Chapter 5: Microsoft Commerce Server

 < Day Day Up > 



Overview

Commerce Server is designed for use by organizations that wish to sell products or services across the Internet. It evolved from the first Microsoft business-to-consumer products called Site Server and Site Server Commerce Edition.

Since these early days, Commerce Server has taken the best features of these original products and updated them to provide a fairly comprehensive product for building, deploying, and managing Web sites to sell goods or services to users (see Figure 5.1).

click to expand
Figure 5.1: Typical Commerce Server-based Web site.

Commerce Server comprises five main elements, each of which can be customized or adapted by Commerce Server developers:

  1. Product catalogs . The product catalog system is the heart of Commerce Server and is used to store the products and services that are sold on the Web site. Catalogs can be imported or exported in XML or CSV format, and the catalog supports a range of searching capabilities, such as freetext, property, and specification searches. Catalog data can be exchanged between Commerce Servers using BizTalk Server.

  2. Profiles. The profiling system in Commerce Server enables organizations or individuals to be profiled and relevant data collected about those visiting your site. Catalog-based information can be customized to suit specific profiles, so, for example, visitors from certain companies are presented with a tailored catalog with goods and pricing to match a prenegotiated deal.

  3. Business analytics . Any active Web site is likely to collect huge amounts of data relating to who visited the Web site, which pages they looked at, what was purchased, and so on. The activity logs from Commerce Server can be exported to Microsoft SQL Server OLAP services and then data mined in a data warehouse OLAP cube.

    Commerce Server pipelines . The business process flow is built using Commerce Server pipelines, which take an order through the purchase cycle and start to link in other business processes as needed to satisfy an order (see Figures 5.2 and 5.3).

    click to expand
    Figure 5.2: Commerce Server pipeline.

    click to expand
    Figure 5.3: Setting pipeline component properties.

  4. Targeting system . Targeting individuals or groups of users is one of the clever ways of increasing sales. By working out who a user is and his or her particular interests, the targeting system can then intelligently propose up-sell or cross-sell opportunities to site visitors. With the predictive algorithms created by Microsoft Research and now incorporated into Commerce Server, buying patterns can be estimated and very specific offers made.

Figure 5.4 illustrates the Commerce Server architecture.

click to expand
Figure 5.4: Commerce Server architecture.



 < Day Day Up > 



Microsoft  .NET. Jumpstart for Systems Administrators and Developers
Microsoft .NET: Jumpstart for Systems Administrators and Developers (Communications (Digital Press))
ISBN: 1555582850
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 136
Authors: Nigel Stanley

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net