IRCE 2008 Session Descriptions

Web 2.0 holds much promise for enriching the online shopping experience and improving the retailer-customer relationship. But it could stop dead if a retailer's platform fails to support the new offerings. The warning signs exist already: even the current web offerings are sometimes too much to handle for many organizations, which suffer from spotty availability, slow response time and inconsistency. This session focuses on the level of complexity involved in developing Web 2.0 applications, from the design phase, through testing to deployment. The complexity is increasing exponentially as web applications become much more composite. More sites rely on bigger building blocks from 3rd parties, which in turn are relying on other building blocks, all delivered straight to the end-user's browser, in real time. And to handle Web 2.0 features, such as rich applications technologies or collaboration utilities, more developers are pushing more code out to the users and relying on end-users' browsers to play a bigger role in delivering the experience to customers. Retailers need to understand that the web experience is no longer under their direct control. The retailer's brand reputation is now in the hands of not only their internal IT department, but also countless third parties and providers, and even in the hands of the most fragile part of the entire ecosystem: their end-users' own machines. This session will examine what could go wrong and help retailers understand how to remedy Web 2.0 problems and how to hold third-party providers accountable for their impact on customer experiences.