Open Market Inc. introduced this week
Transact 4, a new release of its e-commerce solution for transaction
processing, order management, and customer service software originally
introduced in 1995.
Transact provides the commercial backbone for some of the highest profile
sites on the Web, including SegaSoft’s Heat.net and Time Inc.’s Pathfinder,
among others. AT&T, France Telecom, West Group, ICOMS, Swiss PTT, and ECNet
are among the companies participating in the Transact 4 beta test program.
“Transact 4 is the culmination of a four-year mission at Open Market to
address the business operations side of Internet commerce with a comprehensive
enterprise application software product,” said Gary Eichhorn, president and
CEO.
Transact offers buyer authentication, payment, order processing, tax and
shipment cost calculation, fulfillment, buyer self-service, customer service,
reporting, profiling, and analysis.
Transact 4 re-engineers, simplifies, and speeds up the Internet commerce order
flow, the company said. It introduces a new screen management framework called
Smart Pages to support improved buyer flow, screen branding, and
multi-language buyer screens (English, French, German, and Japanese
initially, although Transact 4 can support most major languages).
A new payment API enables numerous new payment modules, including prepay and
postpay microtransactions, credit card fraud, switch cards (a payment card
popular in the UK and Europe), and SET.
In addition Transact already supports credit cards, store-branded cards,
debit cards, procurement cards, purchase orders, coupons, and
subscriptions. The software is also configured so that it can support bank
cards, remote billing interfaces, custom purchase orders, frequent buyer
points, smart cards, and other new payment processing
interfaces as they arise.
The fulfillment system in Transact 4 supports sellers handling back-order and
partial fulfillment and partial credit situations.
Additional one-to-one marketing capabilities have been added to Transact 4
through two new features, the company said. First, the fulfillment API has
been improved to allow sellers to access the purchase history of a given
buyer. Second, expanded reporting capabilities enable more sophisticated
personalized marketing.
Transact 4 runs on UNIX platforms, including Sun Solaris, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, and
Stratus, all with support for both Oracle and Sybase databases. Pricing starts
at $125,000 in the U.S.
