INTERSHOP Communications INTERSHOP 3
Putting INTERSHOP 3 to work in our lab was like buying a prefabricated retail store. The e-commerce-specific product includes all the components a small- to medium-sized business needs to begin selling on the Web. As we prepared our computer equipment site's Web pages, product catalog database, shopping cart and order-fulfillment process, INTERSHOP 3's Graphical Store Design Wizard simplified a complex job with its 11-step, point-and-click interface for creating complete new storefronts. INTERSHOP 3 requires little computer or Web expertise; it's ideal for less-experienced Web merchants. The product dynamically emitted Web pages that tracked shopping-cart contents and recognized return customers.

INTERSHOP 3 worked quickly in the lab, had excellent catalog-building and data-handling capabilities, and provided us with a range of useful statistics about our customer base. Its emitted Web pages were the smallest and the quickest to load of any we produced.

INTERSHOP 3 ships with a copy of Sybase's Adaptive Server v.11, into which we loaded our products and customers through Intershop's Data Import Wizard. Because the wizard automatically created the database schema for our catalog, we didn't need database design expertise to use INTERSHOP 3. The product includes Java-based store banners that we were able to link to individual product Web pages as well as to each customer's shopping cart. INTERSHOP 3 gave us the option to use a diverse selection of third-party payment methods, including CyberCash, Microsoft Wallet, GlobeID, VeriFone's vPOS and WorldPay.

INTERSHOP 3 was an ideal environment for our computer equipment store; selling products such as durable goods is the product's strength. As we customized our store, we used Intershop's Template Extension Language (TLE) to script our handling of products in the shopping cart and manage our inventory. One TLE script offered an extended warranty on selected products; another managed the flow of Web pages guiding cell-phone buyers to select their preferred rate plan.

Using an INTERSHOP interface for custom programming, we created server-side Perl scripts that manipulated Web page data, and processed our customer and product database in business-specific ways. But building an online insurance agency by incorporating insurance-business logic into the storefront's operation proved difficult within INTERSHOP's Perl script framework. Perl is a relatively slow interpreted language that doesn't lend itself to complex insurance data manipulation and calculation. We also found INTERSHOP 3's tools for site design and layout more difficult to work with than NetObject's Fusion and Microsoft's Visual Studio.

We liked INTERSHOP 3's Staging Wizard, which we used to update a live, active store. The Staging Wizard copied our store, let us modify the copy and then moved the new version back to the live store. DynaBase and ColdFusion also gave us the means to switch store versions dynamically, but INTERSHOP 3's approach was easier to use. We updated product information, pricing and Web page graphics painlessly, and without taking our store offline.

There are three editions of INTERSHOP 3: Merchant, Hosting and Developer. We tested the Merchant edition; the more expensive Hosting edition is meant for ISPs offering storefront tools to business customers, while the Developer edition lets a VAR configure and sell customized storefronts for vertical markets. The product has additional language support for German, French and Norwegian.