Personalizing the Experience
As you can see from
Mary's experience, a key piece of managing your store is giving your customers,
especially frequent visitors, a reason to return to your site. In addition to
considering special product promotions and sales, you can update your Web page
content often.
Merchant System makes the process of updating your pages easy. You can
modify your Web pages with any standard Web page development utility, including
Microsoft's FrontPage, Adobe's PageMill, SoftQuad's HoTMetaL, Sausage Software's
HotDog, and good old Windows Notepad.
One caveat applies to creating Web pages for use with Merchant System:
After you create or modify your pages with a development tool, you need to edit
them in Notepad or some other text editor to develop the HTML code to implement
your database queries and tags. The sample stores and pages that Microsoft
provides with Merchant System can help guide you through this process.
Besides letting you create a unique shopping experience for your customers,
Merchant System can also take over the management and administration of your
store. The Merchant Utilities, which you access through a standard Web browser,
let you create and maintain one or more stores. The Utilities include a set of
starter stores; HTML templates to develop the look of your store or stores; and
product, order, shopper, and promotion management tools.
The HTML templates let you show your customers product pages and order
forms and give customers querying capabilities. To add a promotional item for
frequent buyers or to add a product, simply point and click a few times in your
browser, and you're finished. You don't need a staff of database experts or
programmers to set up these features.
Planning Transactions
One of the first questions
any Internet shopper asks is, "How can you guarantee that my credit card
information is secure?" Merchant System uses secure transactions to ensure
credit card confidentiality. The system supports SSL and will support SET when
the computer banking industry finalizes the SET specification later this year.
At present, Merchant System accepts only credit card payments; however, it
will accept purchase orders and other payment methods in the future (Microsoft
has not set a timetable for these payment alternatives). In addition, a new
feature, Microsoft Wallet, is integrated in Merchant System. The Wallet will
hold virtual credit cards, shipping and billing information, personal
credentials, and digital signature (SET) information.
To take advantage of the Wallet features, users will need to use a
Wallet-enabled browser. All transactions between the Wallet-enabled browser and
Merchant System will be encrypted, so the customer won't need to send credit
card information during a purchase. Each customer will have an encrypted
certificate that contains credit information. Merchant System will send this
information to the financial institution--the merchant's store will never see
it.
Ready, Set, Sell
IS managers can prepare to
implement Merchant System by learning about NT Server and IIS. All the good,
common-sense practices of Internet access and Web publishing also apply to
Merchant System. These practices include implementing security measures such as
firewalls and proxy servers.
If you have a Web site today, you can extend your knowledge to easily add
Merchant System. IS managers will need to work with their database
administrators to understand what information they need to retrieve, how best to
present it to a customer, and how to integrate the database with Merchant
System.
The system's sample databases, table schema, and queries can facilitate
this process. For example, you can use the sample queries to understand how to
extract information from an existing database and to see how the table schema is
set up. You can see what information Merchant System expects to insert into a
database and how it retrieves information.
Because Merchant System uses any existing table schema or ODBC-compliant
database, you probably won't need to heavily modify your existing database
information. Reviewing the existing database information now will facilitate
Merchant's deployment later. Financial systems and databases that aren't
OBDC-compliant will need some cleanup and some translation software to prepare
them for use with Merchant.
Merchant System follows Microsoft's strategy of helping companies build
business systems easily, at a reasonable cost, without requiring a lot of
customization. Merchant System uses the third-generation, UNIX-based eShop
product that Microsoft purchased and translated to run on NT. The market for
online shopping applications is very new, and only a few companies have
competing products. For example, Open Market's products require extensive
customization and don't support NT; Netscape's Merchant System platform also
does not support NT. You can find other solutions that target companies that
provide electronic malls, but they are highly customized and very expensive.
Microsoft Merchant System pricing has not been set but will be comparable
to other BackOffice products. Merchant System is scheduled to be available by
the time you read this.
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