Integrate Your E-commerce Solutions

Long after the Internet bubble burst, e-commerce is alive and well for direct marketers and is the fastest-growing direct commerce sales channel. Catalog companies have three options for managing the dynamic online marketing environment.

An Independent Adjunct

At one extreme, a catalog’s e-commerce operation can stand alone as a totally independent adjunct to the traditional enterprise. Although it may share some of the same merchandise, it also may feature items that are not in the catalog. When it does offer catalog items, they may be only a subset of the full catalog line.

In this extreme scenario, no effort is needed to link Web customers to the catalog’s customer database either before, during or after an order is placed. An independent Web site usually still will depend on the catalog infrastructure for order fulfillment, but credit card processing may be handled independently. Orders will be imported into the order-processing system periodically (e.g., every hour, twice a day, overnight), using the same utilities employed to import orders from a third-party call center.

Customer service can be handled exclusively online through a variety of self-service methods, ranging from a list of frequently asked questions to a dynamic knowledge base that learns (from customers) which answers are most useful to which questions. There also may be interactive chat sessions managed by dedicated call center reps, or a group that handles “call-me” inquiries from Web customers.

Tightly Coupled

Other catalogs choose to tightly couple e-commerce with their catalog order-management applications. Most often in these cases, the Web interface the customer sees is created through a series of templates manipulated from a dashboard of options that can be configured without any knowledge of HTML, Java or other programming language.

Of course, just because an e-commerce platform is tightly coupled doesn’t mean it must show all the SKUs featured in the catalog. You still can add Web-only products to the database or decide to show only a subset of products online. In the tightly coupled scenario, all of these decisions and activities are managed from the same database that manages the catalog merchandise. If a new product is added, or a price is changed, it doesn’t have to be replicated on the Web. Data management is centralized and unified.

If tightly coupled, the customer database is available for interactive processing as well—with the appropriate password and security safeguards, of course. If a customer has earned a discount or should be cross-sold to in a certain way based on previous catalog ordering history, the system should respond appropriately. Also, the orders themselves are available immediately from the shopping cart for customer service follow-up, order processing and fulfillment.

Real Integration Strategies

All of that said, neither the independent option nor the tightly bundled strategy provide appropriate balance between the strengths of a dynamic, interactive e-commerce site and the broad functionality of direct-commerce, order-management systems. It’s best to pursue a loosely coupled strategy that links the two system platforms through a layer of middleware.

To “speak” to one another through the middleware layer, both the e-commerce and order-management systems rely on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that act as virtual doorways for the exchange of data. The middleware layer simply passes data between the systems in a synchronous or asynchronous fashion (i.e., real-time or not-real-time), formatting it appropriately for the receiving system’s APIs. It can perform fundamental functions on the data, such as combining data from several fields to build a record in the format required by the receiving system.

Most middleware applications also support both data integrity and functional integrity tracking to assure all data received and transmitted are properly accounted for.

Middleware can consist of a third-party application, such as IBM’s WebSphere MQ, or it can be specifically developed for an enterprise-wide order-management system. For example, to manage integration with its retail.dot.commerce system, CommercialWare uses WebSphere MQ and its own program, integration.dot.commerce, to let retailers and direct marketers integrate Commercial Ware products into their existing IT infrastructures. Integration.dot.commerce maps and translates application data into the appropriate format and supports industry standard protocols so Commercial Ware’s software can fit into any existing architecture.

A Life of Its Own

Synaro Integrator, a middleware program from Page Digital, is another good example here. While it originally was designed to provide connectivity between Page’s synaro order-management system, a legacy accounting program, and synaro WebStore, the synaro Integrator was extended to serve as general-purpose middleware that offers connectivity among myriad applications.

To provide such functionality, the Integrator (which is written in Java) manages business methods in a workflow fashion, and transports data in eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) or Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) formats. It comes with more than 1,000 predefined business methods and processes, but has tools to allow users to define additional methods (and XML-based APIs) required using Java, JavaBeans, or procedure calls for Active Server Pages or Java Server Pages.

Integration Management

Mastering technology is only half the battle, however. The biggest issues are those that determine the kind of experience the customer will have in your multichannel environment.

Whether you have a tightly or loosely coupled e-commerce application, you must support connectivity with your enterprise-wide customer-management system. Customers should be able to seamlessly place orders across both channels (with strong authentication and security). Customer service should be held to high standards and made available in either sales channel.

The products online and the business rules that apply to them may differ from those of the print catalog, but allowing catalog customers to enter SKU numbers on your Web site to build online orders is a smart move. It expedites the ordering process for the customer while eliminating call center labor needed to take the order.

The future will bring technological changes. Some order-management systems already are browser-based in the call center, and someday most direct commerce companies will use the same technology to support both the call center and the Web (if for no other reason than to take full advantage of Web services).

But even when we reach that point, the business rules for each sales channel still will differ (just think of call center price over-rides). The biggest challenge always will be to maximize the customer’s satisfaction by minimizing customer inconvenience and confusion. As always, such issues are driven by business decisions, not technology.

Ernie Schell is president of Marketing Systems Analysis, Southampton, PA, and author of “The Guide to Catalog Management Software.” You can reach him at (215) 396-0660 or ernie@schell.com.