Retail and Hospitality

E-commerce with retail brain

8 May 2008

Web retailer IT247.com is mounting a serious challenge to some large established players with an integrated e-commerce platform driven by Intoscape from Total Commerce Management (TCM).

IT247.com realised that it had to deliver a very different business model, which could still compete with aggressive price points, but do so from a lower operational cost base, without sacrificing customer services and the overall customer experience.

Intoscape supports this new model by providing what TCM claims are a number of industry firsts. These include the ability to actively gather comparative information from an unlimited number of competitors and to offer fully automated analysis of price elasticity for maximum margins. It also has a procurement engine and a content management system.

TCM has developed the Intoscape application and platform sympathetic to standard communication and messaging architecture and based core elements on the Microsoft .NET Platform, says technical director, Paul Collins. The development platform is Microsoft C# .NET 2 and 3, including ASP.NET and ADO.NET and SQL Server 2005. The communications technology is based on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) under .NET 3.0, managing web services and other remote integrations (for example XML and HTTP based integration with third parties). The deployment platform is Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2000 Terminal Server, with Windows XP clients. Forthcoming releases of Intoscape, currently at design stage, will begin to use .NET 3.5 and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

IT247.com, an SCC company, is using Intoscape to manage an online catalogue of over 350,000 available lines changing daily from multiple sources. Intoscape enables IT247 to monitor competitor activity and pricing, set prices for the online store, and manage the back office logistics and procurement associated with a high volume retail operation. Intoscape also manages supply chain functions, and data exchange and integration with ERP applications such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV and GP.

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