Tips for E-Commerce Solution Shopping

According to Morayea Pindziak, international marketing manager at Vista International, which provides solutions for global publishers to small, independent operations, “Publishers should look for a solution that makes their data accessible and effectively links across different product lines, offers cost-effective integration with their current systems and increases the value of their applications by having reusable functionality. ...”

Some publishers believe the volume of online business they do doesn’t justify an online solution, but experts disagree. “It doesn’t take nearly the volume that you would think in order to justify implementing a Web-enabled fulfillment system,” says Fenimore.

She says that every publisher needs to do the math to see at what point it can justify ridding its company of manual processing and automatically process the transactions.

Also important is taking the time up front to research the best product for your company’s short- and long-term goals.

“Moving to a new solution is always resource-intensive,” says Robert Coon, president of Dydacomp, a provider of business solutions for publishing. “Even if the solution itself was free, the energy spent from evaluation to implementation is … [costly]. Therefore, a solution should also be scalable enough to hold you over for a minimum of five years’ anticipated growth.”

According to Coon, if you select a lightweight solution, it should offer upgrade paths so you have options down the road.

“Many publishing systems offered for sale today were built back in the ’70s before Windows and the Internet,” says Gregory Beck, vice president of sales at IPRO Business Systems. “Make sure the system can take in the Web-order information automatically and create an order without manual re-entry from an
e-mail.”

Some leading
e-commerce solutions on the market:

Datasystem Solutions Inc.

Product: Multi-Pub

Description: Datasystem’s Multi-Pub modulated business management solution offers an e-commerce module, called e-sync, for connecting Web sites to fulfillment systems, and for automating ordering, cancellations, expires, etc.