Overview

Commerce Server is designed for use by organizations that wish to sell products or services across the Internet. It evolved from the first Microsoft business-to-consumer products called Site Server and Site Server Commerce Edition.

Since these early days, Commerce Server has taken the best features of these original products and updated them to provide a fairly comprehensive product for building, deploying, and managing Web sites to sell goods or services to users (see Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1: Typical Commerce Server based Web site.

Commerce Server comprises five main elements, each of which can be customized or adapted by Commerce Server developers:

1. Product catalogs . The product catalog system is the heart of Commerce Server and is used to store the products and services that are sold on the Web site. Catalogs can be imported or exported in XML or CSV format, and the catalog supports a range of searching capabilities, such as freetext, property, and specification searches. Catalog data can be exchanged between Commerce Servers using BizTalk Server.

2. Profiles. The profiling system in Commerce Server enables organizations or individuals to be profiled and relevant data collected about those visiting your site. Catalog-based information can be customized to suit specific profiles, so, for example, visitors from certain companies are presented with a tailored catalog with goods and pricing to match a prenegotiated deal.

3. Business analytics . Any active Web site is likely to collect huge amounts of data relating to who visited the Web site, which pages they looked at, what...