Two of the products--Microsoft's Site Server 3.0, Commerce Edition and IBM's Net.Commerce 3.1.1--are toolkits intended primarily for midsized and large e-commerce sites that require a great deal of customization and flexibility. They help make it easier to develop commonly used e-commerce applications, such as online catalogs, order entry systems and shipping managers. These toolkits provide APIs and a framework for building common modules that many e-commerce applications require.

The other two solutions--Open Market's LiveCommerce 3.0 (which works in conjunction with Transact 4 at the back end) and Netscape's combination of ECXpert 1.1.1, BuyerXpert 1.5.2 and SellerXpert 2.0--are packaged systems that reduce programming and development time, and enable less technical individuals to get an e-commerce application up and running, at the cost of ease of customization and some degree of architectural robustness.

All testing took place at Doculabs in Chicago (see "Doculabs' Assessment Method," page 78). Doculabs supplied the participating vendors with detailed functional specifications for a sample e-commerce B2B application for a fictional book distributor, allowing the vendors sufficient time to create the majority of the application offsite. Each vendor was allotted two days for testing--we used the first day to familiarize ourselves with the product and the sample application; the second day was devoted to using the product to create new add-ons (an Order Capture/Customer Service screen, for example), making modifications to the sample system and further testing.

There was no clear-cut, overall winner. All the products had particular strengths. If your needs point more toward the toolkit products and you need to run applications cross-platform or make use of OBI, for example, we recommend IBM's Net.Commerce, which gets kudos for fully supporting the greatest number of diverse standards and platforms, and for having a slightly better out-of-box capability than Site Server.

On the other hand, if you want to host your system on Windows NT, Microsoft's Site Server, Commerce Edition offers a strong, customizable framework for developing an e-commerce system. Site Server has the most robust architecture of any of the products we tested, and while its ease of use and administration is not nearly up to the standard of other Microsoft products, it's still just a tad better than IBM's current offering.

Be warned, though: Both of these products have steep learning curves, and could use additional GUI-based development tools to make them easier to use. Though one of Microsoft Site Server's strengths is the ability to write COM objects in C++, Java, Visual Basic or COBOL, most of the products we tested make use of C++ APIs, although IBM will add Java support in a future version.

As for the "out-of-the-box" products, if you need EDI or OBI, you'll likely favor Netscape's offerings, which provide strong support for those standards, as well as a CORBA-compliant ORB and back-end integration with products from Oracle and SAP. If you don't need either of those standards and are looking for an easily customizable product, go for Open Market's flexible and well-designed LiveCommerce/Transact solution, which has excellent out-of-box functionality and the best catalog development and management of any of the products we tested. It is also significantly less expensive than Netscape's product bundle.