The technical team must be in sync with general requirements and goals for one-to-one marketing or personalization. Applied primarily to business-to-consumer sites, such marketing aims to identify customers visiting the site either individually or demographically, and tailor displays, prompts, prices and products to their interests. This typically requires dynamic HTML generation, tight integration with content databases and registration incentives. Also, the marketing folks may have ideas for online promotions and special deals to appear dynamically under application control. For example, it is possible to analyze click stream behavior on the fly with a product such as Aptex's SelectCast, which monitors user selections and develops a repertoire of user preferences that can be used to generate content.

Intensive marketing efforts will require specialized analysis packages and perhaps even a full-time technical staffer working with the marketing department to perform log-file analysis. While business-to-consumer sites face significant challenges in the creation of targeted content, at least all the technology for dynamic HTML, payments and databases is available and requires nothing more from customers than a current Web browser.

Business-to-business applications, on the other hand, require integration with both customers and downstream suppliers. Your product catalog must be available from a customer's purchasing system, which is often proprietary. Orders placed on your system need to flow to your supplier's order-entry system, which is outside your control. None of the technology for this is in the suite of standards supporting the Web. Business-to-business sites often have the unenviable task of tracking emerging standards such as OBI (open buying on the Internet) and EDI (electronic data interchange) to Web gateways. At the same time, business-to-business sites must forge a close relationship with customers and suppliers to create a high level of integration--the kind you can't yet buy in an off-the-shelf solution.

The Business: Define What You Are Selling

It's crucial to define the business you're in and the goods and services you want to offer. It may turn out to be quite different from your traditional business. For any type of information services, the Web can open a new channel of real-time distribution.

Take NextLink Interactive, which hosts CTI (computer-telephony integration) applications for ad campaigns linked to toll-free phone numbers and call-center overflow. It is now working on a plan to broaden its service by hosting the e-commerce portion of clients' Web sites. Clients could thus target ad campaigns at both 800-number and Web customers, supported by NextLink with a single product catalog, set of payment options and fulfillment stream. By effectively outsourcing e-commerce for Web and telephone shoppers, the client has one source for reports, customer service and merchant banking.

Ingram Micro has applied a similar principle to a more vertical market. Ingram, a large provider of computer hardware to local resellers and VARs (value-added resellers), will offer a new service: hosting the e-commerce portion of its customers' sites on its own e-commerce platform. Ingram thus takes the challenging parts of an e-commerce site--product-catalog maintenance and payment stream--off the VAR's hands, yet it will appear to customers as if transactions occur on the VAR's site. Ingram thus deepens its ties to the reseller, adding tangible service to a relationship previously based solely on product availability and price.

Both of these new opportunities illustrate the potential of e-commerce, and why it's important to analyze the economic fundamentals of your business to see how you can apply them on the Internet.

Be aware that pursuing a new e-commerce clientele will change your organization in ways you may not be able to anticipate. Every Web store is in the information business. All online fulfillment transactions begin with the delivery of a token, ID or digital receipt--even those online businesses that go on to ship merchandise by traditional means. Companies shipping physical goods likely will need to connect their e-commerce platforms to an inventory or manufacturing system, and companies shipping strictly digital goods will need to perform electronic software distribution or manage subscriptions.