Two Maturing Web Fulfillment Tracking Solutions

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Though there are many wannabes, I see two maturing solutions to fulfillment of Web orders. These are substantially different. Open Market's Transact platform provides an open e-commerce design with a number of ordering and fulfillment capabilities that can be adapted to many ordering front ends and back office applications. Smith-Gardner WebOrder, on the other hand is a high-end mail-order management system with a Web ordering interface. Some aspects of Transact can be accessed by lower end shopping cart programs (e.g., ShopSite Manager TX and ShopSite Pro TX), but WebOrder is definitely an enterprise-level product.

Open Market's Transact Platform

Open Market's e-commerce offerings are set up to separate the content management (product display) side of the store from the "back office" ordering and product fulfillment functions.

Product Display

Product display and management is either the enterprise level LiveCommerce product (http://livecommerce.openmarket.com) or the small- to medium-business ShopSite software (http://www.openmarket.com/shopsite/). (Note: ShopSite SC software has its own limited order processing system built in. ShopSite TX, on the other hand, uses the separate Transact platform for order processing.)

Transact Platform

Open Market's Transact e-commerce platform (http://www.openmarket.com/transact/) is designed to provide a full range of e-commerce functions. Since Transact uses its proprietary SecureLink method of communicating between the storefront and Transact, the store content can be hosted on an entirely different server than the server housing the ordering functions.

Transact can perform many complex functions, but with regards to order management and fulfillment, it allows the storeowner to set various levels of permissions and access for employees, depending upon their function. Thus the shipping department can access shipping information only, and the billing department can access billing information only, etc. This way the online databases underlying Transact can become the basis for a company's entire order management.

ShopSite TX, for example, can be set up to automatically notify customers via e-mail whenever an event occurs in the order fulfillment process, such as when a back order is made, when a product is shipped, etc. The customer can also view the progress of orders through a Web interface, find FedEx tracking numbers, the status of previous uncompleted orders, etc.

Storeowners are able to search for orders made in the store by date, name, payment type, etc. In addition, online ordering data may be downloaded for offline analysis and processing.

Flexibility

Transact is an extremely versatile platform, with a wide range of capabilities to meet the needs of B2B as well as retail applications. Storeowners may license the software for use on an in-house server, or use the Transact software hosted on a Commerce Service Provider (CSP) site. More information is available in the Open Market Technical White Paper: "The Transact 4 Fulfillment API: Integrating Transact with External Order Management Systems" (April 10, 1988; couldn't find on their website).

Small- to Medium-sized businesses can find ShopSite TX hosting at Comcation, Inc. After initial set-up and software fees, the Transact Processing fee is $65 per month plus 25 cents/order. Web hosting fees are additional. http://www.comcation.net/ecommerce/hosting.htm

Smith-Gardner WebOrder

With few companies offering both the shopping front end AND the order fulfillment back end, Smith-Gardner WebOrder stands out. Smith-Gardner (http://www.smith-gardner.com) was founded in 1988 to develop a state-of-the-art ordering management system for "enterprise" size catalog and direct mail companies, resulting in the MACS Mailorder And Cataloging System (http://www.smith-gardner.com/prod_macs.htm), a highly-rated and widely-used system. In 1997, they took this kind of core expertise and connected it to an Internet front end, WebOrder (http://www.smith-gardner.com/prod_weborder.htm), which, including MACS-only companies, is now used by about 300 clients.

Their least expensive WebOrder product runs on an NT platform, is capable of approximately 2,000 orders per day, and costs approximately $30,000. The WebOrder system is scalable to hundreds of thousands of orders per day, and the price for software can also run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention the costs of customization and development by a company's team of Web developers.

Some of the capabilities of the WebOrder system include:

• Dynamic webpage creation (in contrast to static HTML pages) with personalized merchandising
• Real time access to WebOrder enterprise system data
• Real time order entry and customer service functions
• Same-day order shipping
• Real time order status and shipment tracking
• Online credit card processing and invoicing
• Timer-controlled e-mails for order and shipment confirmations, up-sells, cross-sells, and customer service.
• Warehouse management
• Integrated shipping manifest system
• Advertising management and analysis
• Customer purchasing analysis
• Merchandising and product purchasing functions
• Accounting and financial management
• Production and operations management
• Data Warehousing and Decision Support

More than 1,500 customization options are available to tailor the system to a company's preferred method of operations. WebOrder provides an open technology that can integrates with many third-party systems, such as financial management by People Soft, retail system software by Island Pacific, and warehouse management system software by Manhattan Associates. It can also integrate with accounting software such as GTS, Great Plains, and Multiview. Depending upon a company's needs, WebOrder can integrate with existing legacy systems, or provide a seamless enterprise system.

Some leading companies that use WebOrder for their Internet sales interface include 911 Gifts, Club Mac, Cyberian Outpost, Delia's, Hickory Farms, JCP Logistics L.P. (JC Penney), Miles Kimball, The Shopping Channel, and the US Mint,