Linking Content and Commerce

The Travelodge journeyMike Lowndes, eCommerce Architect

● For digital channels, products (be they retail items or hotel rooms!) need to be carefully described and marketed

Content’s just our product catalogue, right? Wrong.

Content is King: ● Engaging content helps sell the product

● Accurate, well managed content drives traffic via search engines (both web and internal): SEO/SEM

This talk will run through the content challenges faced by digital commerce, and Travelodge’s ongoing journey

Context is king• Travelodge has more than 500 hotels - over 37,000 rooms• We need more product! Adding 200 hotels over the next few years• Over £1 million through the Website, daily• A combination of ‘Direct Line’ and ‘EasyJet’ approaches to eCommerce

• Been through some rough times but we’re back: • New beds, new levels of service and of course: Travelogicals• Our mission is to be the favourite hotel for value.

The hospitality industry is different?

• Hotel chains like Travelodge operate somewhere between retail and ticket sales

• We have products with a fixed sell-by date, and if we don’t sell it by that date, that revenue is not recoverable

• ‘Returns’ are high volume and instant (Reservation cancels)

• Prices are very dynamic (supply and demand acts almost in realtime).

• Time is very important in revenue management: e.g. Rugby World Cup

• Like everyone else, we rely on web search mechanisms and brand awareness for online visibility

• Travelodge brings direct retail thinking to a sector dominated by aggregators.

The content challenges1. Products

• Historically, timely control over content has been difficult to achieve

• Content may not be owned by you as a vendor, or product descriptions may be owned by different business functions

• Web-specific content needs are different from in-store or paper catalogue

• Content needs to map to inventory management - often this is NOT held in the same place

• There may be several types of first and third party content e.g. reviews and product images that need linking together

• Customers need to be able to search for products simply, getting relevant results

The content challenges2. Categories

• People search for specific products, but often begin searching the web with simple phrases, that is product categories.

• The ecommerce solution is usually called the search landing page, targeted at category keywords e.g. red men’s shirt.

• For Travelodge this could be ‘Hotels in Edinburgh’

There are two issues with this:

1. eCommerce systems are traditionally not good at creating or optimising category pages for SEM

2. The required content often does not exist in a product catalogue, even a web specific product catalogue

Ecommerce ‘engines’ and the web● The web began as a publishing mechanism for hyperlinked documents

and most search engines and the software running the web itself relies on this model, but it’s left a disjoint:

● As retailers we have moved beyond this model: we’re using the web as an application platform, to enable transactions

● At the enterprise level, web content management systems don’t come with mature ecommerce engines

● eCommerce platforms don’t come with mature Content management, marketing or optimisation systems - these are rarely easy to use or flexible enough for the demands of the business

Within eCommerce businesses the cry goes up: ‘we need an easy to use content management system!’

Content management is not website management

Content management is part of the bigger pictureThe requirements summary:● Historically, for larger organisations, easy and rapid business control

over content has been difficult to achieve● Product content often needs to be enhanced, often from multiple first

and third party sources● Category (landing page) content also needs to be managed, but this

content does not generally exist in product catalogues● An answer that is becoming prevalent is to at least partly technically

decouple the content from the commerce

A recent exampleHomebase ‘renewed its online presence’ in early 2015.It used IBM’s WebSphere CommerceBut it also usedCoremedia’s LiveContext 2,0 to:‘give its online marketing team an opportunity to blend promotional pages, how-to guides and microsites with transactional pages.’Used ecommerce agency Salmon - who are our development partner.

Source: http://www.e-commercefacts.com/news/2015/05/retailer-homebase-renews-its-online-presence/ Sep. 2015

The challenge at Travelodge is the same. • However, the Hospitality sector, and more specifically hotel chains, have

no mature out of-the-box ecommerce platform such as the above, no Hybris, no Magento.

• We do have hotel (i.e. inventory) management systems, but need an ecommerce engine to talk to them. So we build our own.

• And we need to do it on a budget.

● Digital is our primary channel - but the ‘back end’ systems that manage inventory and reservations do not support easy content management.

● For several years this was taken care of by a ‘database’ team. The clue is in the name…

● It needed decoupling.

