Mercantec unveils e-commerce suite geared to ISPs

(Telephony) Mercantec introduced at last week’s ISPCON Spring 2001 in Baltimore its Power Commerce™ suite of software products designed to give Internet service providers (ISPs) the opportunity to market e-commerce solutions to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB).

Scheduled for a June 2001 release, Power Commerce is integrated with a host of e-marketing tools developed by CommerceTone, which Mercantec recently acquired. This acquisition was announced at ISPCON.

Power Commerce consists of a Web-building tool that allows users to create sites with an unlimited amount of pages. The tool resides on the server, eliminating the need to download programs.

The software suite also provides a retail feature that provides everything from catalog maintenance to back-office management, as well as a built-in scheduling and calendar tool and “one-click” modules that add increased functionality--such as credit card payment options--to an existing site.

While the various features may be attractive, Jim Mitchel, Mercantec’s vice president of marketing, believes Power Commerce’s modularity and flexibility will be attractive to ISPs.

“It’s a hosted application that can run anywhere on a shared server all the way up to a dedicated server,” Mitchel said. “It’s targeted to small and medium businesses, but given the modular underlying architecture of the product and the scalability of it, … it can serve even a much bigger market than the SMB space.”

“It’s designed to be incredibly flexible. The market is a lot different than it was six months ago, and certainly, what people are going to need six months from now is going to be different than what they need today.”

Mitchel said ISPs would welcome the revenue-producing and churn-reducing opportunities that Power Commerce provides.

“We’ve found that ISPs are interested in two things: increasing ARPU and reducing churn,” he said. “We’re dealing with both of those issues by giving them a product that allows them to add more users more easily, because the products are tailored to their needs, and provides easy accessibility to incremental functionality, so they can raise the average revenue per user on a monthly basis.”

By “incremental functionality,” Mitchel means the ability of Power Commerce to grow with its user base.

“The complaint that we’ve heard over the years is, ‘Once I’ve built my Web presence, when I want to add functionality, I have to throw the whole thing away and start all over again,’” he explained. “This product provides an easy migration path to advanced functionality.”

Once a Web presence is established, that’s where CommerceTone’s e-marketing products come into play. Among the tools that are provided by the suite are:

· An integrated e-marketing campaign manager;

· A “top 100” search-engine registration;

· Visitors, hits, orders and sales tracking functions;

· Market segmentation reporting;

· Customer and order profiling; and

· Targeted customer (CRM) e-mail.

The various reporting mechanisms provided by the e-marketing suite are critical to the effectiveness of the overall Power Commerce package, said Mitchel.

“If I put up a Web site, and I don’t get any feedback mechanism to know what’s working for me, why would I ever upgrade to anything?” he said. “So we needed to make sure that was built into it. It really provides them with a tool to make their current users happy, and bring in more users-and more revenue--for their business.”

By integrating an e-marketing component into the Power Commerce e-commerce suite, Mitchel believes Mercantec is helping ISPs—and their customers—eliminate the guesswork that often accompanies choosing an application.

“It’s an integrated package. If you look at what’s gone on in the marketplace, there’s a tremendous amount of noise out there, there’s a lot of confusion on a merchant level on what does what, and when they start looking into it, it all starts to sound the same,” he explained. “So, if they can go to a provider that they trust and they can get everything they need at the point that they need it, … we believe that’s what’s going to make the whole system work.”