For $tarters: #2. Million Dollar E-commerce Questions

Mary Haggard
Program Manager
Microsoft Corporation

July 17, 1998

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The following article was originally published in the Site Builder Network Magazine "For $tarters" column.

A couple of years ago, the Internet was a place where we all had fun publishing HTML pages, figuring out ActiveX controls, talking in newsgroups, and surfing around to find what everybody else was up to. Then management became convinced that we have to make some money with these sites. Now we've got to think about revenue models, advertising, and all the rest. Everything is so serious!

Let's talk about which e-commerce technologies are being built, what you need to put them in place, some of the more interesting recent developments, and where you go to find out more.

What Online Businesses Are E-commerce Technologies Focusing on?

Online retailing is the obvious first answer. It's using technology to take online the traditional retail model of businesses selling wares to the public. Solid customer experiences, online catalogs that are usable, quick reaction, solid security, good inventory management and reporting processes, and solidly performing systems are all key to success in this type of business.

A couple other key types of e-commerce are major users of the newer technologies. Corporate purchasing and extended value-chain systems are great examples of using e-commerce technologies not to make money, but to save it. For instance, corporate-purchasing systems assemble catalog information from multiple suppliers and offer it for purchase by corporate employees. Extended value-chain systems are intra-business commerce solutions that help corporations purchase parts and supplies from others as part of their business processes. Important concerns for these systems mostly lie on the technical level: Security, scalability, deployment cost, and integration with existing systems and standards, such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), are important components of these systems.

Let's touch on how the Microsoft Windows NT operating system and Microsoft's e-commerce technologies help meet the needs of the systems defined above.

Solid Technology

To make a successful online sale, you must accomplish three tasks: engage your customer, transact an order, and analyze sales.

Engaging the customer means successful advertising, cross promotions, buy-now tactics, targeting, and personalization. Microsoft Commerce Server 3.0 -- part of Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition -- allows you to pinpoint customers by defining ad campaigns according to number of impressions (number of times shown) or click-throughs (number of times clicked). It lets you target ads based on their size, the time of day, day of week, content groups, personalization properties, or campaign goals. You can also monitor and adjust delivery of your ads throughout the campaign period, and then generate reports based on the advertising results.

Getting and maintaining customers is also an important part of the engaging process. With a site personalized through Microsoft Site Server, you can use your back-end ODBC-database systems to gather user-information, track current and past orders, analyze buying behavior, and make suggestions based on a user's selections. Used well, personalization can be a real asset to your sales objectives and can even cut customer-service costs by shifting to online such tasks as tracking order-status information.

Transacting the order must happen reliably and on secure systems. First, a user enters order information through a secure browser add-on such as the Microsoft Wallet -- available for both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. The Windows NT server accepts the order and passes it to the Site Server Commerce server. The latter uses an order-processing pipeline (a set of server-side objects) to let you configure specific order elements such as tracking, taxing, shipping, payment, checking, and product information. It can also fit your business processes by adjusting the scripts that run the components. In the newer edition of Commerce Server, you can even build your own custom pipeline. Commerce Server also relies on the transaction-processing and security power of Windows NT to ensure that transactions occur securely and successfully.

By utilizing Site Server's reporting capabilities, you can build the kind of sales tracking you need. To get a taste of the kinds of reporting features available, take a look at Usage Import and Report Writer on your Internet Information Server 4.0 machine. Those tools are scaled down versions of what is available in Site Server, and let you analyze where visitors to your site are coming from, how often they visit, what they buy, and just about anything else you could want to know.

It's Got to Be Easier than This ...

Site Server gives you several key features to ensure your success. Two tools, the Site Foundation Wizard and the Store Builder Wizard, take information from you and figure all kinds of back-end connections, configuration, business rules, and other tasks on which you normally would spend hours developing. There is great information about these tools on the Site Server site and in Building E-Commerce Solutions, based on a Web Tech·Ed presentation by Josh Axelrod and Arnold Blinn.

Take My Money, Please ...

Has anyone ever offered you money that you didn't take? I didn't think so. Your commerce system had better not, either. Microsoft Transaction Server, as a part of Windows NT 4.0, helps ensure that transactions are completed successfully. Other features of Windows NT, such as security, fault tolerance, monitoring, and extensibility, provide you with a solid solution. It's also really important to ensure that the physical system itself is secure. There's not a lot of point to spending thousands on security features and then going home for the weekend and leaving the door unlocked. If you are working with a vendor to build your solution, make sure they take these issues seriously. If you are looking for someone to help build your solution, take a look at the Commerce Zone on Microsoft's Site Server Web site. It's a listing of top commerce-solution providers.

I'm feeling pretty excited about what's coming down the line in e-commerce technologies. We've come a long way in our thinking over the last year, and the new editions of the products show that. Next month, we'll go over how to plan for e-commerce on your Web site, and how to integrate it into your current business processes.

Mary Haggard is a program manager in charge of internationalization issues for Microsoft's portal site to the Internet.

Where to go for more?

Among books on e-commerce, I'm a big fan of Barry Wadman's Special Edition Using Microsoft Site Server from Que Education and Training . I'd suggest getting yourself a copy.

There is also a good book on concepts, Understanding Electronic Commerce, from Microsoft Press .

Also take a look at some of these Web sites:

For technical how-to questions, check in with the Web Men Talking, the Site Builder Network's answer pair.