Content management is late to the party

Good intentions...● An open source solution was chosen: Drupal● Seen as best practice in WCM without needing to buy a new

ecommerce platform

… and the road to hell● Speed of delivery chosen over architectural best practice● Lack of technical governance (since rectified!)

= A slow website that is slow to develop

Command and Control• Too much reliance on 3rd parties

• Travelodge needed to take better control over its platform with in-house knowledge

• Brought technical governance in-house, creating an Architecture team led by an Enterprise Architect, plus technical leads

• Development still outsourced, but with close governance

• Here’s what we found:

Current Platform

Drupal-delivered pages- Home- Hotel- Press- About Us

Content services (API)

payment services

Enterprise CDN (Akamai)

- Availability- Reservation

Drupal

Custom modules

mySQL

Analytics & MVP

Tag management

Services

Data management

PHP Apps- Search and Book- My Travelodge- Business Customers

shared session data

CacheSearchBookingsCustomersContent

● Drupal is not a scalable ecommerce platform for the enterprise.

● It’s still a great content management system!

How to simplify and scale?

● The core of the TL website is its booking engine ● But to generate traffic and sell those rooms, accurate,

search engine friendly, easily updated content is required● Drupal can do this really well, but can’t run a highly

transactional ecommerce system

● We have a plan

● But in the meantime how are we managing what we have? ○ Hello Akamai○ Hello Endeca

Akamai to the rescue

How can we be better?• So how should we go about linking flexible Content to ecommerce?• We have part of the answer already: decouple it from other systems• Our answer is ‘Headless’ Drupal: use it for what it’s good at, but let the

ecommerce engine run free• This is our new strategy and informs our new architecture

● However before we get to that, we had another problem to solve: product search○ Poor performance○ Lack of filters and search controls○ Little control over results ○ No merchandising / SEO / SEM

Breaking the problem up

Fixing search● Main differences between the Hospitality sector and mainstream

retail: search is fundamentally location & time-based

Solution choices:● Open Source - build our own e.g. SOLR / Elasticsearch● SaaS - SLI systems● Commercial Off-The-Shelf - Oracle Endeca, Funnelweb, Exalead ...

● We chose Oracle Endeca and implemented this year - full rollout on the main booking journey right now

○ Improvements in customer confidence ○ Improvements in engagement

● Endeca still needs content!○ Drupal feed○ Realtime lookup of inventory and price

Endeca is deployed as an internal service, providing a resultset which we ‘mash up’ with price & availability to present to the customer the best products for their search.

Endeca-driven search

● Content at the level of category: ‘Hotels in Edinburgh’ is the type of web search we are aiming to rank for and advertise

● Currently these pages are managed in Drupal, and are manually curated lists of hotels- time consuming and primitive

● Endeca was chosen partly for its capability in this area:

○ Our roadmap is to move all such landing pages into Endeca (using content feeds from Drupal)

○ Utilising the SEO / SEM and content merchandising capabilities of the Endeca platform

Landing page management

Next steps: The Next Gen.• Travelodge is on a journey, moving towards a modern, ‘service

oriented’ platform • This will integrate the worlds of content and commerce,

without (technically) coupling them closely• We’re choosing appropriate tools and products for each job,

‘gluing’ them together to support multiple channels and devices

• As deployed for Endeca already, our content will become a reusable service

• The change to the next gen. will be incremental: no more ‘Big Bangs’

• Here’s a glimpse of the new target architecture and how content fits in:

TL architecture: ‘Next Gen’

Front end apps

Business logic - Common controllers/models/managers e.g. OWS client, FIS client etc

Enterprise CDN

ReservationPayment

Drupal

Front end apps:Search and BookMy TravelodgeBusiness

Public API

Service tiere.g. Account services, content service, customer object.

noSQL: MongoDB

content cachesessions

3rd party/native Apps

Tag management

Front end framework (css/js/ base html)

Content Management

Search engineContent marketing

Oracle ENDECA

Ensighten:Tracking, Analytics & Personalisation

‘headless’ Drupal

API

WebApps

Services

Data

PHP

PHP

ContentBooking Customers

SQL:mySQL

What’s next?Some really great stuff is on its way, so watch this space...