Choosing an E-Commerce Suite

Article by Anthony Leong © Copyright 1998

When it comes to choosing a software application for conducting your web-based storefront, there are a number of options available. These products will differ in terms of price, platform, functionality, ease of use, and scalability, and it is important to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each with respect to your business needs. The following is a list of important criteria to consider and questions to ask when choosing an e-commerce solution:

How well does the application handle all the back-end procedures of the storefront? These back-end functions would refer to all the activities conducted in the background by your e-business site, such as inventory management and order processing. The capabilities with respect to back-end functions will vary from product to product:

• Does the application manage your inventory levels and notify you when a product needs to be reordered?
• Does the application automate all order-processing functions, including tax calculation, credit card verification, and shipping?
• How many different payment systems do you want to accept, and does the application support them?
• Does the application have statistical and reporting functions for monitoring the site's activity? Do you have the ability to generate product- or customer-specific reports for the purposes of managing your business?

How much do you want to spend? There are e-commerce applications for every price range, from free of charge to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What features does the application have for maximizing customer service and convenience? While all the software packages include a shopping cart application and e-mail subscription/notification utilities, certain products distinguish themselves with features that can make your site more customer-friendly. These would include the ability to personalize the web site based on a registered user's preferences, or a utility allowing customers to query on their UPS-shipped order.

As a bare minimum, an e-commerce application must handle two databases-- one for your customers, and the other for your products. Though most applications include a relational database for the handling of such data, there are some products that assume that you will be supplying the database.

If you already have an existing web-based storefront and are upgrading, you must determine if the application's database is compatible with the format of your existing customer and product databases. Depending on the application, the existing data may either have to be re-formatted to facilitate transfer, or be entered manually.

It is also important to determine what heterogeneous databases the application can interact with. Some applications can exchange data with other databases (such as SQL, DB2, or Oracle) via ODBC industry standard. If your web site will be conducting business-to-business transactions, or you plan to interact heavily with your supply-chain partners, you may require the ability to tie your storefront databases to existing legacy applications (such as for querying inventory or production schedules), and handle complex electronic data interchange (EDI) interactions.

All the e-commerce applications utilize graphical user interfaces, wizards, and templates that allow you to quickly set up your site without extensive programming knowledge. However, even with these user-friendly features, the ease of use can vary tremendously.

Some applications are more flexible than others with respect to their ability to handle sales, incentive, and seasonal pricing. The more versatile applications will allow you to create highly-customizable promotional programs, such as threshold pricing ('buy two get one free'), seasonal product lists (such as a Christmas catalog), and weekly specials.

An active e-commerce site will most likely require numerous updates and modifications in order to keep the content fresh and react to the changing tastes of your customers. Making changes to your storefront is easier with some applications than others, and some will even allow you to the ability to make such changes remotely, via a web browser.

How many items will your e-commerce site have, and how much do you expect it to grow in the future? The e-commerce applications vary with respect to the number of products they can handle, from less than ten (for the free services) to infinite (for the high-end solutions). Scalability also applies to how much traffic and how many orders the site can handle.

Each e-commerce application has its own minimum hardware, memory, and hard disk requirements-- will it be compatible with your existing web server? For smaller businesses or new upstarts, there are some applications on the lower end that only require you to possess an Internet connection and a web browser-- the web site is maintained on the provider's web server.

The relative weighting of the above criteria will vary from business to business-- you must decide which product features will have the most relevance and impact on your e-business.

Based on an extensive review of third-party evaluations (see "Further Reading") of the various applications available, the following product profiles have been constructed. The evaluations were conducted by third parties, and judgments are based on their findings (prices are in US dollars):

Cat@log Builder 2.5 is targeted towards more experienced users with extensive web programming experience, trading off ease of use, particularly with respect to novice users, for flexibility and programmability.

• Support for a wide range of payment and tax calculation systems (such as First Virtual, CyberCash, Open Market SecureLink, Verifone, SET, and Taxware), though plug-ins are required
• Real-time access to external data sources (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and Microsoft SQL Server via ODBC) and legacy systems
• Shopping experience can be customized for each customer, based on their registered preferences

If your company only has a few items for sale, this is probably the cheapest way to get an on-line storefront-- iCat offers a free storefront for those merchants with less than 10 items in their catalog. This application also earned the PC Magazine Editor's Choice for e0-commerce suites last November.

• Contains the largest selection of storefront creation templates
• Ability to remotely-administer the site via a web browser
• Sales and incentive pricing are handled particularly well, and users can save seasonal catalog information
• ODBC support
• Ability to create personal experiences for customers based on their registered preferences
• Excellent customer registration and tracking
• Largest number of administrative reports

• Despite the strong back-end functionality of this application, it does not possess a function for checking the inventory of available stock
• The interface for creating the actual site difficult to use, with the minimal amount of on-screen prompts to guide the user
• The database-building interface is similarly geared to experienced users, requiring an experienced database developer
• As opposed to a common scripting language, this application uses Carbo, a proprietary scripting language, which must be learned in order to customize or add functionality to the application

This recently announced product is a Domino-based (Domino 4.61) electronic commerce application for business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions over the Internet. According to company literature, it includes six components for creating, deploying, and administering an e-commerce web site, as well as for maintaining tight integration with back-end databases. It will ship with various credit card payment options, such as the Windows NT-based WebTrans authorization system, and ROI e-card for the IBM AS/400. This application also offers native support for IBM's DB2/400, and Oracle, Sybase, and SQL Server databases via ODBC.

IBM Net.Commerce 3.0 is a scalable application targeted towards larger businesses, and can be seamlessly integrated into an existing Lotus Domino or Notes environment.

