E-Commerce Impact

Companies are finding new ways for Web technology to expand their businesses

By Richard Adhikari

Trump Casino Services plans to teach visitors to its Web site how to play casino games. But it's not doing this for fun. The games are part of a lead-generation application to help the Atlantic City, N.J., casino increase its customer base.
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Lead generation is just one of many ways companies are exploiting the expanding repertoire of E-commerce technology. Companies are using E-commerce tools to globalize operations, offer personalized customer service, manage sales and support, even create new business. Meanwhile, the technology continues to evolve rapidly. New applications using the emerging Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard are providing users with added capabilities such as information retrieval on a scale not possible before.

Trump Casino plans to use its Web application to take hotel reservations, sell tickets, and market merchandise. By year's end, Trump will have in place a Java-based analysis tool from InterWorld Corp., called InterWorld Business Analyzer. It will be customized to collect information as visitors play on the Web site. Trump will find out how long they remain online, the amount of time they spend playing games, which games they prefer, their ability level, and other details. "We're very heavily database-oriented, and this will create a sophisticated marketing machine," executive VP Robert Pickus says.
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American Airlines' AAdvantage frequent flier program is the world's largest, with 32 million members, multiple tiers of membership, and many ways of earning frequent flier points, says John Samuel, director of American's interactive marketing group in Fort Worth, Texas. Personalizing customer service on the company's frequent flier Web site has improved the level of service to customers by offering information based on a user's profile. "We'll give you information about offers, travel-related news, information about American Airlines schedules, new flights, and so on," Samuel says. If, for example, there's construction at an airport, members living in nearby cities will be told about it and asked to allow extra time for travel.

American is using BroadVision One-to-One from BroadVision Inc. BroadVision One-To-One supports large user and content databases, high transaction volumes, intelligent agent matching, and easy integration with existing business systems. BroadVision leverages American's Sabre computer reservations system and databases to dynamically create personalized content for users.
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Samuel plans to extend the personalized service. "We're moving from the technical challenge of being able to do it to the operational and business challenges," he says.

E-commerce technology can help erase the traditional boundaries of time and space. When General Nutrition Cos., a Pittsburgh maker of nutrition supplements and health products, expanded globally, distance and time-zone differences slowed the order and fulfillment process. The company's 200 overseas franchisees, for example, waited several hours just to get questions answered.

CIO Tom Smith decided to use E-commerce technology to let the company's 2,500 franchisees find out whether products were available, reserve them, or look at alternatives, all in real time. He also wanted to let franchisees customize product listings, so they wouldn't get lists with products they couldn't sell or in a format different from their own. The solution also had to tie into the existing IBM DB2 database on General Nutrition's mainframe.

After evaluating several proposals, Smith selected the Signal SegWay Suite from Signal Internet Technologies Inc. The product suite links the enterprise with its distribution channel through the Internet. It can be tailored to users' business rules and can be integrated into legacy mainframe and client-server applications so disparate systems can use and exchange data in real time. The vendor created a link to GNC's DB2 database and agreed to run the application for a year, until Smith's staff learned to maintain it.
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The resulting Worldwide Product Ordering System has paid off for GNC: "Real-time response gave us higher ship rates, a more satisfied customer base, and slightly larger orders," Smith says. "And franchisees in Asia, where there's a 12-hour time differential, can deal with us according to their working hours."