A Complete E-Commerce Tool
By John Pearson
Creating and maintaining an e-commerce site is difficult at best. It was only a few years ago that all you needed was a static page with your name on it to feel successful. Now you need an order desk, help desk, contact management, and lots of other bells and whistles—all of which are time and cash consuming.
Commerce Server 2000 provides an excellent solution to these problems—and others that you may not have thought of yet. The product is a comprehensive site development and implementation package. It's a relative of Microsoft's earlier Site Server package, but it's much better, with only a passing resemblance to its predecessor.
The product catalog is the heart of an
e-commerce site. Commerce Server makes creating a catalog extremely easy: Go to the Catalogs option and create one. As you would expect, the framework is already there for you. Adding products and product categories, and maintaining the product catalog is very easy.
For managers who need to access their site and extract, analyze, or report on key data, Commerce Server's Business Desk offers the necessary data manipulation capabilities.
Microsoft calls business processes "pipelines." Each pipeline is a different feature—such as direct mailing, transactions, and discounts—and you can manage them separately.
