• Electronic catalogs
• Our three-tiered administrative approach
• The why of open-source ecommerce (a few intriguing case-studies)

Interchange is a software package that is designed to help you conduct business efficiently on the Internet. It's a tool that has the potential to dramatically increase your productivity, and to make your life significantly easier. Interchange accomplishes this in several ways:

Interchange is a holistic system. It combines site and content management with inventory and product management, to provide an integrated solution. That means Interchange can automate a lot of the hard, repetitive tasks that plague static web sites. An example: with Interchange, change a price once, and it's changed on every page that it needs to be changed on.

Interchange divides up the work of Internet commerce into several spheres of influence or ``tiers,'' each of which can be administered by the person most capable of handling it. Technical staff, site designers, and product managers all play different roles in a successful ecommerce site; Interchange honors those roles and doesn't try to make people do things they don't want to do. The database administrator, for example, doesn't have to worry about the graphic design, and the graphic designer doesn't have to worry about product merchandising.

Interchange is licensed so that it can meet your business needs. We recognize that there just isn't a single packaged application that can possibly solve all the problems of the business world. There's simply no such thing as an ecommerce panacea. That's why we decided to open-source our system -- so that you can modify it to suit your needs. Need to integrate with a legacy point-of-sale system? You don't need to wait for us to do it; you've got the code, you can do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you. Want Interchange to talk to your customer database? You can do it. Traditional closed-source applications just don't let you do that on your own time frame.

Interchange has been built on open technologies and industry standard systems. We use standard SQL databases, standard web servers, and the de facto standard Internet programming language, Perl. It's all designed to take advantage of your existing technology infrastructure and staff expertise. Why reinvent the wheel?

Interchange is server-side software, with a web-based interface that allows you to administer all aspects of Interchange. You don't have to worry about installing client applications at multiple points across a heterogenous network, or worry about upgrading modules on different machines. All you need is a browser. On vacation in Hawaii, and need to make an emergency change to your site? No problem. Just dial in to your favorite ISP, fire up your browser, and change it. Using the web as an interface means your site is always available, no matter where you are, or what sort of client machine you have.

Electronic catalogs

Interchange is designed for businesses that need to use the Internet to interface with their customers. It can be used for either business-to-business or business-to-consumer sites.

There are two different sides to an ecommerce system. There is the ``storefront,'' which is the part that the user sees and interacts with, and there is the ``back end,'' where the administrators process orders and execute transactions. Interchange can be classified as ``storefront building software.'' That means that it deals with the visible aspects of your store -- like your shopping cart, your site layout, etc. It also provides some transaction capabilities, and can integrate with other transaction systems to expand its capabilities. For example, Interchange interfaces with the Cybercash system (among others) to do real-time credit card processing.

Electronic catalogs are what Interchange is designed for. Because of the combination of site design and product management, it's easy to transfer your existing paper catalogs to the net. Your customers can browse online and order online. Then, once the orders have been captured, you can download them, and process them just like you would have if they had come in over the phone.

You can even use some of Interchange's features to implement a sophisticated content-management system. In fact, we've used Interchange itself to manage the developer resource site you're using right now. The way the page, group and item structure has been integrated with our template system lends itself to infinite variety and functionality. You can pretty much implement a system at whatever level of complexity your heart desires, with a minimum of effort.

Our three-tiered administrative approach

We've mentioned the three ``spheres of influence'' that should be present in any e-commerce implementation. While it is possible that the same person may fulfill more than one of these roles, it's more common to have each sphere administered by the person who is most qualified to administer it. We've designed the software so that everyone gets to do what they do best.

The first person involved in any e-commerce system is the technical implementor. This is a guy that designs and implements the technological framework for your system. He asks questions like:

        What sort of database do we need? 
        What sort of traffic are we expecting? 
        What kind of CPU power are we going to need? 
        What will our bandwidth requirements be? 
        How are we going to integrate our web system with our call center?

