Taking The Buyer's Side In E-Commerce
By Patricia Schnaidt
Online purveyors are struggling to get consumers to buy over the Internet. Many consumers are content to view online catalogs, then resort to old-fashioned methods like the telephone when it comes time to buy. The whole process hasn't improved--just one aspect of it has.
The market for business-to-business faces its own challenges. Fear of using a credit card over the Internet isn't one of them, but the business-to-business e-commerce market must deliver solutions that improve upon the real-life model for buying products and services. If the same or less functionality is offered online, what's the incentive to use the new system, other than a short-lived gee-whiz f
actor?
Electronic commerce must improve an organization's practices to feed the bottom line. If a business can save substantial amounts of money, reduce inventory, operate more quickly or otherwise increase net profit, then its impetus to implement Internet-based electronic commerce grows.
 Enter Commerce One
Launched in April, Commerce One strives to turn business-to-business electronic commerce into a mass market, and it promises to do so by approaching the electronic-commerce market differently. Headed by former Sybase CEO Mark Hoffman, Commerce One's products and services focus on the end-to-end commerce process, from selection, quotes, orders, reconciliation and inventory to billing statements, rather than the piecemeal approach others have taken. Commerce One offers both the purchaser side and the seller side catalog servers and transaction servers. And it's building a transaction network.
What's u
nusual is Commerce One approaches electronic commerce from the purchaser's perspective rather than the seller's, as do most commercial electronic-commerce products. Commerce One considers the purchasing agent who is dealing with multiple electronic-commerce cata
logs, payment systems and inventories, and its BuySite software can present multiple catalogs from the same database. A purchasing agent not only can look at the catalog, but also get quotations, check inventory, order products and get billed.
In a typical setup on the purchaser's side, the Commerce One BuySite is a proxy catalog server, which contains current copies of the different suppliers' multimedia catalogs. Also operating on the client site is the Commerce One REOS 5 transaction server. (The transaction server will ship at the end of this quarter; the catalog servers are shipping now.) A purchasing agent can use BuySite to access and search multiple catalogs and compare products and pricing more easily. Preferences such as products on the
approved list or preferred vendors can be enforced through a configuration engine.
On the seller's side is Commerce One SupplySite Multimedia Catalog as well as an REOS 5 transaction server. Updates to the catalog are propagated to the customers' proxy catalogs. Transactions are processed in real-time, which helps keep excess inventory in check and makes tracking more accurate.
To provide a full solution, Commerce One is integrating its software with key applications used in the back office, including Walker Interactive and GEAC, so that the purchasing process is integrated with inventory and billing. The GEAC integration will be available in the third quarter, the Walker is available now.
Commerce One is throwing its success in with its customers' e-commerce success. In addition to its software, it is building a transaction network, operated by Comdisco. An electronic order over Commerce One will cost about $2.50 per transaction, which compares to about $50 in other forms today, according to Com
merce One. All other actions, such as quotes and inventory lookups, are free. The company makes money if its customers actually use its products and services--now that's incentive.
So while vendors selling products over electronic-commerce systems are wary that th
eir customers can more easily shop for better prices, products like Commerce One can ensure that the user organization gets the best deal from e-commerce.
Patricia Schnaidt can be reached at pschnaidt@ nwc.com. Starting May 15, Art Wittmann's column, On the Edge, will appear in this space. Networkologist will appear in the second issue of the month and will alternate with On the Wire.
|
REPORTS
ANALYTICS
Follow 
