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E-commerce to go Want to build your own Internet store? Consider Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition, a standout in our tests.
By Christopher Null If you've got something to sell on the World Wide Web, there are plenty of service providers vying to host your e-commerce site. But large companies with the in-house resources to maintain their product catalogs online can probably do a better job themselves with one of the five electronic storefront packages we tested.  Despite the enormous price range of these products - from $495 to $19,999 - we were surprised to find that many vendors are missing critical components, such as enterprise scalability and interoperability. Most still haven't realized that e-commerce needs to focus on the buyer, not the seller. For example, Internet shoppers want quick, intuitive shops with helpful recommendation features and easy payment options. Few packages offer any of these features, much less all three.
Our Blue Ribbon Award winner is Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition, a mammoth storefront builder and manager that can scale from simple shops to online malls. Site Server didn't win any points for its installation procedures, but the ease of management and sheer weight of features the system includes make it the hands-down winner.
Our other high-end product, IBM's Net.Commerce Pro 3.1.1, is tough to use and tied to proprietary back-end systems, though it's unmatched in its ability to import database information from legacy applications.
At the low end, Inex's Commerce Court 3.2 Professional stood out for its ease of use, good features and excellent value. For less than $1,000, Inex provides everything a small company needs for creating an online commercial presence. Two other low-end contenders, GoldPaint Internet Services' Shopping Cart Professional 3.945 and WebGenie Software's Shopping Cart Professional 2.03, offered fewer features and weaker third-party support.
Leader of the packIt's easy to be skittish of a complex application, such as Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition, which comes on two CD-ROMs. But once we had it up and running, we found Site Server to be the best all-around e-commerce tool in this comparison. Site Server is surprisingly easy to use and feature-rich. Microsoft includes five sample sites that demonstrate business-to-consumer and business-to-business storefronts. Site Server supports third-party payment processing and tax calculations for just about every service provider we know. For the power user, the Pipeline Editor helps you design the flow of commerce through your site on a step-by-step basis. Additional features include an advertisement manager; a robust searching system; a push-based content system based on Microsoft's Active Channel; and in-depth reporting tools that provide complete details about your site and its sales. New in Version 3.0 is integration with Microsoft Transaction Server for server-centric application deployment. Best, and most important, all the pieces of Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition work well as part of a unified whole. And despite its vast scope, the system is quite speedy, allowing you to retrieve product information with no measurable waiting time. However, don't harbor any illusions about easily interoperating Site Server with an Oracle database or a Netscape Web server. Site Server requires Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0, Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 with Service Pack 4, and an NT File System volume on your hard disk upon which to install the software. You'll also need heavy SQL Server knowledge to properly configure the four databases you need to run all of Site Server's features. (Although you can use Oracle or any other Open Database Connectivity-compliant database, the implicit recommendation is that you use SQL Server.) Plan, too, for a rough installation. Failed install scripts, crashed servers, command-line work and numerous lengthy setup routines sent us scrambling to Microsoft TechNet on more than one occasion. For a hint of just how complex Site Server is, take a look at the "Getting Started" book, which is 131 pages. Microsoft's remaining manuals are good enough to get you on your way without many calls to tech support. All in all, Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition is a good value at almost $6,500 for unlimited user connections (and unlimited stores, so you can use this as a hosting product as well), and it's one of the best e-commerce tool kits out there.A simple planWhile it came in as runner-up to Site Server on our Score Card, Inex's Commerce Court 3.2 Professional is a different order of magnitude in price ($995) and complexity. Easily the simplest tool we tested, Commerce Court is also one of the best electronic storefront programs you'll find if your e-commerce needs are limited. Managing a catalog of products is easy. Each product is fully defined through a set of tabbed pages. You can import a catalog of items from a number of sources, including Intuit's QuickBooks or BestWare's M.Y.O.B. inventory records. Unfortunately, you cannot import a catalog of items from any mainstream databases except Microsoft Access. You can link directly to a Microsoft SQL Server back end to store pages or data, but you have to use Inex's Server Extensions add-on to do so, an unnecessary headache. Commerce Court's streamlined graphical management interface is a plus. For example, setting up taxes is easier than with other storefront products, though Commerce Court's tax options are limited. New in Version 3.2 is much-needed support for several payment gateways, including CyberCash. With these additions, Commerce Court's third-party support is unparalleled at this price. Commerce Court includes a ton of sample store designs and templates. On the other hand, we found its report selection to be weak, consisting of only four simple reports focused on sales activity. You can run Commerce Court as an add-on to Microsoft Site Server 3.0 or alone with Microsoft IIS 4.0. As an addition to Site Server, Commerce Court's value is limited. Commerce Court is primarily designed to work with an ISP's e-commerce hosting service, but you can use it to set up shop on your own servers with a little extra work. Installing the system is simple after you change the settings to work with your local host. Documentation is fair but largely unnecessary. Overall, Commerce Court is a great way for smaller shops to ease their way into e-commerce.Reigning big shotThanks to a ubiquitous advertising campaign, IBM's Net.Commerce is one of the best-known electronic storefront packages in the industry. However, our testing of Net.Commerce Pro 3.1.1 suggests that IBM would be better served by putting money into enhancing its product rather than advertising. While a product such as Microsoft Site Server is a tool kit, providing hooks into dozens of third-party applications, IBM's