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Strategies & Market Trends : e-Commerce the Next 100 Months...... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AugustWest who wrote (1669)	11/10/1998 5:57:00 PM
From: jjs_ynot	Respond to of 2882

Getting very interesting. That's real money.

To: AugustWest who wrote (1669)	11/10/1998 6:01:00 PM
From: jjs_ynot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2882

Interesting news on broadcast.com cbs.marketwatch.com

To: AugustWest who wrote (1669)	11/10/1998 6:49:00 PM
From: AugustWest	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2882

e-shopping stuff... Taking New Online Shopping Carts for a Spin November 10, 1998 PC Week via NewsEdge Corporation : A few months back (PC Week, Aug. 31, page 29), we discussed some of the weaknesses of current online shopping carts. That column provoked quite a few responses from vendors that are creating new shopping carts. Space limitations prevent us from talking about all of these new carts, but we want to draw your attention to a few promising choices. None is yet where we'd like the state of the art to be, but each offers some features of interest if you're setting up an online store. Mercantec's site (www.mercantec.com) was one of the first we visited. Its SoftCart 4.0 is not spectacular, but it illustrates the kinds of capabilities you can purchase in off-the-shelf shopping-cart technology. SoftCart is a customizable cart that includes a decent set of options. Five demo stores show off such features as the ability to calculate shipping costs on the fly, make decisions based on product weight and other features, and keep a cart on-screen at all times via frames. Another promising cart comes from Majestic Laser (www.majesticlaser.com). This company will build customized PCs using a variety of components. When you spec a system, you pick the key components--motherboard, processor, graphics adapter and so on--and they appear in a shopping cart in a frame on the bottom of your display. This cart is interesting in that it displays a checklist that shows whether you have selected all the pieces necessary to make a working PC. Unfortunately, that checklist whets your appetite for a level of intelligent assistance it does not yet provide. The key missing ingredient is compatibility checking, making sure that the pieces you buy will work together well. The cart is not smart enough, for example, to stop you from buying an AT case with an ATX motherboard. The cart, like the rest of the site, is also not graphical enough; pictures or schematics would be helpful. Man vs. Machine (www.manvsmachine.com) provides a demo of how it can help you create a highly graphical cart. The demo lets you assemble a computer system by dragging its components into a cart window. You see all the pieces as you create the system, and the total price is also visible at all times, but when you're ready to buy, you end up in a traditional itemized text list in another browser window. This demo, like the one from Majestic Laser, was missing the back-end logic that would deal with such compatibility issues as whether the monitor you chose could support the high-resolution modes of the graphics adapter in the system you selected. These three carts are fairly straightforward extensions of current shopping carts. A more ambitious and thus farther-out solution is NetWave's QuickBuy Shopper (www.netwaveinc.com). NetWave's offering acts as a combination shopping cart and wallet. The underlying notion is that you use this single cart as you browse multiple online shopping sites. You enter all your shipping and payment data into your cart once. Then you go to sites and either drag items into your cart for later checkout or directly onto your credit card for immediate purchase. The electronic commerce sites and your cart exchange the information they need to complete the transactions, and you're done. But for this notion to work, all the vendors you visit need to support it (and the underlying QuickBuy objects). Without widespread support, it will be only an interesting novelty. We can't vouch for how easy any of these carts would be to implement on your e- commerce sites, but you should keep an eye on them and other advances in this area. We should all also continue to demand better shopping tools because online shopping has a long way to go if it is to reach its full economic potential. Mark L. Van Name and Bill Catchings can be reached at mark_van_name@zd.com and bill_catchings@zd.com. <<PC Week -- 11-09-98>> [Copyright 1998, Ziff Wire]