• Browser-accessible site creation wizard
• The Extended Market Targeting feature provides shoppers with exclusive text, graphics and multimedia tailored to their registered interests
• Site performance enhancing features, including a sophisticated caching mechanism and the ability to program multiple machine configurations onto a single server
• A wide variety of programmed routines are provided for most sales transactions, and if one is not available, it can be created or customized
• A new feature that makes Net.Commerce 3.1 stand out is the Product Advisor, which is a virtual sales assistant application that can help customers with difficult or complicated product selections

• In PC Magazine tests, this application was the most difficult with respect to importing existing data
• Database support is limited, with only DB2 and Oracle databases via ODBC

Intershop Online 3.0 is particularly strong in back-end capabilities.

• Easy site-management, especially if site changes frequently
• Highly customizable, though it requires some technical know-how and several software quick-fixes (available from the Intershop web site)
• Handles sales pricing well
• Best product in terms of inventory control, allowing you to track all stock changes, view stock, enter products manually, and generate a list of all inventory transactions
• Highly-detailed reports and statistical analyses, including the ability to track customer activity at the site
• Bundled with Sybase SQL Server 11 database, and ODBC support allows interaction with other relational databases, including DB2, Informix, and Oracle

• Weak usability in front-end aspects, especially in the areas of site design and layout, necessitating the talents of an experienced web designer
• Though this application provides site-building wizards and templates, the templates are so difficult to modify that it may be easier to build a site from scratch
• Some difficulties in importing existing data (for example, Intershop does not accept spaces in product names)
• Inability to exchange data with legacy applications, though this feature is scheduled for the next release

For companies with Lotus Domino as their computing environment, Domino.Merchant will integrate seamlessly with the Notes infrastructure. This all-in-one-box solution is geared towards small- to medium-sized businesses.

• Highly-detailed wizard that takes developers through the entire process of site creation and ensures that even minute details are not forgotten (such as how to display dollar amounts)
• Ability to administer the site via a web browser
• This is the only application that keeps content creation and site maintenance as separate functions (for example, the site administrator can look after maintenance, while the marketing department can be in charge of content creation)
• Ability to identify and track specific customers and offer them promotions or pricing discounts
• Comes packed with a plethora of tools, including Taxware (sales tax calculations), EDI order forms for generating purchase orders, CyberCash credit card authorization, and 12 modules from the Domino Intranet Starter Pack (which includes e-mail, contact management, discussion forums, databases, and job postings)
• For companies that ship via UPS, an embedded order tracking utility allows customers to check on the progress of their delivery without leaving the storefront

• The highest system requirements of any e-commerce application
• Bogged down by slow performance (for example, Sm@rt Reseller tests found that it took 30 minutes to build a small test site, and another 30 minutes to make each change)
• The generated web sites are compatible only with Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator 3.0 and up-- customers with AOL, Opera, and Lynx browsers are out of luck
• Limited ability to customize 'look and feel' of the web site, resulting in 'cookie-cutter' sites
• Limited support for plug-ins for alternative electronic payment systems

Merchant Builder 3.0 allows you to create up to three storefronts, which can be 'rented' out to other companies, creating a 'virtual mall'. Furthermore, a mall administration utility is included.

• All design and administration functions are handled through your web browser
• Easy-to-use editing interface (though not as easy as an entry-level product), especially with respect to creation of item catalogs, departments, and product lines
• Strong back-end capabilities, including order tracking and customer membership administration
• Ability to create personal experiences for registered customers based on their preferences

• Once certain back-end elements have been established, such as tax calculation tables, it is very difficult to change afterwards
• Product reviewers at PC Week found it too easy to make major mistakes while using this product, such as accidentally copying an empty prototype site over a fully built live one
• The reviewers also had difficulty with importing existing databases, and actually found it easier to enter them manually

ICOMS leases out space on its server to provide e-commerce services (buyer registration, coupon support, payment authorization, tax calculations, and shipping management) to businesses. Because the server is based in New Hampshire, which has no sales tax, ICOMS customers can avoid sales tax issues on their sites.

• Ability to personalize the site for shoppers, including displaying ads based on the shopper's preferences
• Compatibility with most electronic payment processing packages
• Ad server provided for managing site advertisements
• Commerce Interchange Pipeline and Order Processing Pipeline are interfaces provided for managing business-to-business and business-to-consumer processes, which visually define and depict the stages of transactions
• Strong knowledge management utilities allow the creation of powerful search indices and catalogs from various data sources and make them available through Web pages and IP multicast-enabled push
• Sophisticated site analysis tools
• Easy to plug-in applications from third-party vendors, reducing the need for in-house custom programming

• Though a site-creation wizard is provided, it is less thorough and provides fewer options than competitive offerings-- companies requiring more versatility will need a programmer on staff
• Inability to handle business-to-business transactions-- extra components, such as EDI integration, must be built or purchased separately
• Database is not provided (ODBC-compliant required, but SQL Server is recommended)
• Schema-independent database management, making it easy to link to other existing databases

This easy-to-use web-based e-commerce application is tailored for smaller businesses. The browser interface makes it very easy to set up the site and initialize back-end functions, such as Cybercash credit card authorization. However, you must use Virtual Spin as your ISP, and there are restrictions on downloads for each month. Furthermore, the Virtual Spin service has limited reporting functions that are handled via batch processing (not in real time).

• Ability to create sites with a very pleasing 'look and feel'
• Easy to make frequent changes to the site
• Strong reporting tools, capable of telling you where each visitor came from, what pages they visited, and what they placed in their shopping baskets

• Though it is capable of handling large item catalogs, its functionality is the least extensible of all the products, restricting its use to small businesses
• Existing database files must be converted to ASCII format before importing, and some browsers may not support the file uploads needed for importing
• Viaweb users must use Viaweb as the ISP for their site