Net.Commerce Pro 3.1.1 represents the consummate do-it-yourself package with everything you need on a single CD-ROM. If you want external service connectivity to third-party products such as CyberCash, you can build that into the Net.Commerce system. But you have to build it yourself. The software comes in four parts. For back-end functionality, you get IBM's DB2 Universal Database, although Oracle8 is also supported. For Web services, you get the Domino Go Webserver, or you can use the standard Domino Web server or Netscape's Enterprise Server. Also included is IBM's CommercePoint eTill for secure payment transaction services. And of course, there's Net.Commerce itself, the glue that holds it all together. To administer your Net.Commerce site, you must use Netscape Navigator 4.04 or higher. We found Net.Commerce's performance to be fairly slow in comparison to the competition. Screens were sluggish to refresh; data was slow to load. The product also gets low marks for manageability. Unless you're a seasoned DB2 professional, the complexities of the database far outweigh those of any other component we worked with in this comparison. If you have information in other databases, Net. Commerce provides tools to let you import it. IBM has built-in support for such legacy systems as SAP and MQSeries platforms, as well as various electronic data interchange systems. For users migrating from these high-end enterprise applications, Net.Commerce may be your only choice. In contrast to managing a Net.Commerce site, building a store was a well-designed process. IBM has devised a simple process of selecting a business model (One Stop Shop, Personal Delivery or Business-to-Business), providing tax information, setting up shipping tables and selecting a look and feel for your store from templates. Also to its credit, Net.Commerce is one of the few applications we've seen that makes full use of the Secure Electronic Transaction protocol for secure shopping. Net.Commerce also supports Secure Sockets Layer, which more sites are likely to use. Multinational features, such as foreign currency translations, are well-executed. Sadly, though, reporting is limited to a handful of basic summaries. For the real deal, you'll have to dig into the reporting capabilities of DB2. Installing Net.Commerce is a chore that can only be described as painful. It took us five tries, a complete rebuild of the operating system and a total of three days of working with the platform before we had any semblance of stability. The installation difficulty is partly due to the complexity of the products and partly due to their bizarre installation requirements. For example, to run the install process, you have to log on as a user with administrative privileges, but the user's ID must be eight or fewer characters in length - meaning you can't use the Administrator account. Adding to the confusion, Net.Commerce gives you a slew of default accounts and passwords to remember, a different one for each of the four components of the commerce suite. Net.Commerce comes with extensive documentation and, unfortunately, little of it is printed. With a product this complex, we think a vendor owes it to its customers to provide printed manuals. In the final analysis, we were put off by IBM's behemoth of a commerce package and its enforced ties to complex proprietary back-end systems.GoldPaint lacks lusterGoldPaint's Shopping Cart Professional 3.945 is a fair platform for building an electronic storefront, but those wanting advanced features or robust transaction processing will be disappointed. Everything in Shopping Cart Professional uses an HTML extension called Tag Activated Markup Enhancer (TAME), a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) program that you install on your Web server, which in turn serves up your storefront. Each HTML storefront function is built with a TAME tag that prefaces a command to define a product or a purchasing condition. It's an interesting approach, but we'd rather not have to learn TAME and its HTML enhancements to work with our storefronts. TAME gets tiresome quickly, and it's not something that is likely to scale to larger organizations. In general, Shopping Cart Professional's administration screens lack the intuitive approach that many of its competitors, such as Microsoft and Inex, have mastered. Shopping Cart Professional is light on features, such as discounts and cross-selling, and requires you to set up tax tables yourself. This version does support CyberCash, however. Product information databases are only supported if you export an ASCII flat file or extract your inventory information from an existing database. There is no native database support, unless you work with Shopping Cart Profes-sional's custom programming services to build a do-it-yourself connection. Shopping Cart Professional's reporting capabilities, limited to managing customer records and accounts, are unimpressive. The product's lack of polish is also evident in its tricky installation routine, which requires you to manually unzip some files and copy others into the proper directories. Documentation, all online, is fair but unmemorable. At $990, GoldPaint's Shopping Cart Professional is one of a few inexpensive-and-simple e-commerce tools in this survey, but it certainly isn't the best of the lot. It can probably do the job, provided the job is not very sophisticated.No whistles and bellsClued in by its rock-bottom $495 price tag, we didn't have the highest expectations for WebGenie Software's Shopping Cart Professional 2.03. But for what the software is designed to do, it does a good job. WebGenie's Shopping Cart Professional builds simple, straightforward storefronts. The 320K-byte application comes on a single diskette, or you can download it from the Australian company's Web site. By simply filling out a table of goods and prices, you can build a catalog of items in minutes. Shopping Cart Professional builds the requisite HTML code, JavaScript controls and CGI scripts for you. You link the resulting page to your existing site, and that's it. A CyberCash interface is also available, but otherwise, the features list is nonexistent. There is no reporting, no database integration and no way to dynamically update your site. To update your site, you have to rebuild the CGI from scratch. WebGenie's Shopping Cart Profes-sional is a page-generator and nothing more. But it's a pretty nifty one and worth a look for do-it-yourselfers. |
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 National Electronic Commerce Resource Center
Center for Research in Electronic Commerce
ecommerce one Null is the co-author of the upcoming Complete Networking Desk Reference (Osborne). He can be reached at null@sirius.com.  ICANN board approves reform agenda House committee subpoenas WorldCom executives KPMG Consulting to hire Andersen IT staff, not unit Xerox accounting troubles may total $6 billion Analysis: Ciena/ONI deal done All of today's news
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