by David Strom
(appeared in Infoworld, 3/24/97)
iCat's Electronic Commerce Suite has moved into the high-rent part of town, and that isn't necessarily the best neighborhood. Given its humble beginnings, it may be reaching too far and outclassed by its competitors. Version 3 of the software comes with a wide set of tools and is used to create web-based storefronts. I am not sure the software is on par with the cost of some Manhattan monthly rents, roughly triple what the earlier version cost.
There are lots of nice things to say about version 3.0, such as the ability to run catalogs using any ODBC database. The older version supported catalogs built on top of Acius' 4D databases, which didn't have the firepower or extensibility of SQL servers. iCat comes with a series of templates for setting up a sample hardware store catalog, and you can use these examples to help get your own web-based storefront rolling. You can see how they have set up the catalog with different categories of tools and different items per category. And there are templates for registering users (with both billing and shipping addresses), keeping track of their purchases with a sample shopping cart and check-out applications, and a sample search and indexing tools.
There are also templates that support frequent-shopper pricing promotions and other merchandizing extensions to the catalogs, such as the ability to support up-sells (where a shopper buys one item such as a stereo and is presented with an offer for speakers). This is accomplished via filling in a series of HTML-based forms, which can either be easy or tedious, depending on how many changes to your catalog you need to enter. All of this is good news, and shows that iCat has been adding lots of features to the product since we last reviewed the product in November.
The bad news is that your own needs will require modifying these sample applications, and it will be time consuming work. The word suite is somewhat of a misnomer. Yes, there are a bunch of different software applications that work together to deliver on the promise of a web storefront. But you'll still need some solid database and web skills to produce a finished store that can be up and running.
Here is what I mean. To set up your own catalog, you'll have to go through the following four-step process using the HTML forms. First you create your database. You can use the copy of Sybase SQL Anywhere that comes with the product or connect to your own ODBC source. Unfortunately, the Sybase software was not included in our beta. You can enter the promotional prices, discounts, and upsells here. Next you design a series of templates, which will control the look and feel of the actual pages of your catalog that will be seen by shoppers. Third, you specify where all the HTML pages, database files, and other miscellaneous files are located around your hard disk. Finally, you set various sales options such as matching sales tax rates to particular locations and whether or not to make use of the registration, indexing, and searching tools in your catalog.
I tested iCat on an NT version 4.0 server running IIS version 3.0 on an IBM PC 365 Pentium with 32 megabytes of RAM. I had some trouble getting things to work, until I called for support and tweaked my directory permissions in IIS. When I tried to use the non-HTML version of the catalog editor, I found that my machine slowed to a crawl. I would recommend running iCat with at least 64 Mb of RAM unless you plan on having your shoppers doing a lot of waiting.
Speaking of waiting, the beta version I tested ran slowly across my local Ethernet. I would recommend if you purchase iCat to get the performance-enhanced Professional edition, even though it is more costly. Professional Edition also includes command language scripting, optional plug-in modules for calculating sales taxes and shipping, and the HTML catalog editing tools. If your storefront won't have many items or if these enhancements aren't needed, then you might want to consider the Standard version at about a third the price.
iCat's suite has lots of good tools, but the Professional price tag is way too high. If you are willing to surf around the net, you can find many of the modules for much less. Since you still have to do a fair amount of integration with the suite, it may be worth taking a look.
Seattle, WA
206 623 0977
206 623 0477 fax
888 533 8800
moreinfo@icat.com
Price: Professional, $9,995; Standard, $3,495
Platform: Commerce Publisher (catalog designer) Windows 95, NT or Power Macintosh System 7; Carbo Server Windows 95, NT, Solaris, Irix or Macintosh
Copyright 1997 by Infoworld Publishing Corp.