Commerce Server Blog

Even though Commerce server got released 20 months before, still I am getting many mails from different business users explaining the usage of commerce server and what problems it can resolve. Why can’t we develop a e-commerce site from scratch without using commerce server.

My common answer for these types of questions is

Each aspect of developing, deploying, managing, maintaining, and monitoring e-commerce sites is designed to help maximize security, minimize Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), accelerate time to market, and simplify exchange of data with existing LOB systems and trading partners. You can create e-commerce sites that can support millions of customers and products. By using out-of-the-box functionality of commerce server, you can quickly start interacting with the various systems and processes that help you develop, manage, maintain, and help secure e-commerce web sites.

Here are the few advantages Commerce Server will provide.

• Ready made business tools to configure products, catalogs, virtual catalogs, advertisements, discounts, order tracking, etc.
• Supports service oriented architecture.. 
• Using CS adapter for BizTalk, it can easily integrate with LOB, Partners, etc. 
• Through staging feature, we are first import data into staging server and once confirmed we can import the data in production.
• Profile system can be scalable and can store in SQL Server and/or in active directory.
• CS 2007 is based on .NET 2.0
• Partner software development kit is available.
• CS business Analytics system is available with CS 2007 enterprise edition.

With the new version of commerce server (Mojave), the existing customers need not spend lot of money for software migration.

Commerce Server 2007 was built and tested to support large enterprises and to be deployed in 99.9% availability customer environments. It was tested against the following criteria:

• Top-10 retail-oriented catalog scenarios
• 15+ catalog/virtual catalog mix on live site
• 2,500+ categories/catalog for 37.5 K+ categories live
• 250 K+ products/catalog for 3.75 M+ products live
• 250+ variants/product for 937 M SKUs live
• 600–1,200 campaigns w/2 M coupons active
• 60 M user profiles
• 100,000 orders/day (11-hour peak)
• 10 GB/hour Data Warehouse import
• Deployed w/99.9% availability out of the box
• Hosting support (100 active; 1,000 provisioned)

On top of this, if you add some facts and figures on investments and its returns (sorry I don’t have these details) then it will give full support to your business team to propose this technology for clients/projects.