InformationWeek

January 25, 1999

Outsourcing: A Web Site Option

Vendors offer services such as payment processing and shipping.

By Justin Hibbard

ne way to take some of the pressure off a busy Web site is to outsource some of the back-end functions. A growing number of vendors are offering such services, including payment processing and shipping.

Eliance Corp. last week introduced eSourcing, a service for processing credit-card payments. The company's system-a farm of Compaq ProLiant servers connected to multiple T1 lines-can process as many as 200 transactions per second. "Our goal is 99.98% up-time for all of our merchants," Eliance CEO Robert Griggs says. The system is linked to banks and credit-card processing centers. Eliance takes a percentage of successful sales transactions only; it doesn't collect on returns or chargebacks.

Next month, iShip.com Inc. will launch a service that lets Internet merchants link their ordering systems to iShip.com's hosted shipping system. The service, called iShip, will dynamically price packages based on customers' ZIP codes and let merchants compare rates across multiple carriers, such as Airborne Express, Federal Express, and UPS. Setup is free, and iShip.com will charge 50 cents for each shipment it processes. Initially, iShip.com will focus on low-volume merchants, but the company plans to offer a service for busier Web stores in the near future.

Vendors already offering E-commerce payment processing include CyberCash, CyberSource, and Clear Commerce. Buy.com Inc., an Internet retailer, says it used CyberSource's service without a glitch over the recent holiday season, during which Buy.com's sales grew 500%. Managers at the retailer now swear by outsourcing. Says Murray Williams, a VP at Buy.com, "It takes a whole variable out of the equation that otherwise we would have to stay up night and day to monitor."

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