The explosive growth of the Business-to-Business (B2B) E-Commerce marketplace is offering a new realm of opportunity for Distributors and Suppliers who are poised to take advantage of it.  Leading technical analysts such as GartnerGroup Inc. project $7.3 trillion of B2B E-Commerce as early as 2004, contrasted with the 1999 figure of $145 billion.

As we move forward in the Information Age, the Internet and E-Commerce will play an ever-increasing role in day-to-day business.  As this occurs, tight integration with existing business systems and processes becomes critical. 

Yesterday's static "brochure-ware" sites did little more than present products and support E-Mail.  Information flow was one-way, and any business conducted had to be manually keyed into the site owner's internal business systems.  A relatively low-level of technical expertise is required to build a static site.

Today's "dynamic" database-driven sites offer product searching, Shopping Cart purchasing & Credit Card payment processing.  While much more interactive, the "dynamic" data provided to the shopper is either not connected at all to the site-owner's business systems (printed and re-keyed, just as the static site's data is), or is connected through a daily (and generally manual) "batch update" process that requires the expense of custom programming on both ends along with the itinerant costs of maintaining the links.  Orders are delayed getting into the site-owner's business systems.  Order status information flowing from the business system back out to the Web E-Commerce system is likewise delayed, and depending on the design of the Web database, often unavailable.  Worse yet, changes made to the order in the business or "back-end" systems rarely flow out to the web.  The problem is that E-Commerce is being treated as a separate system rather than as a piece of the overall business.

The vision of leading E-Commerce vendors is to provide a single, seamless, "end-to-end" solution which combines a client's internal business systems seamlessly with E-Commerce to provide a 100% real-time & consistent view of information throughout the enterprise, regardless of the method used to enter a given transaction.  This is the ideal scenario, but few E-Commerce vendors have the depth of experience or resources to develop and support a comprehensive business management system. 

QCS already has a comprehensive business management software system in place.  Managing catalogs, processing orders, and providing customer service information have been hallmark functions of our systems for many years.  Our approach was to treat E-Commerce as just another front-end to the EZZ Business Management Software.  We simply enhanced the internal database & software that you already use to support E-Commerce. 

We are currently the only supplier of industry-specific software that can place orders directly into Order processing, check stock levels, provide customer service information, and inter-actively change the web-site presentation based on the data contained in the back-end system.

In the following chapters we will step through the process of setting up a basic B2C E-Commerce site for our fictional company "Laurus Professional Promotions" (LPP).