ecommerce and Ruby on Rails Expert

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We are now looking for a Ruby on Rails and ecommerce expert to come in and provide technical leadership to 3-4 senior software developers and management To get this project started. Able to start right away with the right person.



1) What is our #1, #2 and #3 priorities
2) Timeline
PURPOSE:
This document is a request for quote (RFP) and statement of work (SOW) on enhancing our ecommerce platform. We are looking for proposals that will enable CyberDefender to leverage new ecommerce capabilities with additional flexibility in marketing our products. We cannot impact our existing production sales channel while doing this. This document is to provide vendors and subject matter experts with an overview of our current environment, functionality we have and want to enhance, desired functionality, flexibility and philosophy on ecommerce. This should enable vendors to have a quick dialog with us and then turn around a response to our RFP including an SOW, pricing, resources, assumptions and timelines.
OVERVIEW:

Our system has been created over a number of years while the company has gone through many different phases of startup, growth, re-focus, and now successful growth in sales and revenue. The technologies and architecture are vast, in disarray and aspire to do the right thing, but requires major re-factoring and redesign requirements to meet the future needs. This begs the question to re-build, buy, or integrate.
Ecommerce Features
Our system today addresses many different requirements with some limitations.
Shopping Carts:
It offers shopping carts for direct web campaigns, software [subscribe] button actions, marketing email distributions, also backend customer support for customer verification.
License Management:
Issue, confirm to user and machine use of license codes. Limited use of 3rd party licenses
Pixel Tracking:
Robust tracking of initial campaign user statistics (imp, clk, dl, install/uninstall/order pg, order, subscribe)
Admin Tool:
Create new product, campaigns, affiliates, accounts, view customer details.
Operational Data:
Statistics on camapaigns, dl/upload, csv export, ad-hoc reporting against production data
Dynamic Download File Naming and lookup:
Dynamically name downloaded file names to campaign numbers.
Ecommerce Challenges
Shopping Carts:
Can not add new product bundles quickly. Can not quickly implement variation of pricing terms (monthly, annual. Cannot track multiple campaigns (only the original)
License Management:
Cannot issue empty license keys for value resellers (we require customer data in our DB).
Pixel Tracking:
Cannot easily add 3rd party tracking pixel code. Usually 3rd parties want dynamic data and we have code conflicts.
Admin Tool:
More admin control and features are subject to code development time lines
Operational Data:
Reporting changes are difficult as it requires complex SQL to keep existing functionality.
Dynamic Download File Naming and lookup
This is required on all software products we sell/resell as a pay to delete (p2d) model. Works well for dynamically tracked installs. But difficult to manage for software we don’t install.
HARDWARE
• 3 Linux (DB)
• 2 CDN (download)
• 5 Linux (Web)
SOFTWARE:
MySQL, binary executables, apache web, MASON, CATALSYT, mod_perl, javascript (multiple libraries), soaplite, CSS – in most cases many of these are not being used to their optimum architected strengths and there are over kill uses of the concepts that result in inefficient and slow uses.
3rd PARTY INTEGRATION:
• Threat Notifications (our EDC SPN network)
• Online Chat widgets
• Survey companies
• Disclosed Customer information referred sale (e.g., trial pay)
• Vendor/Partner (Services, Physical Product Orders, 3rd Party customer profiles).
CURRENT ECOMMERCE SYSTEM:

The current production system does do some things quite well, and those concepts need to be further enhanced and modularized. We currently can track to ecommerce campaign the actual software product installs/purchases/uninstalls, we currently have complete initial campaign statistics on “impressions, clicks, landing page hits, downloads, [installs/purchases/uninstalls] from the software, order page hits, orders executed). We can distribute upgrade packages to our system with the use of one script (will not impact the previously described features).

Current Overview of Functionality

Please review APPENDIX A for some additional capabilities.
What We Want to Enhance and Keep:
Our system today addresses many different requirements with some limitations.
Shopping Carts (Likely Replace):
• Need the ability to dynamically deploy content, graphics and offerings without the use of Web Development (maybe HTML for one or two sections of the page).
• Need to have the ability to offer any combination of products, bundles, incentives and identify as a particular campaign/offer combination. Capture variations as part of another campaign/offer and track statistics
• Should have various templates that allow various creative and communication with the consumer. Much like godaddy.com ecommerce experience.
License Management (likely enhance)
• Enable automation to reduce keystrokes for users buying from the machine they install on.
• Enable the ability to issue liceneses to channels and subchannels – then bind to users at a later date. Must have ability to enable and re-initialize the license expiration date.

