live Chat

    Current available integrations include WhosOn, BoldChat, and Live Person.

Marketing tools

  • Discounts

    Available discounts include, but are not limited to:

    ● Site wide Discount
    ● Category Specific Discount
    ● 2 for the price of 1
    ● Buy 1 get 1 free
    ● Buy 1 get 1 half price
    ● Fixed Price Bundles
    ● Fixed Price Off
    ● Gift with purchase
    ● One off gift with Purchase
    ● Gift Vouchers
    ● Member Discounts
    ● Quantity Price Break
    ● Quantity Discount

  • Email marketing

    bluCommerce features integrations with a growing number of volume email mailing providers, including but not limited to Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, AWeber and Pure 360. In all cases where the MSP's platform allows it, we offer both subscribe and unsubscribe integrations, and multiple list support.

  • Re-marketing emails

    This simple but effective feature helps capture the ones that got away, by sending a short email of your choosing to abandoned carts (where the email address is known), allowing them to return and rapidly check out, with a pre-populated basket, and optional follow-up emails with discounts to further entice buyers.

Catalogue Management

  • Introduction

    All aspects of your product catalogue can be managed from within the admin, from creating and editing products, to setting up new category hierarchies and category-specific landing pages. Product management takes into account product tax types, varying pricing structures, image management, category assignment, descriptions, as well as full stock control.

    2011 sees the launch of our brand new desktop-based admin system that will make managing your catalogue even easier. Features include a drag-and-drop interface, easy bulk editing, multiple tab views, an offline mode, and much more.

Order management

  • Introduction

    Although orders are typically routed directly into your ERP/CRM/Warehousing system, it is still possible to view all incoming and historic orders and perform a host of actions such as updating order statuses (in bulk), relay comments to the customer on a specific order, batch print orders, print order labels, add 3rd party delivery/courier tracking codes, edit the contents of an order, as well as check the payment transaction history.

    Where customers haven't completed an order, i.e. an abandoned cart, these are visible in the order management area and emails can easily be sent out to try and convert the sale (this feature can also be set up automatically if so desired).

Call-centre ordering

  • Introduction

    bluCommerce accommodates fully for call-centre phone orders and 'manual orders'. Combining a streamlined and tailored admin-view of the frontend of your site, together with some special admin functionality, you can easily have multiple call-centre staff managing incoming orders.

    Call-centre staff typically place the customer's order by using the in-built search system to quickly find products and add them to the shopping cart, or by using an admin-only quickbuy interface (see above for more information). In the checkout, they are then able to sign in with a specially designated username and password which cuts out a number of the common steps regular customers have to make, and streamlines the checkout process.

    The order admin allows you to filter orders by channel-type and also gives you the ability to still provide the customer will full order tracking abilities should they provide you with an email address.

Customer management

  • Introduction

    With a centralised customer management area, you can fully manage the customers that have registered on your site.

    ● Overview that allows filtering by date, name, keyword, number of orders
    ● View full customer order history
    ● View all support tickets the customer has opened and their current status
    ● Update the customers' billing and delivery details
    ● Grant special discounts, free shipping rules, VAT-exempt status, or modify the account to allow full trade access.

The Backend

The Backend

The bluCommerce admin has been developed to be functional and intuitive, and presents the ability to manage multiple sites from a single point of access, routing orders, customers, and other shared data into a single location.

To cover all administrative functionality would make this page so long it'd be boring to read, so instead, focus has been kept on those areas most related to marketing and business process management.

Delivery

  • Introduction

    bluCommerce hosts an advanced shipping system, allowing for complete customisation of destinations, requirements and prices.

  • Destination filtering

    ● Country-specific filtering
    ● Selectable regions within each country
    ● Narrow down the field even further with Post Code/ZIP-level inclusions and exclusions

  • Flexible methods

    Individual item weights and prices

    ● Collective item weights and prices
    ● Product groupings

  • Charges & Fees

    ● Fixed charges
    ● The number of items
    ● Total weight
    ● Total order price
    ● The types of products in the order
    ● Combination of any of the above

  • Multiple destinations

    If enabled, customers are allowed to divide their orders up in to parts, and deliver each individually to separate destinations.

  • Package splitting

    Orders can be automatically split into sub-packages according to business rules, such as splitting for Jersey Despatch, or based on product lead times.

