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The ICS Store Manager

The ICS Store Manager gives you a simple GUI interface for configuring your electronic market. Instead of spending hours stacking apples in a store, you can design a store hierarchy with the ICS Store Manager to determine the overall look-and-feel as Web shoppers browse the aisles of your virtual market. You can define sections and sub-sections to divide your different goods into logical groups, just as your friendly grocer does. The idea of the store manager is to let you design an appealing store online.

With the store manager, you also define the product items and their descriptions. You can use this tool to keep a running inventory of each item you have available in your virtual store. (After all, you must deliver the real item from a given physical location.) You can define special taxation rules tailored to the country or state where you do business and set up rules governing the type of payment process for your cybercustomers.

The ICS Persistent Shopping Cart

Users can use the ICS Persistent Shopping Cart to browse the virtual store that you created with the ICS Store Manager. The shopping cart is persistent because for each user who enters your virtual store, the contents they choose are retained by the Oracle database even if they move on to another Web site or get logged off by mistake. When they return, users will find their shopping carts full of the same goods they had when they left.

Product Browsing and Searches with ConText

You can easily integrate the shopping cart with Oracle's new ConText option, which allows you to store detailed descriptions of each item. Shoppers can then search for each item using these descriptions and simple keyword searches.

Customizable User Interface

Oracle ships ICS with many HTML templates, which serve as the basis of your virtual store. You can enhance these documents and add graphics, sound, and a unique look-and-feel as long as you keep the original HTML placeholders in your Web pages. You can change the buttons that lead users around your store to give shoppers a unique experience. Every Oracle ICS store need not look the same. The idea is to make the Oracle ICS back end transparent to the user, and the templates shouldn't be a hindrance to your creative efforts in building the Web pages.

User Preferences

With Oracle ICS, users can specify specific products or sections of the store they want to enter first so they aren't flooded with useless information. For instance, in an online bookstore, a customer might want only books about Buddhism and science fiction . With Oracle ICS, you can make those sections the first they enter. For another shopper, those areas might be in the back of the store.

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Promotions and Discounts

As an Oracle ICS merchant, you can create a set of online coupons for shoppers. You can specify discounts at the item, subsection, or section level of your store. These discounts can run for a given date or time range. When the discount expires , ICS simply removes the discount "tag" from the Web shopper's view.

Customer Accounts

With Oracle ICS, you can issue virtual customer cards to Web shoppers. You could define shoppers with bronze, silver, or gold status and tailor certain Web pages to the type of customer. For instance, a gold customer might see a special discount that other customers cannot see or he might receive additional coupons.

Open Interface

Oracle ICS offers an API (Application Programmer Interface) library for developers to add on or configure the basic product. Even though the default features are robust, you can further configure ICS with other systems or add business-specific rules or features.

A Peek at Some of the Third-Party Internet Commerce Server Cartridges

The Internet Commerce Server from Oracle derives its power from the cartridge. There is no question that you can develop your own electronic commerce application using CGI, HTML, and maybe Java, but the Oracle Internet Commerce Server is more efficient because you can purchase prewritten software that performs the specific business tasks that you need to do business over the Web.

If you determine that coding your own back-end application from scratch is less costly than buying the Internet Commerce Server and the cartridges you require, you might consider starting your own development effort. In most cases, developing software in-house, especially new technology software, is more expensive than expected. The power of the cartridge is that you have off-the-shelf software that you can customize for your own needs.

The following list describes some of the cartridges that you can purchase with the Internet Commerce Server or at a later date. Do not hesitate to purchase from a legitimate third-party business that can support its products. The whole concept behind the cartridge is that a standard software interface allows many software vendors to write code to a specific standard, not just Oracle:

• VeriFone vPOS cartridge: This is a point-of-sale application that allows you to handle credit-card payments over the Internet. Credit-card payments are verified in the same way that retail stores handle credit-card payments.

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• CyberCash CashRegister cartridge: If your business sells small units of inexpensive goods and services, the fee for processing credit cards becomes too high. For instance, if your Web site charges 25 cents for someone to download a research paper, the cost of processing a 25-cent credit-card fee results in a loss for you. The alternative is CyberCash. A person might purchase $20 of "CyberCash" with a credit card and then make small purchases from any vendor who accepts this form of payment.
• StepSearch: This cartridge won Oracle Corporation's contest promoting cartridge development, the Cartridge Fund. With this plug-in, you can create catalogs and generate other publishing documents for the World Wide Web.

Oracle Applications for the Web

Oracle offers software for the Web that, unlike the Internet Commerce Server, includes specific vertical applications that perform a variety of tasks for a specific area of business. What makes these applications different is that they are primarily designed for business-to-business transactions, with standard business mechanisms coded into the Web applications.

If you don't need the flexibility of the Oracle Internet Commerce Server, these off-the-shelf applications that run on the Web are very powerful. What makes them interesting is that they incorporate standard Web tools such as JavaScript, frames , and hypertext links. The three applications offered by Oracle are Oracle Web Customers, Oracle Web Employees , and Oracle Web Suppliers.

Oracle Web Customers

Oracle Web Customers is tailored for your business customer rather than the general public. With this tool, your customers can place sales orders, view your products offered through "catalogs," and use a shopping cart similar to the ICS package. This tool can also interface with Oracle's Order Entry application so your Web customers can confirm their orders.

Users can also view their past orders, shipping records, and invoices. The applications all contain a drill-down capability so your customers can also scrutinize shipping details and invoice line items. This can save your company a great deal of money by eliminating the time that your employees spend with customers to confirm or analyze a transaction.

Oracle Web Employees

Oracle Web Employees equips your employees who need to design, deliver, and manage your product sales cycle. With this tool, employees can browse product catalogs, create requisitions, and submit requisitions to Oracle Purchasing. You can create in-house charge accounts based on your internal business rules and departmental structure.

Oracle Web Employees is ideal for a business that needs to purchase parts to build or assemble a final product, such as a manufacturing firm with a pending order for an airplane engine. With Oracle Web Employees, all the requisitions for the parts to build that engine are online and integrated into the purchasing and receiving functions of a company.

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