Web servers tuned for e-commerce

The least technical, but perhaps most important, aspect of evaluating a commerce server is simply to determine what kind of business you're in. That can be a bit more difficult than it sounds. "You have to first determine your specific business goals," explains Erica Rugullies, a research analyst at the Hurwitz Group consultancy in Newton, Mass. "You need to be able to plan for it and budget for it. And know whether you want to build or to buy."

Thus, for example, do you intend to do on-line retailing, where you're selling directly to the consumer, or will your main purpose be business-to-business commerce? If it's the latter, then are you committed to electronic data interchange that collection of data standards for business-to-business communications that are now gradually moving to the Internet? If so, you may have just eliminated several servers from consideration--like Microsoft's Merchant Server, for instance--at least for now. "And for a lot of people that is a real show-stopper right there," says Andy Parker, president of Mercantec of Lisle, Ill., which sells a suite of commerce-oriented software that can fit on top of a variety of other Web servers, such as Microsoft's, Netscape's, and so on.

But if you're purely interested in retail, then EDI may not particularly matter. "EDI is a necessity in any robust environment," notes Banc One's Dieringer. "But if you're a mom-and-pop shop, why bother?"

So let's assume that you're looking to conduct retail electronic commerce. Now, how large are you? How many transactions do you expect to make on any given day? If you're very small, or just trying out Web-based e-commerce as an experiment--or even if you're large and simply don't wish to invest a small fortune in Web technology--then you may not want to own a Web server of any sort. It may serve you far better to go to any one of the large number of Internet store-front providers--such as BBN of Cambridge, Mass., and AT&T--which will host your store, handle everything right up to billing, and then charge you on a per-transaction basis. Incidentally, both BBN and AT&T are Open Market customers.

But, assume instead that your retail site is large enough to warrant an investment in Web technology. How do you choose? One really strong evaluation criterion is cost. Another is standards. "Our sense was that in doing Internet marketing, we wanted to use a standardized product," says Kenneth Freidman, president of Corporate Micros in New York City. "We felt that Microsoft is here now, and will be there tomorrow."

Corporate Micros is a systems integrator, consultancy, and Web-site developer. The company is using Microsoft's commerce-oriented Web server, Merchant Server, to give its clients Web commerce facilities. Merchant Server is an NT product that Microsoft obtained when it acquired EShop. The good news is that Merchant Server has the resources and the immense market presence of Microsoft behind it. The bad news is that the product is not cross-platform. You're not going to run it on a UNIX device.

There are other drawbacks. Because it was acquired rather than developed in house, Merchant Server does not yet enjoy the support of all of Microsoft's Web tools. It isn't supported, for example, by the company's newly announced Visual InterDev (a.k.a. "Black Bird"), though that's scheduled to change sometime this year.

Moreover, Merchant Server has a "shopping basket" into which buyers place their purchases prior to order. That's not unusual. Most servers do. What is odd is that when Microsoft acquired the product, it intended shopping basket to be a client-side process. That is, the cart would be an ActiveX application that the users would download over the Net and run on their own systems.

But that opened up a host of problems. For example, if the connection to the server is broken--if, for instance, the buyer simply decides to log off--then there could be complications in the vendor's bookkeeping. An inventory system might, for example, show that an item had been removed from stock, but the checkout system wouldn't actually have completed the transaction.

All of which gave potential users a shock--and sent Microsoft scurrying back to the drawing board. "We had big plans for a client-side cart," says Derrick Bazlen, program manager at Microsoft. "But we've changed our plans." Today, Merchant Server supports server-side carts as well. And in fact, notes Bazlen, "at least 99.9% of our users have them."

But the client-side cart left some developers edgy about Merchant Server. What hasn't helped matters is that Merchant Server's shopping basket, whether on the client or the server, is a black box. "Microsoft hasn't published the details of the structure for it," says Freidman. "It's just a data blob." That's supposed to change in the near future, but for the moment, developers can't get at it to customize it or merge it more completely with their applications.

Still, for Freidman and Corporate Micros, that's all beside the point. Whatever Merchant Server lacks in terms of cross-platform functionality and unpublished APIs, it more than makes up for everywhere else. Freidman says that Microsoft's e-commerce Web server is flexible and easy to use and program: Useful store templates are included that can be quickly customized for a variety of purposes. It's also relatively inexpensive. "It is really impressive that we can develop a store for $50,000 or less," notes Freidman, "instead of a few hundred thousand dollars."