Article & blog system

  • Introduction

    Regularly updated, relevant, content is unmistakeably a critical part to a successful site, not to mention a great boost for search engine performance. Be it in the form of regularly changing content on the homepage, or a fully-fledged blog, bluCommerce provides all the tools you need to produce 'sticky' content.

    Our article & blog system works in much the same way as many other popular blogging platforms do. Posts can be categorised and tagged, images and rich content can be uploaded through the built-in HTML editor, and you can even up-sell products and categories to the posts you write. This becomes a very powerful tool if you are writing product specific posts and want to direct customers to related products.

    The article & blog system also allows for moderated user comments, and if you manage multiple sites on bluCommerce, you can create site-specific posts.

Ticketing system

  • Introduction

    All support queries opened in the customer account area are routed into the admin ticketing system. From here, support staff can reply to queries, authorise returns, and modify the status of tickets (low, medium, high priority). The ticketing system also allows for 'canned responses' (designed to cut down time for common queries), auto-responders, and the ability to view orders related to the ticket.

Statistics

  • Google Analytics

    Offering one of the most advanced statistics packages online, all sites integrate with Google Analytics to show visitor numbers, referrals, performance on major search engines, the ability to set up goals, and many more features. This also includes integration with Google Analytics' eCommerce tracking functionality, allowing a drill down on performance per product, section, and detailed information about where purchasing traffic comes from.

  • Share this

    Adding this to your site allows sharing of products and links to all of the very best social platforms and is a simple way for your site to gain exposure across many locations.

Search engine optimisation

  • Introduction

    We build our eCommerce sites from the ground up with SEO in mind, and aim to make the whole process self-perpetuating and easily manageable – if a site is well designed in the first place, there is generally little need for ongoing SEO, as organic rankings will grow of their own accord.

  • Sitemaps

    The purpose of sitemaps are to inform search engines about URLs on your site that are available for crawling and indexing. As standard, we provide automated feeds to Google, Yahoo, and Bing that are submitted daily, and these same feeds are consumed by all other major search engines.

  • On-page optimisation

    bluCommerce abides closely to the widely regarded best practises for on-page optimisation: proper use of HTML tags (h1, h2, h3 etc), clean and easily readable HTML code and CSS, and a well-structured HTML document. Important product information such as product name and description summary are displayed prominently on the page, and meta tags (such as description and keyword) are automatically populated based on product data specified.

  • Breadcrumb trails

    Breadcrumb trails get their name from the rather Grimm Hansel and Gretel fairytale - almost entirely unlike how they failed to lead the two siblings to safety, the breadcrumb system in bluCommerce gives customers a way to keep track of their location. These are generally used as a usability tool but can also benefit search engine performance. Google for example has begun to display the breadcrumbs of websites in their organic search results.

  • URL redirects

    Changing eCommerce platform doesn't mean that you'll lose all your existing search engine rankings. We ensure a thorough system of mapping old URLs (product pages, category and landing pages, etc) to their equivalent new ones on the bluCommerce platform via transparent redirects.

3. Platform

Stability, scalability, and cutting-edge technology

Technology

  • PHP 5.3

    The latest stable version of PHP, 5.3 allows us to take advantage of a variety of speed and development features, allowing growth in bluCommerce, and uncompromising performance.

  • Apache Solr

    Apache Solr is an offshoot of the Apache Lucene project, which allows for rapid contextual search and faceted navigation. Solr was selected due to its extreme scaling potential and the incredible speed with which it returns data. blubolt have contributed to the open source Solr project, including the Solr PHP library.

  • MySQL

    MySQL is a tried and tested RDBMS, offering high performance at a low cost. MySQL is currently used as the persistent data-store for the majority of client data, although we are anticipating moving less volatile data to a new, non-relational platform in 2011 in order to further enhance performance and scalability. Order and customer data will remain in MySQL.

  • Memcached

    Memcached is a high-speed memory-resident cache, used within bluCommerce to provide high performance and scalability of data over multiple redundant servers. On average, bluCommerce makes 0.2 database queries per page-view, resulting in high speed service.

  • DRBD

    DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) is a technology which allows us to have multiple servers operating in an utterly identical configuration. We currently employ this in order to ensure 100% uptime on the master database, and 100% uptime and doubled capacity on our NFS (Networked File System) servers, which hold client assets (images, etc.).

  • HA-NFS

    HA-NFS (High Availability Networked File System) is employed to ensure high data throughput and reliability for client assets stored on the storage cluster.

