Online Sales Channels: Internet Selling Environment


The Internet selling environment includes a hosted online store featuring customer management, advanced selling, shopping cart, and order processing functionality. Although the ECISP builds and hosts the store, clients retain complete control over design elements and merchandising. Consumers see only the client’s brand, content, and merchandise. The ECISP handles everything technical, including site uptime, response time, and the management of customer shopping sessions. The ECISP also handles tax calculation, payment processing, data encryption, order routing, and customer e-mail notification.

The Integration of Business Services and Applications

Integrated business applications and services includes a full suite of tools and services to manage the online channel, including merchandise planning, storefront management, marketing, fulfillment, and customer service. These applications allow clients considerable flexibility. Companies can choose to fulfill orders in one or a combination of ways: in-house warehousing and fulfillment, third-party logistics services using a preintegrated provider, and/or drop shipping using preintegrated vendors. Similarly, clients can perform customer service in-house, or they can outsource this service to a preintegrated call center. In either case, account management and advanced CRM applications support the service representatives. Marketing applications and services include e-mail campaigns and affiliate programs. Storefront management applications include catalog management, pricing and promotions, and content management. And finally, merchandise planning includes optional applications for seasonal planning, demand forecasting, replenishment, and purchase order management.

Business Intelligence Service

Business intelligence service (BIS) includes real-time reports, advanced ad hoc reporting, and financial data feeds to analyze client business performance. In an ECISP environment, clients retain ownership of their data and flexibility as to its usage. Clients receive a combination of direct data feeds (in a format of their choosing) and access to standard reports delivered through an online portal. With an online analytical processing (OLAP) package, reporting capabilities become extremely powerful and flexible in terms of ad hoc design using multiple data sources.

Advisory Service

Advisory services include e-commerce expertise and assistance in merchandising, demand forecasting, marketing, customer service, and logistics. Given their advantaged position in serving dozens of companies simultaneously, ECISPs can leverage a single team of business experts across many clients. Clients benefit from performance benchmarking and best practices gleaned from the entire network. For example, clients can benchmark their performance in customer acquisition, shopping conversion, fulfillment time and accuracy, and staffing levels, all while their ECISP partner recommends changes to move closer to best practice. Rather than reinventing the e-commerce wheel, businesses implement well the first time and receive ongoing help from a partner financially committed to their success.

Infrastructure of Hosted Technology

Hosted technology infrastructure includes world-class e-commerce infrastructure with guaranteed reliability. ECISPs specialize in designing technology platforms built to scale with the highest degree of operational excellence. ECISPs achieve economies of scale by managing a single, multitenant architecture. Rather than operating a separate technology cluster for each client (thereby losing all of the advantages of scale), ECISPs focus on a single platform built with best-of-breed components throughout. Some even issue industry-leading service level agreements covering site uptime, response time, and customer service responsiveness. Clients sleep at night knowing that their sites run on the best hardware and software, all backed by failover redundancy, technology operations experts, and quality of service guarantees. And, they never have to own, build, or manage any technology themselves.




Electronic Commerce (Networking Serie 2003)
Electronic Commerce (Charles River Media Networking/Security)
ISBN: 1584500646
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 260
Authors: Pete Loshin

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