With the sweet smell of new revenue in the air, however, a new market category--prepackaged storefronts--has emerged to fill the gap. PC Week Labs' exclusive review of Oracle's Internet Commerce Server 1.1 reveals strengths and weaknesses representative of these storefronts.
ICS, and competing products such as Microsoft's Site Server and IBM's Net.Commerce, allow companies to serve up goods to their customers in a matter of weeks, rather than the months it would take with a build-your-own solution. However, these prepackaged storefronts lack the flexibility, customizability and tight business process integration possible with custom-developed software.
These prepackaged storefronts are less expensive than most custom software. ICS costs $US20,000 per CPU for a full package or $US5,000 per CPU if customers use an existing Oracle7 or Oracle8 database server.
However, ICS, for example, lacks essential e-commerce elements such as taxation, shipping and payment modules, so additional purchases will be required. And the implementation and integration costs of any e-commerce solution tend to be three to four times higher than any capital costs involved.
We used ICS with its included Web server, but it also works with a wide variety of other Web servers.
Just add customers Out of the box, ICS provided an extensive collection of prebuilt store components, including search and navigation tools, an online shopping cart, and simple discounting schemes.
With its database-driven design and graphical administration and reporting tools, ICS helps companies leap some of the significant hurdles on the e-commerce road. However, ICS doesn't handle the critical issues of payment, shipping or taxation of items sold, leaving those tasks to vendors such as Cybercash, VeriFone, TaxWare International and Tandata.
In addition, ICS doesn't include the electronic data interchange support, repeat ordering and back-end integration that more sophisticated business-to-consumer and most business-to-business packages need.
Packages such as Netscape Communications' CommerceXpert and Open Market's LiveCommerce provide these features, but cost between $US50,000 and $US200,000, depending on the size of the installation. Organizations without these resources, particularly shops that lack developers, will find ICS a great help getting started.
We could assemble and later modify our store's structure using only ICS' graphical store editor and, after testing our changes, update our production store with a single command.
ICS provides a good number of customization options, as long as users stay within its basic section-product type-item hierarchy. We could define an unlimited number of product attributes, product types and store sections, and we could customize ICS' store interface screens using any HTML editor, allowing us to create a unique look for our store.
Storewide customizations are much more limited. ICS provides only one level of user preference settings and didn't let us define any new global attributes (such as tax categories or storage information) that would apply to all products.
ICS 1.1 shipped in mid-January for SPARC Solaris (we tested it on a dual-CPU UltraSPARC Enterprise 2 with 512MB of RAM). Other operating systems will be supported in the coming months, Oracle officials said.
ICS is priced at $US20,000 per CPU for a full package or $US5,000 per CPU if customers use an existing Oracle7 or Oracle8 database server. Customers should remember, though, that the implementation and integration costs of developing an e-commerce site (regardless of products used) tend to be three to four times higher than any capital costs involved.
Cookie-less shopping When we connected to our production store as an end user, ICS' prebuilt store logic asked us to log in and then presented us with a browsable version of the store. New with ICS 1.1, shoppers need not have cookies enabled on their browsers--HTML frame support is ICS' only requirement.
As is appropriate for a site entirely driven from database content, ICS offered us flexible product-search options. We could customize our view to see only particular categories of products or use ICS' full-text search engine (Oracle's ConText product) to perform a full-text search across an entire store to find particular products.
ICS maintains a shopping cart for each user registered with a store and also supports walk-in users for more casual shopping.
ICS provides a flexible, multilayered discounting scheme to do target marketing and run store promotions. As administrators, we could group registered users into custom categories to define preferred pricing and define sale prices for certain items or time-sensitive coupons for groups of users.
We could give coupons to only particular groups of users, product categories or store sections, but we couldn't perform more sophisticated discounting based on users' past purchase habits (for example, buy 10, get one free) or current shopping cart contents.
The ICS administration site included 10 simple reports that provided basic store traffic, inventory and customer order information, but the reports were not customizable, and we couldn't add new ones. All of ICS' data is stored in Oracle tables, so it is fortunate that numerous third-party reporting options are available-- options ICS customers should plan to buy.
ICS supports bulk-loading customer and inventory data from foreign data sources, but doing so required us to export data as plain text first and then do a horrendous amount of preprocessing on the file. For now, customers should plan on several days of programming to get the task done or hope Oracle supplies software for the task first.
PC Week Labs Executive Summary: Oracle Internet Commerce Server 1.1 ICS provides a quick start for organizations that want to open business-to-consumer electronic storefronts, and its relatively open design allows organizations to customize the system to fit business needs. However, the package doesn't support business-to-business e-commerce well and provides only part of an e-commerce setup. USABILITY B CAPABILITY C PERFORMANCE C INTEROPERABILITY C MANAGEABILITY B Pros: Fully functional end-user interface out of the box, including store registration, full-text searching and shopping cart logic; graphical administration tools; open Java and HTML-based design; good third-party support. Cons: Importing customer or stock data is cumbersome; slow Java administration tools; limited, unexpandable reporting tools; customization of back-end database structures is limited to individual products, not overall store structure or global metadata. Oracle; www.oracle.com
