Community site GeoCities Friday said it will revamp
its GeoShops online storefront utility, and signed an agreement with IT
firm InterWorld Corp. to develop a
new e-commerce infrastructure.
GeoShops provides tools for GeoCities members to create and maintain an
online retail site. InterWorld specializes in providing enterprise-class
Internet commerce software for sales, order management, fulfillment and
customer service.
GeoCities will license and integrate InterWorld’s infrastructure to update
its GeoShops site. InterWorld will also be featured on the co-branded
GeoStore channel, which sells software, hardware, logo merchandise and
publishing products.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
GeoCities first launched GeoShops in March 1998, originally powered by
Internet Commerce Services Corp. The company chose to update the utility
using InterWorld’s services because of its scalable infrastructure,
according to Alan Andreini, president and CEO of InterWorld.
“Our Internet commerce solution is designed to scale to meet the
requirements of global organizations, such as GeoCities, as well as provide
the flexibility to change as their business evolves,” said Andreini.
“This new technology will allow us to leverage the tremendous amount of
traffic that we have at GeoCities for conducting commerce on our site,”
added Thomas R. Evans, GeoCities’ president and chief executive officer.
“We are making this growth market easily accessible and affordable to the
average merchant to set up and sell products, goods and services over the
Internet.”
