E-Commerce solution using Microsoft Commerce Server 2009

With the increase of trust towards online transactions, online shopping has becoming the best choice of selling & buying products these days. Not every product needs to sell in an outlet. Enterprises started to sell their products through web as one medium.

To start any E-commerce business, at high level everyone needs to concentrate on two things

1. Product offering:

• This is the most important for the enterprises to provide wide
  variety of products for their customers.
• Quickly reach out to the dynamically changing markets.
• Dynamically change their business model to increase the sales
  of the products
• Concentrate on coming out with new products.
• Compete with the competitors.
• Establish the brand value.

2. IT tools to host website and Process the orderes

• E-Commerce website for selling products
• Catalog management system for managing products and its information.
• Order Management System for processing orders placed on websites.
• Campaign Management System for discounts, coupons, Ads.
• Customer Management System for customer reach.
• Integration with other apps

To reach the market quickly, every big and medium sized E-commerce business needs the above mentioned necessary tools to host the solution and concentrate on the growth of the business.

To develop all these systems it takes more in time and cost. They don’t
want to wait until IT tools are being developed. Enterprises have to hit the markets soon and get successful in their branding, sales and revenues. Instead of reinvent the whole wheel everyone need a ready to use Ecommerce Solution for hosting their business.

Microsoft is providing a solution Commerce Server 2009 as a server product, which contains all necessary & extensible tools, infrastructure for hosting solutions. Microsoft is developing & improving product since 2002. The current version is more matured and flexible in terms of making customizations to it. It’s built over .NET. Every internal system is provided with a managed API for accessing the data and displaying the data.

Basic Management Features

• Catalog management

• Maintaining product Hierarchy, categorizing products in
  categories
• Creating temporary catalogs with Virtual catalogs.
• Catalog & Products creation along with Globalization.
• Maintaining the data to ease for retrieval and searching.
• Product Inventory management is part of it.
• Ability Customizing the information stored on the products, categories by modifying the schema as per the needs.

• Campaign Management

• Easily creation of marketing campaign for marketing team.
• Creating various types of Discounts.
• Creation of coupon codes associated with the discounts.
• Creation of various types ads for external & internal users
• Collecting & Maintaining of information about Impressions and Clicks
• Generating standard reports for the marketing teams
• Publishing of created ads with an approval workflow.
• CSF(Content Selection framework)

• Order management

• Inbuilt Shopping cart for ecommerce web sites.
• Applying the discounts on shopping cart items with discounts
• Collection of credit card details.
• Creation of orders with prober billing & shipping details.

• Profile management

• Maintaining customer information including logging credentials.
• Storing addresses and credit card details.
• Shipping information.

 New Features

• SharePoint integration :
  
  • Ready to use ecommerce Site template for hosting the on to the web.
  • More than 30 inbuilt web parts were given to communicate with information available in Commerce server.
• New Multi Channel Foundation API
  
  • Alternate API for the existing API. This is designed for better retrieval with performance.
  • Channel aware API, so that the same API is used for sending data to different sources like mobile, gaming consoles.
• Better UI Tools
• Information and navigation is improved.
• We can install the tools anywhere in your network.
• Integration to Live ID(optional)
• Integration with LOB made easy with BizTalk and its Adapters.
• Report Analytics with Microsoft BI Platform.
• Better Migration features.
• Improve Security management with Azmen.
• Many more.

Many of the successful Ecommerce websites are hosted with Commerce Server platform. It has been designed for better extensibility, so that you can integrate CS2009 to your line of business application.

Microsoft has been encouraging the use of Commerce Server product by providing the Virtual PC with complete installation of all the required software. Please download and evaluate. There are many third party software which offers Ecommerce solutions, But Microsoft as a platform has all the required tools & technologies to support your Ecommerce Solution.