Usability of Microsoft bCentrals Commerce Manager

Microsoft bCentral?s Commerce Manager is a very comprehensive and cost effective e-commerce tool for small businesses. However, it requires some customization to improve its usability for customers. Microsoft could also improve e-commerce usability and the overall value of Commerce Manager by providing templates that address usability issues. This has been done with ?Privacy? in the existing package.

We use Commerce Manager in our business at Millennial Living to offer a variety of services. We selected Commerce Manager, because it enabled us to create a single catalog of products and services and to track and manage online orders.

We?re also able to place our catalog of offerings on our own website as well as MSN Marketplace, bCentral MarketPlace and eBay. The cost of the service is about $249 a year or you can do month to month. There is no software to install and one doesn?t even need a website to use it in order to sell products online.

Because of a 2000 Holiday Report by Mark Hurst and Jacob Nielsen work?s work on E-Commerce Usability, we customized certain aspects of the catalog and product lists and templates of Commerce Manager. We did this to address usability concerns that our customers might have in making online purchases.

The changes included creating separate web pages addressing: security, privacy, guarantees, delivery times, payment, and shipping (here's an example). We also customized the Commerce Manager heading so that those pages corresponded with the headers of our website. We then added a Truste and Verisign images in the footer of Commerce Manager template to establish our company as creditable and trustworthy. The latter was done because users are taken to a bCentral?s server and might need some assurance that they were still dealing with us.

Because we are marketing services, we recognized that our prospective clients would need to be educated about various aspects of usability or e-government before they would make a purchase or call us. We added hyperlinks in our product listings to our usability and e-government resources to facilitate that. This is very important if users find your products and services via the two market places or eBay.

The Commerce Manager interface has evolved over time and has gotten better. Changing a product offering was somewhat difficult if you want to add some html code. The recent release makes this a breeze. It contains a feature that allows one to modify multiple products and upload them all at once. This is a great time saver.

One of our concerns is how products or services actually display when placed in MSN Market Place and bCentral Market Place. Each of these online market places renders your product or service pages differently. For example, if you created some hyperlinks in the Commerce Manager they would be underlined in MSN Market Place, but not in the bCentral Market Place. In the latter, users would not know that a link was there unless they placed their cursor on the word. We compensated for this by inserting code to bold our links so they are visible in any marketplace. We haven?t placed our services in eBay yet, but expect our pages to render different there as well.

Commerce Manager has made some great usability strides with respect to its Shopping Cart. Now the cart shows shipping costs at the beginning of the order. Users can also leave a note and check a box if they wish the purchase to be a gift. Another feature that we like is that a user can pay via major credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Discover), check, money order or Paypal. Few e-commerce packages offer all of these payment schemes.

Once an order is placed, Commerce Manager also sends an automatic response to the customer and an email to the merchant that an order has been replaced. The email to the customer allows them to track the status of the order.

There are tradeoffs with any technology offering to small business. Given what Commerce Manager does and its price, we will stick with it. The one thing that would make us rethink our position is if we established an affiliate program. Some of the affiliate programs we investigated don?t automatically work with Commerce Manager. This should be fixed. (Bil, are you listening?)

Finally, here?s our usability wish list for Commerce Manager. We?d like Microsoft to:

1) Encourage or require common usability practices on all of the marketplaces so that products render the same on each one (e.g. hyperlinks are all underlined), especially on those it owns;

2) Create tips within the Commerce Manager setup that offer suggestions to improve trustworthiness (e.g. Truste, Verisign, BBBonline seals), just as it did with the ?Privacy Statement;?

3) Ditto for addressing security, privacy, guarantees, delivery times and shipping. If Commerce Manager wants to offer itself as a complete package this would really help. Microsoft can provide templates on the shopping cart or catalog pages to facilitate this; and

4) Improve the online help. There is not a lot of detail online and hardly anything available offline. Also beef up the online help section with advanced topics.

In closing, Commerce Manager provides a lot for the price and is on the right road with respect to usability. It warrants a good look for those considering an e-commerce package for products and services on multiple market places and for those who don?t have a web site.

Please let us know what you think by commenting or by contacting us.

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Comments

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Anyone know where I can find more information?

[Tom Russo]

Yes. Go to http://www.becentral.com and click on Commerce Manager. Lots of information and pricing. Feel free to also call or email me to discuss how u will use it. good luck with your site.