Commerce Manager
The heart of bCentral's Commerce Manager is the Seller Console, which is the key interface between the seller and all products, marketplaces, and orders. The Seller Console consists of four main sections, or managers:
- Catalog Manager—Creates and maintains a list of items to sell
- Marketplace Manager—Signs up and maintains relationships with marketplaces
- Order Manager—Processes incoming orders
- Report Manager—Generates reports and links to other bCentral modules
For the price of the Web site or with a Commerce Manager subscription, you can create a catalog and list your company's products and services online. (To use Commerce Manager, you must have a Web site, even if your Web site is built and hosted elsewhere.) Catalog creation is wizard driven. Commerce Manager uses shopping-cart technology to accept and process orders. Realtime credit card processing is part of the service, but you must have a credit card service. Microsoft has a partnership with Cardservice International to provide this service for all major credit cards for a fee of $29.95 per month plus a standard credit card transaction fee.
You use Catalog Manager's wizard to build a catalog of products, outlining the selling terms, payment rules, shipping methods, and other features. You can enter each product individually, which is tedious if you need to enter many products, or use an Excel spreadsheet to upload multiple products at once.
You use Order Manager to handle financial transactions on a Site Manager Web site. When shoppers click on a product's Add to Cart button, Order Manager is activated. Customers can choose item-based or order-based shipping and various shipping methods, including overnight delivery. Order Manager calculates shipping costs in realtime; these costs depend on the number of units being shipped and the type of carrier selected. Order Manager also calculates state sales tax and adds this tax to the shopper's bill during the purchase process.
Hit Generators
Small businesses are always looking for ways to increase sales. Businesses can use Traffic Builder to promote their Web site or use Commerce Manager to sell their products on popular Internet marketplaces. Traffic Builder's Submit It! service lets users pick from 400 search engines and directories, eliminating the need to manually list a site on search engines. A wizard walks users through adding metatags to keywords in their Web site so that search engines can find those words.
Businesses can measure how well their keywords fare in important search engines. Businesses can also tweak the words to try to obtain a higher position for their Web site in the search results.
The .NET Connection
Microsoft's bCentral is the poster child for much of what the company hopes to achieve with .NET. As Schmidt puts it, "We're an internal customer of .NET, and we're one of the leading proponents in the company of the concept of software as a service. Microsoft sees bCentral as a great proving ground for .NET technology."
Figure 3 shows how bCentral uses .NET services. bCentral uses Microsoft's .NET servers as Microsoft introduces them and is beginning to adopt the .NET services in .NET My Services. bCentral uses .NET in four specific areas:
- Identity—.NET services such as Passport make account management easier for users and provide support on a wide range of devices.
- Personalization—.NET services store a profile of users, their preferences, and the rules that they want to apply to their business transactions.
- XML Store—.NET uses XML to store data and exchange it with partners and third parties who provide services to customers.
- Directory and Search—bCentral integrates into Web directories to provide advanced search capabilities against data stored in XML format.
In keeping with .NET's strong wireless component, Microsoft plans to extend bCentral services to mobile devices, including Web-enabled cell phones. This mobile access capability for all bCentral services is a crucial capability for small businesses and a strong differentiator from other business services.
The bCentral Business Model
When Microsoft conceptualized bCentral in 1998, business-to-business (B2B) portals were all the rage and a small-business portal offering a range of integrated services seemed to address an enormous market need. Many companies started services to help small businesses establish e-commerce Web sites.
But the market reality is that small businesses are cost sensitive and volatile. According to Schmidt, "The biggest surprise for us is that the nature of the small-business market is such that it's hard to create a subscriber for life." When we researched this article, only 4 percent (65,000 users at the time of writing) of bCentral's registered users were paying customers—a small number for a site as ambitious as this one.
bCentral competes with Yahoo! Stores, Intuit, Bigstep, Oracle NetLedger, Oracle Small Business Online, Amazon.com, eBay (now a bCentral partner), and others. In comparison with the competition, bCentral's subscription numbers are reasonable in what is, after all, a relatively new marketplace.
Microsoft bCentral is both less and more appealing than its competitors. It's less appealing because not one of its services is overwhelmingly best of breed; it's more appealing because it's a comprehensive small-business portal. We wonder whether small businesses are ready for a Web-based business tool such as bCentral and whether those businesses will be willing to give up local control over their data. bCentral might be a little ahead of its time and is likely to change substantially over the next year as Microsoft gains experience in this area.
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