Hope management seen this.........Friday, October 29, 1999, 4:30 PM ET.
Products Offer New
Ways To Mix
E-Commerce With
Content
By RICHARD KARPINSKI
Content-driven Web sites are about to get
new tools to help them add no-hassle
e-commerce capabilities.
An example of this form of e-commerce
might be a community site for skiers that
wants to sell ski packages, equipment,
books or even music alongside articles
on those topics, simply by adding an
in-context buy button.
Mixing in-context commerce elements
with content has proved difficult because
it forces content developers to worry
about deploying expensive commerce
infrastructures while also arranging for
product availability, fulfillment and
customer service. A vendor that handles
those aspects of e-commerce would be a
boon to such Web sites.
Emerging in November are products from
a handful of upstart vendors that let
content sites avoid such headaches and
sell products from their Web sites via a
vendor's distributed e-commerce
backbone network.
“Content and commerce are colliding,”
said Grant Slade, vice president of
marketing at iVendor, which next week is
launching the iVendor Network to support
distributed e-commerce. “What's missing
is a scalable and manageable solution.”
Content sites like the pitch. iVendor
customer Cybergrrl Inc. uses the service
to add a variety of products for sale on its
mostly content-oriented site. NewsReal,
which provides content to Web and portal
sites, is working with vendor Iconomy.com
to embed commerce offers within the
content, in most cases customized to the
site visitor's interests. Web design house
Spotlight Studios is using a similar
package from vendor Poptoit.com to add
an online pet store to content site
dogsbythebay.com.
“It lets us offer products to our visitors
without having to develop a whole
commerce system,” said Spotlight
Studios COO Mike Jennet.
Pricing for these products varies widely,
but typically a user must pay some
up-front setup fees and then a percentage
of sales to the vendor partner. Still, the
percentage that goes to the content site
typically is more than the 5 percent or 10
percent most merchant affiliate programs
offer.
Just as important, the content site doesn't
pass customers off to an affiliate site to
complete the sale, but rather keeps them
on its own site.
Done right, such distributed e-commerce
strategies may be some of the most
technologically ambitious the Web has yet
seen.
Take iVendor. The start-up is staffed by
former executives from object technology
vendor Versant Corp. The iVendor
network features a three-tier, distributed
Java architecture, both relational and
object data stores, and separate
applications handling payment, taxes and
fulfillment. iVendor even arranges for
site-branded shipping and call center
support for the products its customers
sell.
If successful, the iVendor network could
soon begin handling thousands--if not
millions--of transactions, funneled back
into its system from a wide variety of
content sites, said iVendor's Slade.
iVendor has plenty of company in addition
to Iconomy and Poptoit.com. Elsewhere,
Vitessa Corp., formerly known as EC
Direct, recently debuted the Internet
Product Code (IPC) Clearinghouse, a
self-serve warehouse that lets merchants
virtually stock and sell products without
holding inventory.
The Vitessa IPC technology enables
merchants to sell their products anywhere
on the Internet--from Web stores and
banner ads to affiliate sites and e-mail.
In a somewhat different spin, vendor
Vstore.com this week debuted a platform
that lets any Web site build a fully stocked
store in a matter of minutes.
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