E-Commerce App Lets Businesses Create A Unified ViewE-Commerce App Lets Businesses Create A Unified View

E-commerce software company Intershop Communications Inc. late last month introduced software designed to help companies with multiple Web sites centrally update and maintain them consistently across different business units.

Enfinity MultiSite will help online companies provide a single view of their entire business, tying more closely together the Web sites for their different stores or brands. That could lead not only to access to a greater selection of merchandise, but also to online shopping integrated with existing stores. For example, Web promotions can increase foot traffic in brick-and-mortar shops, says Kent Allen, Aberdeen Group's research director.

"The customer-relationship management people are preoccupied with the unified view of the customer; they forget that the customer wants the same thing of the enterprise. It's returning the favor to the customer," Allen says. The majority of Intershop customers, which include Time-Life, car-stereo maker Blaupunkt, and Otto Versand, the world's largest mail-order company, are European. Intershop, based in Hamburg, Germany, also has a sales office in San Francisco.

Otto Versand, which owns a majority stake in Crate & Barrel, controls Spiegel Inc., and sells merchandise in more than 20 countries, is considering using Enfinity MultiSite to centrally manage online content and business rules, says Laura Mylls, Intershop's VP of marketing and services, Americas. With Enfinity MultiSite, Otto Versand could share promotions, simultaneously change the photograph of a product, and conduct more integrated customer profiling or segmentation for its personalization campaigns across its different Web sites, Mylls says.

Businesses can also use the software to compile a merchandise catalog for the company and then distribute subsets of the catalog to specific business units, for example, or support diverse business models, such as a business-to-consumer site.

"The more serious an organization is, the more likely it will want to experiment and have different parts of the organization selling to different people in different ways,'' says Carol Baroudi, president of the Baroudi Group, a consulting firm. "There's clearly a business need for this."