August 16, 1999

Web Makeover For Sales Forces

Mary Kay, Amway unveil big initiatives

By Clinton Wilder

Related links:

Web Commerce Means E-Service

And from our sister publications:

InternetWeek Come Late To The E-Commerce Party, But Don't Come Timidly InternetWeek E-Businesses Reach For Packaged Apps Windows Open for E-business

lectronic commerce is coming, in a big way, to the world of independent sales representatives. Mary Kay Inc. and Amway Corp. are rolling out online ordering applications to their huge independent sales forces.

Mary Kay recently launched Atlas, an online ordering system it plans to deploy to most of its 400,000 sales consultants within two years. The Dallas cosmetics company already takes online orders from the top 10% of its sellers through InTouch, a proprietary client-server application.

"We want any consultant to have access to the Mary Kay world from wherever she is," says S. Kregg Jodie, Mary Kay's senior VP and CIO.

Consultants will be able to develop their own home pages, hosted by the company. Mary Kay is also adding online functionality for consumers, such as a "virtual makeover" feature and referrals to the nearest sales consultant based on ZIP code. But the company is vehemently against using the Web to sell direct. "We'll never, ever go around the consultant," Jodie says.

Mary Kay has a volume discount deal with Gateway Inc. to supply PCs to sales consultants. "This is the biggest thing to happen to this company since the pink Cadillac," executive VP Russell Mack says.

Atlas links to Mary Kay's legacy logistics, distribution, order-processing, inventory, and tax applications, which run on OpenVMS processors. Developed mainly with Microsoft ActiveServer pages, Atlas runs on Microsoft Commerce Server and Windows NT. Mary Kay engaged Predictive Systems Inc. to help give Atlas scalability, fault-tolerance, and security.

Amway plans a Sept. 1 launch of Quixtar, its application to enable online ordering by the 1 million independent business owners who sell its home and health products. Amway has invested $10 million in the project. Some of that money went to multiple DS3 lines to handle Quixtar's projected volumes, says Randy Bancino, senior manager of the Internet business group. Quixtar will run on Microsoft Internet platforms and use IBM's MQSeries middleware to link to Amway's legacy applications and DB2 databases.

Back to This Week's Issue

Send Us Your Feedback

Top of the Page

---