NETTING IT OUT

Many of your customers prefer doing business with online. They go to your Web sites to learn about your products and services, to find products and/or services that address their needs, to configure and price the products and/or service s that they’d like to buy, and to purchase those products and/or services. They also set up and manage accounts with you. When those customers are consumers, we call these activities B2C (business to consumer) ecommerce.

ATG Commerce Suite is ATG’s primary B2C ecommerce offering. The package includes the services and configurable and customizable technologies that support your customers’ B2C ecommerce activities, tools for marketing and merchandising, and a data warehousing system for analyzing customer, marketing, and merchandising activities.

ATG was and is one of the leading software suppliers for B2C ecommerce. ATG claims that approximately 600 customer organizations accounts have implemented its products, many of the largest and best-known retailers among them.

On the PSGroup Report Card for evaluating B2C ecommerce product and services, ATG Commerce Suite exceeds our requirements in search, personalization, integration, support for explore and select activities, and analytic functionality. We grade it as needing improvement in Web content management and product viability.

If you are a large organization with a significant budget and a hearty appetite for customization, then we recommend that you consider ATG Commerce Suite as the software to run your B2C ecommerce site. Its packaged services and flexible technologies provide excellent support for the activities that your customers want to perform, especially their activities to find and learn about the products that they’d like to buy—the core operational functionality of ecommerce.

ATG COMMERCE MC EDITION

An Ecommerce Market Leader Since 1997

ATG Commerce Suite is ATG’s primary B2C ecommerce software offering. This product package was introduced as Dynamo 3 Commerce Server in 1997. Its current version, which was released in June 2007, is 2007. ^[1] In the 11 years that it has been available, ATG claims that more than 600 customer organizations have purchased and implemented “Commerce.” We’ve been writing about it since 1998. Commerce was is one of the leading ecommerce applications in functionality and market penetration, especially so in online retailing where many of the most well known brands use Commerce for their online stores.

ATG Commerce Suite is a package of infrastructure, and applications. The infrastructure is the ATG Platform, which provides a foundation of data, content, and services for the applications. The ATG Platform deploys on top of the leading J2EE Web application servers. Commerce Suite’s applications and the capabilities that they provide are:

• ATG Commerce provides the packaged services and the configurable and customizable technologies that support your customers’ activities to find and learn about your products and services, to purchase your products and services, and to manage their accounts and orders with you. In other words, ATG Commerce provides the operational functionality of ecommerce.
• ATG Search applies ATG’s premium search engine against the content of ecommerce catalogs to help customers find your products.
• ATG Customer Intelligence is a complete data warehousing system for measuring, analyzing, and refining operational ecommerce functionality.
• ATG Merchandising provides tools to let merchandisers create and deliver up-sells, cross-sells, substitutions, and promotions.
• ATG Campaign Optimization provides the tools to let you perform A/B testing of content and offers.
• ATG Outreach provides the tools to develop marketing campaigns across Web and email channels and to deliver email notifications to customers.
• ATG Content Administration provides facilities and tools that let business users manage content. The product does not include content creation facilities.

ATG also offers a set of add-on applications that have capabilities to extend and complement the capabilities of Commerce Suite. Key among these is ATG Commerce Service Center and e-Commerce Optimization Services. ATG Commerce Service Center (CSC) lets your agents deliver assisted-service for ecommerce. See our product review of CSC.1 ATG’s e-Commerce Optimization Services are Click to Call and Click to Chat, both of which provide mechanisms, obvious by their names, to let customers escalate to assisted-service. Also included in ATG’s e-Commerce Optimization Services is the ATG Recommendations Service, which provides personalization capabilities based on predictive analytics, complementing the rules based and process- and context-based personalization of ATG Commerce. Note that e-Commerce Optimization Services came to ATG through the acquisition of eStara. ATG is in the process of rebranding these offerings.

ATG also offers products that support customer activities in their install and use lifecycle phases, helping customers get answers to questions and to diagnose and resolve problems. These products are ATG Self-Service and ATG Knowledge.

ATG offers perpetual and subscription licenses for Commerce Suite. You may deploy perpetually licensed products in your site or have ATG host them for you for a monthly fee. For “competitive reasons,” ATG keeps pricing details confidential. The firm did tells us that, for perpetual license deals, the entry software license fees for the ATG Commerce Starter Pack is $150k, and the typical price is $600k. You’ve told us that ATG offers customer-specific “deals” for its products and services.

EVALUATING ATG COMMERCE

In this report we evaluate ATG Consumer Commerce against our framework for B2C ecommerce. The framework has evaluation criteria for the following:

• Operational functionality, which combines the technologies that you customize, configure, and implement and the packaged software services that support customers’ activities and your delivery of a branded ecommerce experience.
• Analytic functionality, which provides the capabilities to measure, analyze, and refine your ecommerce experience.
• Architecture, the ecommerce software’s supported environments and some detail about its deployment options.
• Product viability, the factors for assessing the business risk in acquiring the ecommerce offering.
• Company viability, the factors for assessing the business risk in doing business with the ecommerce supplier.

We show these top level valuation criteria and their sub criteria in Illustration 1.

B2C Ecommerce Evaluation Framework

© 2008 Patricia Seybold Group, Inc.

Illustration 1. This illustration shows the evaluation criteria and sub-criteria of the PSGroup B2C Ecommerce Evaluation Framework.

The Customers.com Perspective

B2C ecommerce systems are sometimes described as your online marketing and sales applications. That’s not our perspective. We’re the customers.com company. We always have a customer perspective. We believe that if you make it easy for your customers to do business with you… they will! The measures of all of the systems of your customer experience should be customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability.

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