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IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite 6.0
Rich Ecommerce Services, Flexible Technologies, and Elegant Integration with External Applications
By Mitchell I. Kramer, July 31, 2008

Many of your customers prefer doing business with you 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.

IBM WebSphere Commerce, introduced in 1996, is IBM’s B2C (and B2B) ecommerce offering. Its current version is 6.0 Feature Pack 3. IBM WebSphere Commerce was and remains one of the leading software offerings for B2C ecommerce. IBM claims that 1,500 customer organizations have implemented the product. You can deploy it on-premise, hosted, or via SaaS subscription.

On the PSGroup Report Card for evaluating B2C ecommerce product and services, IBM WebSphere Commerce earns "exceeds requirement" grades in Web content, customer and product data, integration, and company viability. It needs improvement in search and analytic functionality.

Without qualification, we recommend that you consider IBM WebSphere Commerce as the software to run your B2C ecommerce site. Its packaged services and easily customizable technologies provide excellent support for the activities that your customers want to perform. IBM provides a wealth of samples and examples that simplify and speed your implementation and packages an elegant, Web Services-based approach to integration that supports the complete customer cycle—from finding products to receiving them.

IBM WebSphere Commerce is IBM’s B2C ecommerce software offering. The product was introduced as Net.Commerce Server in 1996. Its current version, which was released in December 2007, is Version 6.0 Feature Pack 3. Across the 12 years that it has been available, IBM claims that more than 1,500 customer organizations have purchased and implemented WebSphere Commerce. We’ve been writing about it since 1998. WebSphere Commerce was and is one of the leading ecommerce applications in functionality, technology, and market penetration across both B2C and B2B implementations in many industry segments.

You can license and deploy WebSphere Commerce in three ways: on-premise via perpetual license from IBM, hosted via perpetual license from IBM, and on demand as Software as a Service (SaaS) via subscription license from IBM’s partners. Most WebSphere Commerce customers have on-premise implementations. IBM began offering WebSphere Commerce SaaS deployment just this year. IBM expects to have eight to twelve SaaS implementations by the end of this year.

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

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

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.