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.
*Endnotes*
1) http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/pr03-13-08cc
*Endnotes*