Pixel Tracking (likely enhance):
• Robust tracking of initial campaign user statistics (imp, clk, dl, install/uninstall/order pg, order, subscribe)
• Need to
Admin Tool: (Likely replace)
• Create new product, campaigns, affiliates, accounts, view customer details.
• Productions need to be sold individually, with other add ons, with special bundles.
• Products pages (landing, order, cart) need to enable re-directs (send to 3rd party, chats, surveys).
• Products need to be billed daily, monthly, quarterly, semi and annual.
• Products and incentive offers (free gas cards, tickets, other products) need to be offered and tracked as a bundle offer
• Need to capture original campaign that initiated the free download, as well as other campaigns that contribute during the sales process. Such as targeted emails.
Operational Data: (likely enhanced)
• Statistics on campaigns, dl/upload, csv export, ad-hoc reporting against production data.
• Cannot easily add 3rd party tracking pixel code. Usually 3rd parties want dynamic data and we have code conflicts.
• Ability to run historical and tred reports (datamart) time by affiliate, campaign, offer, and bundle, time of day, statistics as it relates to the user experience chain (and against orders).
• Ability to show current day’s progress real time by affiliate, campaign, offer, and bundle, time of day

Dynamic Download File Naming and lookup:
• Dynamically name downloaded file names to campaign numbers.
• Alternatively enable a way for software to be downloaded – tracked against the campaign associated with the download.
WHAT WE NEED

We need to be able to scale our sales and distribution channels for expected growth in 2009 and migrate to a system that enables more flexibility and partner/vendor integration efforts. The system needs to be data driven, able to quickly make appropriate product and offering changes and leverage concepts that work with from our existing system.

The system needs to address the items in the section above “What We Want to Enhance and Keep”.

Also we are looking for a system that will allow new products to be offers to be deployed without the need of web developers (only some html or JavaScript/AJAX) components if fancy offerings are required.

Adding new products should follow a template and only developers to program web services for integration. Marketing should be able to be required along with the actual software executables.

DESIRED TIMELINE

- Analysis
- Proposal
- Development
- Costs

 
APPENDIX A – Existing Ecommerce Overview

CyberDefender ECommerce Documentation

Contents:
1) Overview
a) The types of shopping carts: Universal Cart, Upgrade Cart & Admin Cart
b) How to access the carts
c) Products, Upsells & Backup CD’s
d) Affiliates, Campaigns, Vendors, Products and how they relate to carts
e) Multi-year Licenses.
f) Tech info: where to find the code, apache redirects, development process, Cybersource

2) Creating and Editing Products
a) The Universal Cart
b) The Upgrade Cart

3) Creating and Editing Upsells
a) The Universal Cart
b) The Upgrade Cart

4) Tracking and 3rd Party code.



1.a The Types Of Carts

CyberDefender has three kinds of shopping carts: The Universal Cart, the Upgrade Cart & the Admin Cart. Each allows a user to purchase our products. Each serves a different function. The Universal Cart is openly accessible on the CDEF website. The Upgrade Cart is accessed by the freely download CDEF software application. The Admin Cart is a streamlined cart for internal use only.

 


1.b How To Access The Carts

The Universal Cart:
Anyone can easily access this cart from the CDEF website. Currently the url is: https://www.cyberdefender.com/universal/?affl=cdsite_edc2
We have set up aliases that all point to https://www.cyberdefender.com/universal so the following all point to the same place:
https://www.cyberdefender.com/universal/?affl=cdsite_edc2
https://www.cyberdefender.com/order/?affl=cdsite_edc2
https://www.cyberdefender.com/familypak/?affl=cdsite_edc2
https://www.cyberdefender.com/complete/?affl=cdsite_edc2
https://www.cyberdefender.com/ultimate/?affl=cdsite_edc2

It is important to note the parameter at the end of the url (affl=cdsite_edc2). This affl parameter specifies which affiliate and campaign to use. It tells the code which affiliate/campaign to use for tracking, and also tells the cart which product to show.

The Upgrade Cart:
The Upgrade cart is designed to be accessed by the freely downloaded CDEF client. When a user downloads the free CDEF software client, he/she is prompted by the application to buy the fully-functional version. At this point, the application opens up a URL in the user’s browser pointing to the Upgrade Cart. This url is https://www.cyberdefender.com/upgrade/?affl=cdsite_p2d
Just like the Ultimate Cart, the affl parameter is important in telling the code which affiliate/campaign to use for tracking. It also tells the cart which product to show.

