The IBM WebSphere Commerce family offers the following products:

• WebSphere Commerce – Express
• WebSphere Commerce Professional
• WebSphere Commerce Enterprise
• WebSphere Commerce Developer Enterprise
• WebSphere Commerce Developer Professional
• WebSphere Commerce Developer Express

IBM WebSphere Commerce – Express

IBM WebSphere Commerce – Express is an easily installed, affordable, yet complete solution designed to help growing mid-market companies do business on the Web. Jump-start your online presence with the basics then grow with the industry leader as your needs change and grow. WebSphere Commerce – Express can support both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) needs and is:

• Affordable but complete, with “all-in-one” licensing that gives SMB (small- and medium-business) customers everything they need for production, staging and site development at one attractive price.
• Quickly and easily installed, allowing customers or partners to create and start customizing a store site right away with its nimble, fast-loading development tools.
• Ready to go with the capabilities required to get started out-of-the-box, while providing many advanced features to grow into over time.
• Easy to administer, with highly-usable tools that let mid-market customers manage their site effectively without special technical skills.
• Built on open standards, freeing companies from proprietary platform restrictions WebSphere Commerce – Express is designed to support the key platforms required by most mid-market customers, which is a subset of the platforms supported by the overall WebSphere Commerce family. Supported platforms include: Microsoft Windows 2000 or 2003, Linux -Intel (SuSE Linux and RedHat) and IBM System i™ servers.
  

WebSphere Commerce – Express offers the following new and improved features:

• Lightweight development
• Starter stores
• Catalog import utility
• Content
• WebSphere Commerce business process models
• Information center
• Sales catalogs
• Streamlined installation
• Improved business user tools
• Extend e-Marketing Spots to e-mail activity
• Manage e-mail
• Integration reference applications
• Migration wizard
• Payments plug-in controller

IBM WebSphere Commerce Professional

WebSphere Commerce Professional is a solution for sell-side electronic commerce. It helps increase site functionality for B2B businesses and B2C retailers by enhancing customer buying experiences, improving operational efficiencies, and accommodating high transaction volumes by enabling the following:

• Trusted commerce – a total solution from IBM, a vendor you can trust your future to
• Rapid ROI - Provides an easy-to-install, integrated solution with out-of-the-box functionality
• Offers a total commerce process flow that includes merchandising, order processing, fulfillment, payment, customer care, and business analysis
• Includes easy-to-use tools to empower business users to create dynamic marketing campaigns, target market segments, and personalized product promotions
• Supports auctions (open cry, sealed bid, and Dutch bid)
• Online collaboration through Lotus® Sametime® (optional product that can be purchased separately) to improve customer satisfaction
• Meets the needs of an international or culturally diverse customer base with sophisticated multi-cultural enablement and support
• Builds on a reliable, highly secure, scalable foundation that enables around-the-clock availability and global reach
• Leverages Java technology to deliver a flexible, portable and easy-to-maintain solution

Consumer Direct supports commerce transactions involving products, services, or information between businesses and consumers. The business can be a retailer, a manufacturer who sells their goods directly to consumers through their own retail outlet, or any other business that sells goods or provides services directly to consumers. For example, a business that sells to consumers directly through a catalog would be considered a consumer direct business. Organizations that are not traditionally considered businesses, such as governments, can also be considered consumer direct sellers. Governments may provide goods and services directly to citizens (government customers).

WebSphere Commerce Professional offers everything in WebSphere Commerce – Express plus the following new and improved features:

• System installation
• Migration tuning
• Scalable, mission critical platform
• Logging
• Promotions management subsystem
• Workspaces
• WebSphere Commerce Analyzer enhancement
  • E-mail templates
• WebSphere Commerce Accelerator enhancements
  • Product Manager role
  • Merchandising
  • Campaign management
• Consumer direct starter store
• Single datamart database for WebSphere Commerce Analyzer
• IBM Gift Center
• IBM Sales Center
  

 IBM WebSphere Commerce Enterprise

WebSphere Commerce Enterprise builds on the reputation of WebSphere Commerce Professional for dependability, scalability and performance. WebSphere Commerce Enterprise solutions let you deploy a wide variety of value chain initiatives, from a simple online sales channel to a completely integrated, multi-tier demand chain -- all on a single platform.

