As business-to-consumer functionality becomes increasingly commoditized within E-commerce software platforms, vendors are turning their attention to the lucrative business-to-business market. In their rush to penetrate a new application space, many--but not all--E-commerce platform vendors have failed to adequately address the features, functions, and back-office connectivity that business-to-business E-commerce applications require.

Doculabs is in the midst of a comparative evaluation of E-commerce platforms. We've already looked at the offerings from Allaire, Blue Martini, IBM (see story, "Much-Needed Scalability Comes To The B-To-B Market"), and Intershop, and will soon be reviewing products from Microsoft, SpaceWorks, and Trilogy. We'll publish a comparative review of all of the products we've evaluated in mid-July.

So far, we've discovered that vendors are extremely interested in focusing on the business-to-business market, but it will take time before they build the right capabilities into their products. Thus, E-commerce platform buyers should be wary of vendors that promise robust out-of-the-box business-to-business capabilities, when they are really trying to retool their business-to-consumer solutions for the B-to-B market. A detailed inspection may disclose partnerships-in-progress, limited back-office connectivity and integration capabilities, and the need for extensive professional services and integration work in order to build a sophisticated business-to-business commerce site.

This isn't to say that the vendors provide inferior technology, because they don't. The systems we've seen are sophisticated, but they're really designed for consumer transactions. There are a number of distinct requirements for business-to-business applications that many vendors have yet to address, including contract management, business-focused personalization, content and application syndication, reporting, back-end connectivity, and bill presentment and payment.

Many of the vendors examined thus far extend their payment and pricing functionality to business-to-consumer borders, but go no further. For pricing, most business-to-consumer solutions don't need to support anything other than spot-sourcing, which gives customers a flat retail price for every item sold.

But in the business world, many trading partners purchase on a direct-sourcing model, in which negotiated terms dictate the price. Factors in pricing may include warranty coverage, volume-based pricing, and carrier or logistics preferences. In addition, many business-to-business trading partners want flexibility for spot purchases, with the ability to negotiate terms in real time or using automated agents acting on their company's behalf.

As for payment, most E-commerce platforms handle payments via third-party payment processors CyberCash Inc. and CyberSource Corp. Few E-commerce platforms support payment methods usually associated with business-to-business transactions, such as letters of credit, purchase orders, or cost-center codes as payment methods.

Business users of a commerce site want the site to recognize them, just as a business-to-consumer site would. But in a business-to-business site, there may be different information about the business customer that must be captured and stored. For example, business customers often need to establish re-ordering or replenishment schedules, and they need to buy according to prenegotiated prices.

Thus, effective business-to-business sites require personalization that manages the complex purchasing preferences of trading partners, which might be suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, or resellers. But most of the E-commerce platforms we've seen incorporate consumer personalization capabilities such as user-defined profile views and personalized E-mail promotions. Implementing the types of personalization needed for business-to-business commerce--such as building personalized offers or agreement terms based on customer-relationship information, including order history, payment records, geographic location, industry, and even customer-service costs--requires heavy programming and a robust rules engine.

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