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Red Hat Unveils Linux E-Commerce Server
Wonko42 writes "The subject pretty much says it all; Red Hat is now selling its new E-Commerce server for $149.99. The server is packaged with several other programs, including the Netscape Roaming Module, Squid proxy, and Webalyzer web server log analyzer. And of course, it's built to run on Red Hat 6.0. "
Disclaimer: My employer is in the e-commerce backend business. While we run Red Hat on our site, we are in no other business relationships with Red Hat. None of our products/services are currently in Red Hat's E-Commerce kit.
How about:
hype + forms + hype + ssl + hype + CGI + hype + credit card processing + hype + tracking orders?
People sell these great "e-commerce" solutions that set up a beautiful storefront. They forget about accepting payment.
There's a lot of e-marketing software out there. Tease your eye, get you to buy. The rest of e-commerce is how to get your money, how to get the customer their product, how to track complaints...all the non-sexy stuff.
The packages that the RH kit ships with at least claim to work the backend, from payment processing and credit card authorization to order databases. As to how well the packages actually work, I have no personal experience.
As to whether it's worth the extra C-note, it's the same RH gambit: save you the trouble of getting it off the FTP site, likely bundled in with some installation support. When "trouble" can be measured in engineer-hours, that $149 is chicken feed.
--The basis of all love is respect
Let's look at what really makes sense in the e-commerce world. Complete interactivity with the corporate data == 95% of the time you need M$ SiteServer 3.0.
Luckily, this is not true. After running Siteserver on a fast-growing e-commerce site for a year, we finally broke down and ripped it out and put a custom solution in its place. Siteserver compatibility generally means only that the product uses the default db table names that Siteserver creates. This can be configured or the tables can be emulated. However, Siteserver itself is little more than a bunch of poorly written Visual Basic Script scripts and some extremely inefficient objects (out-of-the-box, anyway) for storing and manipulating the shopping cart data, bundled with some site analysis tools that we didn't even use. The overhead and inefficiency of the product outweighed any benefits we got, so much that even management suggested we get rid of it.
My advice is, though, don't even start using it, because it _is_ very easy to get stuck with it when you start buying 3rd party software that runs with it, etc. The lock-in effect is harsh. But, as I was saying, luckily nearly 100% of the big-name e-commerce players offer a (usually better and more mature) UNIX version of their software in addition to a Siteserver version. This includes the credit card processors (Cybercash, Clear Commerce), etc. Note that Siteserver does not come with credit card processing software.
This has been my experience. There is no way that RedHat's package could be worse.
bob