The collapse of the dot-com bubble has taught the surviving e-commerce firms many valuable lessons, not the least being the importance of building a sustainable cashflow. As most established businesses realise, a reliable cashflow comes from offering a combination of good value and good service. One without the other is seldom sufficient.
Achieving an adequate level of service typically means linking the Web site store front to back-end business systems, and particularly customer support systems. Companies that offer a Web business as one channel to market among others may be at an advantage, as they should have reliable information about typical customers. Conversely, they may face problems that are not shared by rivals starting with a cleaner sheet.
Quick fix
In many businesses, the perceived need to get online in a hurry will have compounded the problem of linking to back-end systems. In the latter part of the 1990s, many firms built complicated e-commerce structures using proprietary tools. Today, most companies would choose a system based on widely adopted standards like Java or XML, but the wisdom of such choices was much less clear prior to 1997.
Over time structural changes have also complicated the average e-commerce site. Where five years ago it may have been possible to implement a Web content strategy within which all data was kept by the Web server, today most companies expect to use data held in enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, product design management tools, supply chain management databases and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Tying the site in with billing and support systems brings a further set of requirements. A large number of back office processes often run on legacy systems, and the traditional business models were not made to interface with the Internet. The result is often a logistical nightmare that makes it hard to make money online  it may even be hard to determine if a profit or loss is being made by a Web site.
E-commerce system vendor Reef Software's product family is typical of current offerings from e-commerce specialists. It comprises a suite of software in four parts, focusing on catalogue management, content management, transaction processing and user tracking.
Larger vendors specialising in e-commerce systems, like BroadVision and Open Market, have also sought to offer this kind of end-to-end e-commerce and Web content delivery system. BroadVision has particular strengths in personalisation software, allowing companies to provide relevant information to their Web site visitors. With the purchase of Interleaf last year, BroadVision added content management to a suite that supports CRM, ERP, billing and knowledge management.
Open Market offers a product line including Transact, a transaction-processing system, and Content Server, a content management system, plus Marketing Studio and Personalisation Centre tools that sit on top of the Content Server. Open Market's Integration Centre uses middleware from WebMethods to connect Content Server with a variety of back office systems.
Mike Alderton, UK managing director at Reef Software, argues that the strengths of e-commerce suites lie in their ability to integrate with back office systems. Reef offers support for Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and the ability to configure the systems using standard HTML. 'The world is moving to J2EE-compliance, and when this is achieved, compatibility problems will go away,' Alderton says.
Computer Associates approaches the problem of integrating e-commerce Web sites in a similar way, arguing that any information  whether it is provided from an application, database, object request broker or XML stream  can be wrapped to appear as a Java object. It provides middleware to control the access to and integration of content in this way through its Jasmine II product.
