An e-commerce system for 10 Amway markets in Central and Eastern Europe built by e-point SA.

 

Amway is a global direct sales leader active on 57 markets in 80 countries and territories world-wide. Amway enables everybody to set up a business on their own and sell quality products offered by the company. It also enables offering such opportunity to others. Amway’s mother company is Alticor whose yearly sales exceeded USD 6.4 billion in 2005.

 

Amway has been offering its Independent Businessmen in Europe the possibility to order and sell products online for a few years. This strategy resulted in the start-up of VEBSO – Internet Trade Service – in 2001, first in Hungary, then in 7 other countries (Croatia, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Turkey). VEBSO appeared to be a very successful project. It is currently used by 126,000 users whose orders account for 41% of all orders form Amway products in those countries in the average. It has therefore become one of the largest e-commerce systems in this part of Europe in terms of sales.

 

The decision to build a new online system has been made in order to be able to serve constantly growing number of users, provide them with new functionalities an enable their flexible modifications according to business needs in the future. Providing a new, comprehensible and attractive information aspect of the system that would encourage and facilitate making orders was another major goal of the new project. The new system was supposed to be based on J2EE – a global web-based solution building standard – using IBM WebSphere, the most frequently used e-business platform world-wide. An international tender composed of several stages was launched and after few months e-point SA appeared to be the company that proposed the best combination of terms and skills. According to Marek Sodolski, Project Manager in charge of managing the e-business projects portfolio of Amway in Europe, „e-point SA implements an e-business project of strategic importance to Amway in Europe thanks to the modern, scaleable solution proposed. Factors such as experience, creativeness, good references, ability to create user-friendly web site designs and a pragmatic approach to the implementation of IT solutions played an equally important role in awarding the contract to e-point SA.”

 

On October 6, 2005 e-point SA started up the new e-commerce system for Independent Businessmen in Ukraine in co-operation with Amway. Ukraine is the first of 10 countries where the new system is to be deployed. Other include Croatia, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey and Hungary.

 

The system enables Independent Businessmen co-operating with Amway to make orders, monitor their status and history. The ordering mechanism is based on an extensive, comfortable online catalogue supported by supplementary functionalities, e.g. predefined shopping lists. Catalogue can be skipped during making orders, if so-called ‘quick order’ is used. The system also makes data useful for Amway Independent Businessmen available to them.

 

		Watch the Amway Online presentation for Project Excellence Award 2007

The e-commerce system of Amway is also designed to be an important marketing tool presenting both the products and the company itself in an attractive and extensive manner. It is also a major channel of communication with Independent Businessmen used for notifying them of promotions and new items. All those elements required creating extensive tools in the administrative part of the system and making them available to Amway personnel in order to guarantee the proper service of Independent Businessmen co-operating with the company.

 

The public part of the system has been made available to prospective Independent Businessmen and their customers who can get acquainted with the whole offer of the company. Customers can register with the selected Independent Businessman using the system and benefit from the possibility of ordering Amway products online on their own.

 

This solution has been built for Amway in whole using J2EE in the latest version of  OneWeb, the programming environment of e-point SA. This environment enables a very quick creation of advanced web-based solutions, because it provides many ready-made components including content management functionality (CMS) made by Active Content and methods. Thanks to it, the implementation of the functionalities designed only took about 3 months.

 

The system is based on the IBM platform. IBM WebSphere has been used as the application server and DB2 as the data base. The hardware layer has been built on pSeries servers also provided by IBM.

 

The implementation of the project was preceded by the design stage where e-point SA applied Prototyping as the method of verification of the assumptions made with the participation of final users of the system and the basis for its final specification. This enabled making a solution characterized by the optimum functionality.

Apart from creating a web-based trade system, Amway has also entrusted e-point SA with its maintenance. e-point SA was in charge of building the infrastructure appropriate for the maintenance of the system and its expected huge load. It is currently responsible for its functioning. In this domain, e-point SA co-operates with Atman, its hosting partner delivering hosting center infrastructures. The solution built is one of the largest installations using IBM Websphere and pSeries in Europe.