Move your e-commerce efforts beyond the basics. Here are five of the latest techniques and technologies you'll find at hot business-to-business e-commerce sites.
By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 02/22/99
1. Personalization
Personalization software provides a way for a Web site to identify users and configure the presentation to match their preferences. Most importantly to a Web site owner, personalization tracks site use and purchasing behavior at a highly detailed level so that users can be targeted for products and service offers that closely match their stated or deduced interests. For a great consumer implementation, check out www.amazon.com.
Note that personalization requires collecting information about users, an activity that worries many people. If a company uses personalization, it must have a privacy statement and be able to justify the information it wants to collect. For example, it makes sense for a loan brokerage to ask for an applicant's income. An office supply company would have a hard time justifying the same request.
Another issue is that personalization isn't cheap. The starting cost of a personalization subsystem is about $25,000.
Examples of personalization products are:
- LikeMinds Personalization Server and ARIA Web Site Activity Analysis Software from Andromedia.
- BroadVision One-To-One Enterprise, BroadVision One-To-One Commerce and BroadVision One-To-One Financial from BroadVision.
- Netscape MerchantXpert from Netscape.
- MarketStream from ConnectInc.com
LiveCommerce and ShopSite from Open Market.
- Firefly Passport Office, Firefly Network Hub and Firefly Catalog Navigator from Firefly Network (Microsoft recently acquired Firefly Network).
2. Affinity engineering
If a customer buys something from a company once, there's a pretty good chance they'll do so again. That's the simple premise behind this concept. Affinity engineering examines user purchasing behavior or site use and, through a variety of mathematical techniques, compares it with the behavior of other site users. The objective is to determine which products have a high probability of gaining the users' interest and thereby securing more sales. Check out CDNow's Album Advisor, at www.cdnow.com, for a good demonstration.
The key is making sure that users are satisfied with the recommendations. Otherwise they'll consider the feature, and maybe your site, unreliable.
The personalization software vendors listed above all offer some form of affinity engineering. And, with Microsoft's acquisition of Firefly, it's likely that it will incorporate the capability in Site Server soon.
Net Perceptions for E-commerce, Net Perceptions for Ad Targeting and Net Perceptions Recommendation Engine from Net Perceptions, at www.netperceptions.com.
3. Virtual private networks
VPNs are the answer for companies that want to keep tight control over the privacy of connections and also want to ensure that they can identify the people that visit a site. VPNs create a "pipe" that encrypts data sent across the Internet and provides complete control of what resources are visible at the service end of the connection. Digital certificates, housed either in software or on smart cards, provide user authentication. See our VPN Net Resources page for primers and news.
Myriad VPN products are available, including:
4. Web-to-telephony integration
Customers see a button on a Web site labeled "Push for Customer Service." They do, and suddenly they're connected by IP telephony and browsing the same Web presentation as customer service representatives. This provides a cool and satisfying customer experience - the kind that will ensure return visitors.
Today, two types of Web-to-telephony integration are in use. The first, as described above, is mediated by IP telephony. The only problem is that this requires that the user have an audio-equipped PC and a reasonable connection speed. Failing that, the voice call is handled by a regular telephone connection.
Products in this area include:
5. Public key infrastructure
As companies come to rely on electronic commerce to underpin business operations, hopefully they'll start to get serious about security. And central to rigorous, robust e-commerce security is authenticating the people who use a Web site and services, particularly for conducting business-to-business transactions. Enter the need for PKI, a management system designed to provide public-key encryption and digital signature support for applications and services. By managing keys and certificates through a PKI, an organization can establish and maintain a secure networking environment.
PKI products include:
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