The Admin Cart:
The Admin Cart is on the CDEF admin site. You’ll need an admin account to access it. The direct url is:
https://admin.cyberdefender.com/admin/store/index.html/
It can also be accessed by logging in to the main admin page, and navigating on the menu to Admin->Store Cart. From there you can choose which product you would like to buy. This cart is very streamlined and typically used when a user has had problems purchasing our product and calls in for help. At this point, an admin will use the Admin Cart to purchase the product for him/her.



1.c Products, Upsells & Backup CDs

While many items can be shown on the cart, only one can be purchased at a time. We hope to add multi-item-purchase functionality in the future. When a user goes to the cart page, the affiliate/campaign pair is mapped to a single product. A product may have several Upsells attached to it.

An Upsell is a different, usually higher-priced, product the user can buy instead of the product they came to the cart for. This is very different from an Upgrade, which is an upgrade from a free downloaded client. When a user chooses to purchase an Upsell, the cart purchases the upsell product instead of the original product. Affiliates/Campaigns are appropriately tracked.

The user may opt to purchase a physical Backup CD of the software they purchase. Because of our one-product purchase limitation, this is handled separately from the main product. When the user selects this option, the cart sends a fulfillment order for the CD and it is mailed to the user.

Using the admin interface, an admin can create and edit products and upsells. They can also attach upsells to products. Many of the parameters on the shopping cart are customizable. This includes titles, box images, and copy and price. This only works for the Universal cart. In the Upgrade cart, Upsells are hard-coded. An admin page for setting upsells on the Upgrade cart has not been built yet.

Technical Notes:
A product is represented in the DB in the vendor_product table (cdef_main database). An upsell is represented in the DB in the cart_upsell table. A product has a has-many relationship to upsells. Each upsell points to the parent product in the vendor_product table that owns in (vendor_product_id) and to the product to upsell to (upsell_prod_id). So Product1 can have Upsell1 and Upsell2. Upsell1’s vendor_product_id points to Product1, and it’s upsell_prod_id will point to the new, higher-priced product.

When a user click to buy an upsell, javascript on the cart page dynamically changes the form variables (product_id, price, campaign, campaign_code, etc) so the user will purchase the new product (defined by upsell_prod_id). It also recalculates the total price and any discounts that may be applied.

When a user orders a backup cd, we notify a 3rd party to handle fulfillment (send it to the user). The code sends a POST request to https://www.acutrack.com/netservicedev/ODOrders.aspx with XML describe the order.

<Authentication>
<TokenKey>Cus-193081202</TokenKey>
<DealerID>DI102J</DealerID>
<DealerPassword>OrdTest08</DealerPassword>
</Authentication>

Testing productid: <ProductID>PRD1002</ProductID>

The response XML will contain message codes and description.

E-P001 - Product does not exist
E-R001 - Purchase order Number already exist
S-S001 - Order created successfully
&#8195;



1.d Affiliates, Campaigns, Vendors, Products And How They Relate To Carts

When a user visits a cart, an affiliate and campaign must be provided in the url. If the user came from the CDEF website, the affiliate will always be ‘cdsite’. Our affiliates can also direct users to our cart and share in the revenue generated. Using Affiliates and Campaigns, we can track which affiliate generated a sale. Each campaign can currently have only one product associated with it.

Technical Notes:
Given an affiliate and campaign, we can figure out the vendor and product_id in the campaign table (cdef_stats database). Using this, we can figure out what to display on the cart. Once we have the vendor and product_id, we can also search for other upsells to display on the cart.



1.e Multi-Year Licenses

A user can purchase a license for more than one year (usually at a discounted price). You can decide whether to show this option on a cart using the Product Admin page. You can also set discounts.

Technical Notes:
Purchase of a multiple year license is handled similarly to a one-year license. The major difference is that the expiration date of the license is extended to two or more years. This is set in the license table (cdef_main database). The columns that are affected are expiration_dt(the date the license expires) and period (the length of the license in months).




1.f Tech Info

Where to find the code:
The Universal and Upgrade carts are located at ip address 66.223.17.100 in the directory:
/var/www/web/store/universal/
/var/www/web/store/upgrade/

It refers to CDEF::Ebiz::Cybersource to handle the order processing, which is here:
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/CDEF/Ebiz/Cybersource.pm

Index.html contains most of the code html and js.
Templates for the cart page, receipts and error messages can be found in tmpl/ directory.

The Admin cart is located at ww1.cyberdefender.com in the directory
/var/www/webtech/admin.cyberdefender.com/admin/store/
It refers to it’s own CDEF::Ebiz::Cybersource library.

Apache redirects:
The main web server redirects are here:
/usr/local/apache2/conf/sites-enabled/a.conf
This is how multiple urls point to the same universal cart.

