Commerce Server 2007: Value Proposition

I thought I’d update and repost this after reading a short article about the Commerce Server 2007 RC release on InformationWeek’s web site. I was really disturbed by the article and by the author’s apparent attempt to spread rumor and innuendo rather than just report the facts about the new release candidate of Commerce Server 2007. At the same time, I keep reading these rants and raves by MiniMicrosoft about reductions in force, downsizing and cut-backs at Microsoft. So here’s one developer’s opinion with all the facts checked and rechecked!

“What’s the value proposition of Commerce Server 2007? Why not just build your own E-Commerce framework?”

It’s an interesting question and one that deserves a well thought-out answer.

Many people have the (mistaken) impression that Commerce Server is Microsoft’s version of “e-commerce in a box”. Large corporate customers think it’s not “robust” enough for the “Enterprise” and small-to-medium size businesses think it’s way too complicated for the little guys. Over the years, I’ve used Commerce Server (2000, 2002 and now 2007) to build B2B E-Commerce sites for $10 million, $50 Million and $250 million dollar companies. In every instance the basic “requirements” are mostly the same and fall into what I like to call the three basic questions of E-Commerce.

• How does the user find a product? (Catalog System)
  
  
• How does the user order a product? (Order Management System)
  
  
• How does the company fulfill the order? (Integration System)

It’s in these three areas that Commerce Server really shines as an E-Commerce development platform, especially the upcoming release.

The Catalog System
Commerce Server offers one of the most flexible, scalable and robust product catalogs ever imagined. It offers the developer the chance to design extremely flexible catalog, category, sub-category, product and product-variant structures as well as providing unique product search capabilities. In the latest version, the developer can also design inventory handling into his “catalog system”. Building this from scratch while possible, would take hundreds of man-hours and cost thousands of dollars.

The Order Management System
Commerce Server also offers an incredibly powerful “orders” system including the ability to develop multiple shopping carts, wish lists, gift registries and (for us B2B guys) blanket purchase orders. The “pipeline component” architecture used by Commerce Server gives a developer a huge amount of flexibility in processing orders including the ability to split orders into multiple orders with different addresses, payment methods and shipment methods. Again, you could build this from scratch but why spend the time and money.

The Integration System
Developing a product catalog is pretty cool. Easily handling multiple shopping carts is very powerful. Being able to integrate your web-based orders into your back-end ERP system (without hiring a dozen ABAP programmers) is just plain “awesome”! Commerce Server now includes it’s own set of BizTalk Adapters which allow the developer to perform bidirectional integration between the web “front-end” and the ERP “back-end” systems. NO, you could NOT build this from scratch (at least not until WWF ships), even if you had $5 million to spend. Believe me, I’ve tried it and it ain’t pretty.

So why would I recommend buying Commerce Server? It’s pretty simple when you look at dollars and sense. It just doesn’t make sense to spend development dollars to build your own E-Commerce framework when you can buy it from Microsoft at a fraction of the cost!

So why should Microsoft pour it’s time and money into a product like Commerce Server 2007? Well Mini, because there are hundreds of thousands of mid-size companies in the world that need to move their business “on-line” to survive and succeed in the coming years. Because competitive E-Commerce products cost way too much and these costs are preventing companies from moving forward. And because Mini, no company ever shrunk it’s way to success!