  • Nagios

    Nagios is an industry-standard networked device monitoring system, allowing us to have 24/7 overwatch of the status of all services and servers configured within the bluCommerce infrastructure. We operate two nagios nodes, one in the UK and one in the US, which jointly monitor both of our server clusters, ensuring complete coverage.

  • Munin

    Munin operates in tandem with nagios, allowing us to view graphed data of key performance metrics over time, allowing us to identify potential infrastructure issues or heavy load points prior to them becoming problematic, thus enabling us to proactively grow our infrastructure to suit future client needs, today.

  • nginx

    nginx, pronounced "engine X", is our fast caching asset/proxy server utilised for delivery of client assets to the consumer at unprecedented speed.

  • Varnish

    Varnish is our load balancing and content caching layer, in which requests from non-logged in customers and customers without anything in their cart (90% of traffic, including search engine traffic) are handled, rather than passing them on to the web servers. Again, this results in vastly improved performance.

  • Linux

    Linux is a core part of our technology stack, and is the fundament upon which our entire infrastructure operates. We currently employ Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long Term Support), which gives us excellent future growth and update potential with minimal security risk (security risk always exists, unless your webserver is turned off, in a concrete bunker, 3000 feet underground in an undisclosed location and preferably ground into dust).

  • Apache

    Apache is the web server which handles requests which aren't handled by nginx or varnish. It's a venerable work-horse which just doesn't quit, although we are evaluating other, more modern web server technologies currently, as Apache is now over-engineered for the purposes for which we use it.

The Platform

The Platform

bluCommerce is built on a variety of technologies in order to present the best possible solution to the need for a high performance, versatile and scalable platform. When selecting technologies, we carefully evaluate their benefits and setbacks, and ensure that all technologies utilised are sufficiently mature to be maintained and relied upon for mission-critical processes.

Infrastructure

  • Introduction

    bluCommerce encompasses not only the software and the service, but also the infrastructure which supports your online presence.

    We currently maintain two bluCommerce clusters - one in the US, and one in the UK, as geographical location of hosted sites matters both from the perspective of performance for the end user, and from the perspective of SEO - sites physically located within the UK will be promoted more highly by search engines for UK residents.

    Both clusters are identical in terms of implementation, and both are built to be expansible and scaleable. We have no single point of failure in our cluster configuration, allowing us 100% uptime, with the exception of scheduled maintenance windows, which typically occur between 0300 and 0400 GMT.

Security

  • Introduction

    Security is of paramount importance in any environment, particularly those environments which handle consumer and payment data. As a result, we take security extremely seriously, and handle it at multiple different levels.

  • Physical security

    On the most basic level is physical security. All of our UK servers are located in Telehouse West in London's docklands, a brand new eco-friendly facility with high physical security, redundant power supplies, and all the other systems one would expect from a reputable ISO/IEC 27001 certified datacentre provider.

  • Server security

    On the next level, we ensure security by ensuring that only key members of support staff have access to our server clusters beyond a superficial level. This is enforced through the application of a single point of entry into each cluster, from which either cluster can then be managed, over SSH, using RSA-keyed logins only. In short, this means that unless an operative has access to a lengthy encryption key and a password, they have no access to the servers. Each server operates entirely internally within the cluster network, with only the front-end proxy server exposed to the web as a whole.

  • Information security

    Finally, and importantly, we ensure that all customer data is stored in a PCI/DSS & Data Protection compliant fashion, and that all sensitive details (e.g. credit card numbers) are stored encrypted, allowing only the customer to decrypt said data in order to perform repeat purchases - card data never leaves the system, and is never persisted in any non-compliant fashion anywhere.

Accessibility & Compatability

  • Introduction

    Any eCommerce website should be accessible to the broadest possible range of consumers, with as little compromise in experience as technically possible.

  • Browser support

    As standard, bluCommerce supports the following web browsers:

    ● Internet Explorer 7 and greater.
    ● Firefox 1.5 and greater
    ● Safari 2 and greater
    ● Google Chrome (all versions)
    ● Opera 8 and greater

    In this relatively short list, over 99.99% of browser traffic is encompassed.

    In addition to support for the above browsers, bluCommerce sites function in a gracefully degraded fashion in older browsers. This means that visually impaired customers with screen-readers will not have their browsing experience impinged upon, and that customers with truly arcane browsers will nonetheless be able to order.