Development process:
Development on the cart can be done on the live store server (66.223.17.100). This ensures you will be using the live, most up-to-date version of Cybersource.pm. To work on a live cart, copy it into the /var/www/web/store/test/ directory and develop/test from there. When you are satisfied with your code, move it to the universal or upgrade directory. Note that you will need to set the line:
my $ cart = 'universal'; in index.html

To test the cart, use the following form variables:

To ensure your Backup CD request is ignored:
Last Name = Test

To ensure your CC transaction are not sent to CyberSource
Email = (where XXXXX is anything you like sent to Cybersource)
CC Number = 4111111111111111
CC Type = Visa
CC Expiration Date = sometime in the future




2. Creating And Editing Products

You can create and edit products using the admin website.

First go to the Vendors Page by going to the following url:
https://admin.cyberdefender.com/admin/vendor.html
or, go to the main Admin site and navigate via the menu Admin->Vendor

Choose your vendor, which will almost always be cybersource. Then choose ‘products’ to get to the Vendor Products page.



2.a The Universal Cart

The form fields are explained below.

Product ID: You should already have this from the Campaign associated with this cart. To view go to Admin->Affiliate->Campaign.

Name: The name of the product as it will be displayed on the cart. Html allowed
Description: The description of the product as it will be displayed on the cart. Html allowed.
Purchase Url: This should be: https://www.cyberdefender.com/universal/
Page Title: This is the title of the page as it will be displayed on the cart. Html allowed.
Image URL: This is the html for the box-shot image for the product.
Notes: Add descriptive notes for this product. This is for internal use only.
Price: This is the price of the product as it will be displayed on the cart.
Version: The version of the product
Show Multi-Year: Set to Yes to display the option to buy multiple-year licenses on the cart page.
2-Yr Discount: The percentage discount the user will get if they purchase a 2-year license.
3-Yr Discount: The percentage discount the user will get if they purchase a 3-year license.
Multi-Year Default: The selection for 1, 2 or 3 year license on the cart page will be defaulted to this.
Show Backup CD: Set to Yes to show the option to purchase a backup CD.
Product Codes: Which product codes are attached to this product. Usually it will be EDC.
Order Types: What type of order this is (new, additional, renew). In most cases, it will be ‘new’.




2.b The Upgrade Cart

Products are created and edited the exact same way on the upgrade cart except the Purchase Url will be
https://www.cyberdefender.com/upgrade/




3. Creating And Editing Upsells

You can create and edit upsells using the admin website.

First go to the Vendors Page by going to the following url:
https://admin.cyberdefender.com/admin/vendor.html
or, go to the main Admin site and navigate via the menu Admin->Vendor

Choose your vendor, which will almost always be cybersource. Then choose ‘upsells’ to get to the Vendor Upsells page.


3.a The Universal Cart

An upsell is like a link because it is basically a way of linking, or upselling FROM one product TO another. Both products should already be created prior to creating the upsell.

Upsell To This Product: This is the higher-priced product the user will be purchasing.
Upsell From This Product: This is the original product the user will be purchasing. The upsell will be found on the cart for this product.
Name: The name of the upsell as it will be shown on the cart. Html allowed.
Call To Action: This is the copy that will show under the name of the upsell on the cart. Html allowed.
Description 2 (hoverbox): This copy will show in a hover-over box on the cart. Html allowed.
Image URL: This is the image that will be shown on the cart for this upsell.
Order Of Appearance: You can order the upsells for a given product using this number.
Precheck: Set to yes to have the upsell prechecked for the user. Although you can have more than one upsell on a page, only one will be prechecked.



3.b The Upgrade Cart
There is currently no way for an admin to create or edit upsells on the Upgrade Cart. A developer can easily do it in the code, however.

Technical Notes:
To add an upsell, check the code in /var/www/web/store/upgrade/index.html for the text ‘my %upsell1 = ’ This is where you can edit upsells or add new ones.




4. Tracking and 3rd Party Code

There is a lot of tracking and 3rd party code on our cart pages.

On index.html:

Google analytics: https://ssl.google-analytics.com/urchin.js
Google analytic tracking code.

https://www.cyberdefender.com/pixel/js/store_track_oclick_ssl.js
This is run when the user first gets to the cart page. See oclick pixels on the admin page for campaigns (Admin->Affiliate->Campaign->Edit)

https://www.cyberdefender.com/pixel/js/store_track_regnow_action.js
This is run on submission of the order.

https://www.upsellit.com/upsellitJS2.jsp....
This is on the upgrade cart. If the user navigates away from the cart page without buying, it opens a pop-up DIV. This window simulates a chat window. The idea is that the Bot tries to convince the user to buy the product.

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