Then he goes ahead and answers them, and sets it all up. He's probably going to be your system administrator as well. He'll have a continuing role in the maintenance and scaling of the system. But this guy doesn't know anything about site design. He doesn't want to worry about the graphics or the HTML that the site is using. And he doesn't care about which products are in season, or which are on sale. In some systems, every time a site designer needs to make a change to the look and feel of a site, he has to talk to the technical implementor. We think that is ludicrous.

The next person to step in is the site designer. This is your graphic artist and HTML designer. (You may even want to split design and HTML work into two jobs.) This person decides on a look and feel for the site. She may ask:

        What are the graphics going to look like? 
        How is the site going to flow? 
        What kind of image are we projecting? 
        How is our web site going to correlate with other advertising initiatives?

She needs to know HTML and killer graphic design. But she doesn't need to know anything about databases or servers. She doesn't want to have to hand her design over to a techie to be implemented. She wants to do it herself, and get instant feedback on what works and what doesn't. She wants to create the new site, load it into the system, and then sit back and marvel at her creation. Similarly, she doesn't want to be bothered every time someone needs to add aproduct or fix a typo. She wants them to be able to do it themselves, but she doesn't want them fiddling with her design.

Then there's the store administrator. This is the guy that's going to be responsible for the day-to-day operations of the site. He's the man that's going to add new products, change prices, update the shipping policies page, and manage the incoming orders. He asks:

        When should something go on sale? 
        When has a product been discontinued? 
        When is an item out of stock? 
        Where is this customer's order? 
        What are our return policies?

He doesn't want to have to wake up the site designer every time he needs to change a content page. He doesn't want to have to talk to the tech guys to remove a product from the system. He wants to have control over the site's data, and doesn't want to have to get involved if the site design changes, and doesn't care if a disk drive is filling up.

The why of open-source ecommerce (a few intriguing case-studies)

Why should you consider an open-source solution? Because no packaged application can possibly be flexible enough to encompass all of the various needs of the business world. Commerce is much more than a shopping cart, and it's much more diverse than the little molds some people try to squeeze it into. Packaged applications are either ultra-specialized (meaning that few people can use them), or ultra-generalized (meaning that few people can have their individual needs met). By developing a generalized open-source e-commerce system, we can offer all the advantages that the all-encompassing packages provide, while leaving the door open to allow you make the modifications you need to meet your specific needs.

As an example, one of our clients a few months ago was using a packaged e-commerce application. They were very happy with it in general -- it was small, stable, and provided a good level of functionality. As their business grew, however, they found that they desperately needed a customized discounting system. Our client tried talking to the company that produced their system, but they were told it would be months before the production schedule would allow them to implement the requested feature. They reluctantly decided to ``upgrade'' to a package costing twenty times more than they had paid for the first system, that provided far too many features that they simply didn't need. The new software proved to be buggy and unreliable, and the cost of the project grew astronomically. Our client had an extremely competent IT staff; had they simply been able to modify the software a little bit, they could have continued with their original software choice, and saved buckets of money.

The problem is not unique to that particular company. A recent study found that the average cost of an e-commerce implementation for major sites is $1,000,000. Of that money, $100,000 is used to purchase hardware, $100,000 is used for software, and $800,000 is used for custom programming. The problem is that everyone is re-inventing the wheel, and writing reams of code that someone else has probably already written before.

Another survey suggests that the vast majority of Internet commerce sites are custom-built, not made with pre-packaged software. The packaged application market leader, ShopSite, accounts for roughtly 10,000 of all sites. (Akopia's development staff designed ShopSite in 1995, then went on to build Interchange after its acquisition.) Other major packages account for maybe another 15,000. The rest of the tens or hundreds of thousands of ecommerce sites are custom-built.

What people really need is software that allows them to have complete control over what the software does, and how it does it. For a long time, writing your own software was the only way to accomplish that. With Interchange, Akopia is raising the bar to entry. There just isn't a reason to start from scratch anymore. We invite people everywhere to download our software, take it for a spin, modify it, and make loads of money with it.

Want to learn a little more about the economic rationale behind open-source? Eric S. Raymond has written an excellent article called ``The Magic Cauldron.'' It's highly recommended reading for anyone with questions about open-source as a viable economic model.