Building an e-Commerce Business with Software
So what's involved with building an e-Commerce business? While there are vast differences between a consumer and business-to-business site, the similarities are prevalent. All of the software will create a store operation. This consists of a product catalog (where the online customers select what they want to order), a shopping cart (where product selections are collected), transaction security (credit authorization and other payment schemes), and order processing (shipping, taxes, inventory, etc.). All of these elements combined give the store a personality and the end users a true shopping experience.

The All-Important Catalog
Whether browsing or buying, from the customer's perspective the online catalog is the most important part of e-commerce. It's similar to the printed mail-order catalog with respect to the basics: products, pictures, and prices. However, a Web catalog can be a fully interactive shopping experience, including video, sound, and a lot more. Making a Web catalog into a multimedia extravaganza is not easy (read: expensive). Collecting and incorporating images, sounds, and other trimmings for hundreds (or thousands) of catalog products is both a major organizational effort and a complex job for the e-commerce storefront developer.

Often, the right software can help make this job easier. For example, iCat's Electronic Commerce Suite is good at incorporating multimedia. Most of the software products also can organize the catalog into groups of products (departments, sections). This is combined with a search utility to make products easy to locate. Oracle's Internet Commerce Server and Microsoft's Site Server Commerce Edition have powerful indexing capabilities. IBM's Net.Commerce goes one step further with the Product Advisor that helps customers develop a profile of what they want and shows them how to find it.

Many e-commerce products also come with catalog page templates that can be used repeatedly and easily, so the work does not have to be duplicated many times. Not incidentally, connecting to or importing data such as prices and product descriptions can be a major headache. If the items in your catalog change frequently or you have a large number of items.

Processing Orders
-- Where the Devil is in the Details As a customer shops in your online store, catalog selections are usually put into a "shopping cart." Cart selections are then stored in a database so the customer can review what has been selected before check out. Again, this is not much different from ordering in a regular store, but there can be some wrinkles.

There can be many details involved with shipping and taxes, so look for software that supports third-party shipping modules (e.g. Tandata from Tandata Corporation) and tax calculation packages (e.g. Taxware by Taxware International). There are many other kinds of calculations associated with orders; discounts, coupons, volume breaks, to name a few. Most e-commerce software can do some of these calculations. You should check your needs against the list of supported calculations, or at least be able to easily add customized calculations.

There are also many possible connections to accounting systems. Some software products such as INEX's Dynamic NT come with complete accounting and inventory software. More commonly, programs provide connections to legacy data and accounting systems. As you might expect, companies like IBM and Oracle are particularly careful to honor their older systems.