Netscape's solution includes more than 200 business rules, which makes it extremely flexible, but it's notably lacking any kind of workflow customizability equivalent to IBM's or Microsoft's component-based architectures. We were able to modify the flow and content of screens somewhat, but there's no good way for developers or third parties to plug their own modules and code into Netscape's existing workflow model. On the other hand, workflow routing within the included structure is very good, especially in the buyer package. Status tracking in SellerXpert is simple and powerful.

Order management through the SellerXpert module includes support for discounts, charges and promotions; it also handles repeat and multiple orders. Costs for an order can be easily split across multiple cost centers. Oddly, though, freight and shipping are difficult to calculate, especially FedEx and UPS charges, and there's no automatic link between shippers and shipping methods.

Netscape pays little attention to providing any kind of application development environment--a fault shared by Open Market's LiveCommerce solution--and there's certainly no IDE, debugger or source code management. However, experienced programmers can customize the solution via the wide variety of well-documented C++ APIs.

Open Market LiveCommerce 3.0/Transact 4
Unlike Microsoft and IBM's e-commerce offerings, Open Market's out-of-the-box solution makes it easier (and less expensive) to set up and configure a B2B site. Open Market's high-end "industrial tool," LiveCommerce 3.0, offers a great deal of built-in functionality without the need to write any code. The trade-off is somewhat less ability to customize and extend or modify features, and a less robust architecture overall.

LiveCommerce 3.0 interacts with a back-end component called Transact 4, which handles order processing, customer service, fulfillment, membership information and buyer profiles, and also provides a shopping cart that is secure (SET and SSL are supported) and persistent throughout browser sessions. In fact, Open Market holds key patents in the areas of credit-card payments and the use of shopping carts and persistent session IDs in e-commerce.

One of LiveCommerce's greatest strengths is its rich catalog functionality. It includes a discrete catalog server component, and well-designed tools that manage content, import data, design screens and manage users. New catalogs either can be imported or automatically generated from the attribute lists that describe products. For example, if you sell camels, and you've got an attribute for "number of humps" that can be set to either "one" or "two," the catalog generator can automatically create a new catalog entry for "one-humped camel" and "two-humped camel."

Exclusion rules prevent generation of spurious entries for attributes that don't actually distinguish products. This can save an enormous amount of time if you've got a large product line with a lot of individual items that share standard characteristics, as in an electronic parts business. The catalog can be thoroughly personalized for individual users, or by user class or company (if multiple companies or lines of business are served from one catalog server); in addition, the individual items displayed, the functionality available and even the overall catalog design can be customized per user. Page layout and navigation, product categories and attributes shown, search types and capabilities, types of cross-sell offered, discounts and other marketing promotions can all be customized and personalized out of the box.

We found catalog deployment to be flexible and scalable. A given catalog can span multiple physical hosts, or multiple catalog servers can be utilized for the same catalog for load-balancing purposes. However, load-balancing is a fairly basic round-robin type and not truly configurable. And although multiple copies of the IIS Web server and the ObjectStore Cache (which caches and stores objects to reduce database load) can be deployed, the ODB (Object Database) at the heart of the system is a potential single point of failure, as is the back-end Transact Server.

Many of LiveCommerce's features are extensible, but it seemed clear that Open Market, like Netscape, has paid much less attention to depth of the development capability than either IBM or Microsoft. There are no source control features or interfaces, no integrated debugging capabilities, and no visual layout tools.

There are documented APIs for implementing features, such as linking to an external shopping cart instead of using the one included in Transact, but much less of the underlying system functionality is exposed than in a toolkit product like Net.Commerce. Workflow and process control, for instance, cannot be as easily modified or supplemented as in the pipeline model of Microsoft Site Server. SNMP is not supported for system management, and XML is not yet supported or available. Nor does LiveCommerce support any kind of external transaction processor, and it is not fully transactive.

LiveCommerce/Transact does exhibit extremely strong out-of-box settlement and fulfillment capabilities, however, including partial payments and credit memos. It fully supports both pre- and post-payment micropayment models (especially useful for such scenarios as a business that distributes online text or other information). Fulfillment notification can be delivered via e-mail, fax or secure Web page, or through a custom mechanism via the included API. Transact 4 does a good job of handling issues such as shipment and payment methods, back orders, cancellations, credits and chargebacks. The payment features include support for purchase orders and real-time secure credit-card transactions through SET. Integration with various payment processors is easy and complete, and includes "dummy" payment processors that can be used during testing. EDI support, however, is minimal to nonexistent, which is unfortunate if the product you sell is intended to be used in a supply-chain environment.

Personalized "Smart Pages" allow for full-featured customer self-service out of the box; information such as order status and tracking, shipping and order histories can be obtained directly available over the Web.

LiveCommerce runs only under Windows NT and is integrated with Microsoft Internet Information Server. Unfortunately, there is currently no support for using LDAP to maintain user data.

Send your comments on this article to Richard Hoffman at rhoffman@nwc.com.