As a member of the IBM WebSphere software platform for electronic business WebSphere Commerce Enterprise provides a powerful, flexible infrastructure based on a unified platform for running large, high-volume B2B and advanced B2C electronic commerce Web sites for global electronic businesses and through the following additional capabilities:

• Help optimize and automate business processes and interactions potentially resulting in rapid ROI
• Help strengthen and manage business relationships with customers and trading partners
• Support international businesses by leveraging a dynamic global infrastructure
• Help maximize efficiencies in their value chain by rapidly integrating a broad range of internal and external processes and applications
• Manage accounts, contracts, request for quotes and requisition lists
  

IBM WebSphere Commerce Enterprise V6.0 contains the new enterprise capabilities of WebSphere Commerce Professional plus additional capabilities for running large, high-volume B2B (business-to-business) and advanced B2C (business-to-consumer) e-commerce Web sites for your global on demand business. WebSphere Commerce Enterprise provides a single, flexible infrastructure to connect to your customers. By delivering business processes on top of the Business Context Engine, you can reach every customer, with every business model, all in a single infrastructure. WebSphere Commerce Enterprise supports the following direct business models:

• B2B direct supports commerce transactions involving products, services, or information between two businesses or parties. In the B2B direct model, business buyers, resellers, distributors and trading partners are able to purchase directly from the seller. B2B direct also supports multiple sites, where a seller can have many sites aimed at different audiences, including geographic or market segment focused.

And the following indirect business models representing variations of what is referred to as Channel Management:

• A demand chain is composed of the enterprises that sell the goods or services of a business. For example, a demand chain may be composed of buyers who initiate the sales transaction, resellers who sell the goods of a manufacturer, and the manufacturer who creates the goods. Demand chains also support direct sales channels, in which the demand chain owner sells directly to customers or business partners. The demand chain owner may host sites for its channel partners.

A supply chain is composed of the enterprises that provide services to a business. WebSphere Commerce supports supply chains by enabling multiple buyers and suppliers, and allowing them to interact directly or through a private marketplace. A private marketplace provides a forum for suppliers to offer goods or services for sale. Buyers can establish contractual relationships directly with individual suppliers, and they can issue RFQs to selected suppliers.

The extended site business model provides self-provisioning tools that allow the seller to create and administer multiple stores, as well as tools that allow the hosting provider to manage all hosted sites. The hosting provider could be either the manufacturer or a third-party service provider. This technology supports many business models involving multi-party or multi-tier transactions. Extended Sites are easily set up and maintained and scaled. Shoppers or business buyers can access any Extended site directly, and optionally register on that site for shopping. Alternatively, they have the option of browsing the store directory operated by the hosting provider and then transfer to the selected extended site.

WebSphere Commerce Enterprise offers everything in WebSphere Commerce Professional plus the following new and improved features:

• Wizard driven extended site creation
• Business accounts and contracts
• Catalog filtering
• Advanced B2B direct starter store model
• Business models
• Contract enhancement
• Business accounts
• Business policies
• Buyer and Seller collaboration
• Request For Quote (RFQ) and shopping cart

Bundled Products

WebSphere Commerce – Express is now packaged with the following software:

• WebSphere Application Server Express
• DB2 Express
• Payment Rules
  

Both WebSphere Commerce Professional and WebSphere Commerce Enterprise are now packaged with the following software:

• WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment
• DB2 Universal Database
• Payment Rules

IBM WebSphere Commerce Development Environment

All the WebSphere Commerce Developer Editions includes include tools to:

• Create, test and deploy a WC site under the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) provided by Rational® Application Developer (RAD)
• Build and extend Enterprise JavaBeans® (EJBs)

The development environment is still a fully configured workspace for RAD, but with the following enhancements:

• In addition to the classic full test environment, there is also a fully functional lightweight test environment that emulates the WebSphere Commerce production environment but with a greatly reduced memory footprint and start-up time. Code developed in the workspace can be tested in either test environment.
• The development environment is initially configured to work with IBM Cloudscape™ (http://www.ibm.com/software/data/cloudscape/ ), which is included with WebSphere Commerce Developer. However, you can switch to using DB2 Universal Database or Oracle Database, locally or remotely (on Windows), as your development database.
• The initial installation of WebSphere Commerce Developer, which provides a development environment with the lightweight WebSphere Commerce test environment and a Cloudscape development database, has all of the starter store archives prepublished. You can publish additional stores or reset the database to its bootstrap configuration.
• The workspace shows all projects that you can customize. In previous versions the workspace showed all projects.
• If necessary, the development environment can be installed multiple times on the same system.