For this year's fourth quarter, Gartner is predicting U.S. online sales to consumers to exceed last year's fourth-quarter figures by 39 percent, with a forecasted $25.3 billion to be spent via B2C sites.

Much of this growth is due, at least indirectly, to improved customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is crucial in retaining and increasing the customer base, and companies are quickly wising up to this fact. According to Gartner, customer satisfaction with online shopping grew to 75 percent in 2000. On the purchasing side, the willingness of customers to shop online has continued to grow as e-tailers have made navigating sites easier. The lessons e-tailers have learned over the past few years have definitely helped the usability and reliability of B2C sites.

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So are you ready to jump into the B2C fray or move your B2C site to the next level? The choices for building a B2C Web site used to be very limited: Either you built it from scratch in-house or you bought a package and deployed it. That was before integration with back-end systems, marketing, CRM (customer-relationship management) and data mining entered the picture.

To create an enterprise-class B2C site, you must consider many factors at the outset. How will the site look? What's the most effective way to track and move the customer through the fulfillment process? How should you use the data collected from transactions to measure ROI (return on investment), retain online customers and attract new customers? What's the best way to integrate your B2C data with your other legacy systems? How do you ensure a secure site from both a physical and a network perspective?

If you have an existing site and it's not completely integrated into the rest of your business, you have a lot to consider. Getting your product in front of the customer on the Web is no longer enough; you have to worry about how your site looks, how best to track the customer through the fulfillment process and how to ensure that the data collected from the site can be best used to measure ROI. You must create a strategy for electronic customer retention and completely integrate the site with every other system you have.

Where do you start? There are basically three enterprise-class options: build a system from scratch, use a framework from an established vendor or go with an outsourcer.

"Out of the box and onto the Web" systems are simply not enterprise-class solutions. They comprise a set of applications that are difficult to customize -- if customization can be performed at all -- and generally are meant simply to get your product in front of customers and to authorize credit cards for orders. These products work fine for starting up a pure e-business or getting a mom-and-pop shop running quickly. But they're not feasible for organizations with existing mission-critical systems coupled with an extensive need for integration with multiple back-end systems.

Building from scratch is generally no longer practical because of staffing limitations. The enterprise has trouble keeping up with changes in technology, and the staff you have on hand should be concentrating on their primary job of keeping your current business running. They aren't concerned with running out and learning the newest technology available -- especially not on their own time.

If you do have a bunch of eager types and you pull them off their day-to-day IT duties to engineer a B2C site, you're likely to lose them once the project is complete. Even in a down economy, knowledge is king. Your employees are likely to take the knowledge they've gained and head for a better paying position before too long. Of course, you could take the time and effort to put incentives in place to avoid this situation, but in the long run a framework solution might be a better bet.

IBM was one of the first to offer an e-business framework that integrates both development tools and back-end systems. You still need to do development, but a framework takes care of basic integration functions and provides database- and legacy-system adapters. Generally, the companies selling frameworks also offer professional services. After all, that's where the real money is. These developers know the framework well and can build and deploy a site in less time than it would take your in-house developers to learn the framework.

But this scenario raises other issues. When the consultants leave, they take firsthand knowledge of how to maintain and update your B2C system with them. Knowledge transfer is supposed to happen as they're on their way out the door. But successfully transferring knowledge and making sure that documentation is complete can be difficult. It's the sort of housekeeping chore that can be overlooked.

The consultants are the ones who know what's changed -- including how it has affected your business processes. And that brings up another point: Adopting a framework usually means adjusting the way you've been doing business. For companies that have never had a B2C site before, this is less of an issue. But for companies looking to expand an existing B2C presence, this can be a major concern. If you're considering a framework, make sure you ask about the vendor's business-process approach, then analyze how it fits with your existing processes.

Whether your company considers the B2C slice of its business to be mission critical is a tougher issue. The thinking has always been that mission-critical business functions should be developed and maintained in-house. This is mainly an issue of control, and as costs for outsourced solutions drop, many companies may decide to toss the dice and hope for the best as they opt for a lower-cost outsourced solution for B2C development.

There's no question that outsourcing is becoming increasingly attractive for B2C development. Recent changes in the market have forced ASPs (application service providers) and hosting services to consolidate, and they are now rushing to provide the most services for the dollar to retain existing customers and attract new ones. SLAs (service-level agreements), caching and load-balancing services, and performance monitoring and management as well as content management are generally offered as a part of a solution package -- one that includes design, development, integration and deployment of your B2C site.