Admin oversight: From customer service to security, E-marketplaces fall down on administration.

By Julie Bort
Network World, 09/11/00

One of the areas where e-commerce falls short is administration. So if you're thinking about joining a business-to-business site, its administration is an area that deserves scrutiny. For instance, how does the site handle the administration of payments? Sure it will use a transaction engine to process payment, but then what?

If the site takes a cut of the transaction, an ideal administrative task it should perform for you is payment consolidation. Buyers receive one invoice for all of their transactions per month. Sellers receive one payment.

Consolidated payments are more efficient for the trading partners, but infinitely harder for an exchange to implement. The marketplace could use special software for this task, such as that offered by Consolidated Commerce, or it could custom-develop such a code. Eventually, financial firms will likely offer this as a service to e-marketplaces, Costello says. If the site does offer this service, be sure you test it thoroughly before trusting it.

As for other administrative systems, sites have to build their own, perhaps kluging together customer relationship management software with help desk and security management features. Yet security management in particular should be automated and flawless, especially authentication. Look for the presence of a Web authorization server from vendors such as Dascom, enCommerce, Netegrity or Securant Technologies. Such products can assist e-marketplaces with complex access control.

For example, Netegrity's SiteMinder lets trading partners create and administer access control policies, such as employee password management, says Jim Rosen, vice president of business development at the Waltham, Mass., company. So participants decide which of their employees have access to the e-marketplaces and to what extent. When employees leave, it becomes the participant's responsibility, not the e-marketplace's, to change passwords. The site should also support many forms of encryption, such as 128-bit Triple-DES or MD-5.

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