What's in Commerce Server?

Commerce Server 2002 contains five core applications that can be called from ASP or ASP.NET pages:

• A catalog system for listing items for sale.
• A targeting system for creating personalized content and managing marketing campaigns (e.g., e-mail, direct mail).
• A profiling system for collecting and storing data about users.
• A business analytics system for data mining and predictive analysis (e.g., recommending cross-selling opportunities based on a user’s actions). In Commerce Server 2002, most of the advanced analytics functions are only available in the Enterprise Edition.
• Business-processing pipelines, which are customizable frameworks for defining and linking together functions such as order processing, advertising, merchandising, discounting, and cross-selling.

These systems require SQL Server for storing and retrieving data. The profiling system can also be modified through a graphical interface to use any other OLEDB Level 1–compliant database or LDAP v.3-compliant directory service. Among other benefits, this allows organizations to switch an existing e-commerce site to Commerce Server without migrating large amounts of user data to a new database. All the systems share data, so updates to one system are reflected immediately in the others.