High-End Commerce Servers

Microsoft, Netscape, and Open Market all offer commerce-enabling products targeted at systems integrators, commerce service providers, and large retail companies. Unlike the storefront software evaluated for this report, these products require the skill sets of professional Web-site builders. These programs provide the tools for Web-development firms and their large clients to build commerce technologies on the Web. These products are not necessarily easy to use -- and may require teams of programmers and designers to fully deploy -- but the results reflect the extra expense in robustness and scalability.

Microsoft Merchant Server

Merchant Server straddles the market niche between the storefront products evaluated in this report and the higher-end solutions from Netscape and Open Market. At $14,995 for the software and $3495 for each store site you create with the software, this package is too costly to be an entry-level product, and the documentation is clearly meant for Webmasters. There are no wizards or step-by-step dialog boxes to guide you through store development -- you need to use Frontpage for that. All product documentation, which covers such topics as installation, building a store, administration, system architecture, order processing, security, and staging the development cycle, comes on the distribution CD in Microsoft Word and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format.

Merchant Server relies heavily on Microsoft products, running only on Windows NT with the Internet Information Server (IIS). The starter stores use Microsoft SQL Server as the database server, but it can hook up to any Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) database.

Netscape Merchant System

Besides its popular Internet servers, Netscape also offers the Netscape Merchant System for complete retail management services. Pricing starts at around $60,000 and can escalate sharply depending on how much help is necessary to implement all the desired features. For the money, though, Web merchants can display thousands of products in a catalog, handle hundreds of simultaneous transactions, and integrate with legacy database systems for inventory, orders, and fulfillment. You use a staging server to develop the Web store, while product offerings migrate to the Merchant Server and a separate Transaction Server handles orders.

Merchant System integrates powerful merchandising capabilities, including product search, promotional discount support, flexible pricing, dynamic displays, and multimedia integration capabilities -- everything you need to run a merchant site.

First Data processes payments, and the syste m integrates with Taxware's sales-tax computation engine as well as Netscape's other high-end product, Netscape Publishing System, which lets publishers create subscription-based publications. Merchant System is available for Sun Solaris and Silicon Graphics Irix, with other Unix versions expected this spring.

Open Market OM-Transact

Open Market is in the business of supplying industrial-strength commerce software, with an emphasis on back-office infrastructure, for high-volume Web merchants. Corporate clients can license OM-Transact for $250,000, which, added to the cost of building the actual Web site and catalog databases, puts it out of reach of small Web merchants.

OM-Transact provides a complete back-office infrastructure for secure Internet commerce and supports secure payment, order management, transaction processing, and customer service for high-volume transaction environments. As a backbone Internet commerce offering, it works in conjunction with Web-site and catalog- development tools such as those available from Cadis, Saqqara, and Bluestone, all of which are Open Market software partners, as is the iCat catalog product. OM-Transact runs on major Unix platforms -- those from Sun, Silicon Graphics, Stratus, and Hewlett-Packard.