January 26, 1998 Office Depo t Goes Online Sales channel added for small customers By Clinton Wilder ost large companies launched a public Web site long before doing full-scale business-to-business commerce on the Web. Office Depot did just the opposite. The Jan. 16 launch of Office Depot Online ( www.officedepot.com ) represents the latest effort in the world's largest office products retailer's two-year strategy to create online sales channels for two different types of customers. Despite the hype about online retail shopping that began three to four years ago, Office Depot says most of its small-business, home-office, and individual consumers weren't ready to buy on the Web until now. "When we first looked at the Web in January 1996, it was a much more difficult proposition to sell to the public, but not to certain large customers," says Paul Gaffney, senior VP of systems development at Office Depot, in Delray Beach, Fla. "So we addressed a product to a market that was ready for it." In 1996, Office Depot ran one of the first pilot projects for office supplies procurement on the Web. Working with American Express and Florida integrator Systems Consulting Group (later acquired by Cambridge Technology Partners), Office Depot set up a secure private Web site for buyers from MIT. The site was successful on two counts. Office Depot opened it to most of the contract customers of its $2 billion business services division, and the retailer's online business customers now number several hundred, including Motorola, MCI, and several other universities. The MIT project also became the basis for the Amex-led Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) set of standards for corporate Web-based procurement proposed last year; Office Depot was a member o f the Internet Purchasing Roundtable that helped develop the standards. Office Depot doesn't break out its Web sales to businesses, but Gaffney says its online capability has helped it win contracts. To support the business-to-business Web site, Office Depot wrote a customer order-management system in Cobol and RPG to run on its IBM AS/400 and connect to the Web via messaging middleware written in C. When the company decided to open a consumer channel in cyberspace, it knew that interface and online support issues created a different ball game, so the company hired San Francisco Web-site design firm Studio Verso. It also located the Office Depot Online unit in San Francisco for better access to Web design talent. Office Depot Online uses Microsoft Site Server as its commerce engine, and Gaffney says the site will be fully OBI-compliant when it moves to the next version of Site Server, due later this year. "We expect large businesses to adopt OBI first," he says, "but if it ever goes mass-market, we'll be ready." Back to News in Review Send Us Your Feedback Top of the Page

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