eMerchant Extends Applications to the Web
With the introduction of eMerchant, Magic Software Enterprises Inc. (Irvine, Calif.) delivers a business-to-business e-commerce solution particularly suited for businesses with large inventories, high volumes of transactions and substantial amounts of repetitive business with regular customers.
Magic eMerchant features transaction processing and order-entry templates designed to manage inventories of hundreds of thousands of products and process thousands of transactions per hour. It can store past customer orders to allow for repeat orders, and can present detailed and summarized versions of a customer's purchase folders, making purchasing suggestions based upon a customer's past history and a product's current availability.
In addition, eMerchant can capture and analyze information on customers' buying patterns to allow for future planning and more targeted marketing.
"EMerchant was developed with the understanding that, as more and more companies take their businesses to the Web, competitive advantage and profitability will be tied to transactional speed," says Jack Dunietz, CEO of Magic. "It also recognizes how anticipating customer needs and providing more personalized service can positively impact a company's bottom line."
EMerchant also has built-in security, can integrate with existing applications, extending them to the Web, and is designed to grow with customers' business needs.
"We're not only focused on the AS/400, we're focused on bringing solutions to the AS/400 marketplace," says Alan Zwiren, VP of marketing for Magic. "We have the ability to integrate with legacy code. We don't have to come into a shop and say, 'Let's start building something completely new.' Our product is an add-on to what exists and it integrates with what exists."
Magic's business partners have been using the company's technology to deliver enterprise e-commerce applications for a number of years now, according to Zwiren. "We're focused on business-to-business, not business-to-consumer e-commerce," he points out. "We handle high transaction volumes, large databases and recurring customers. We customize the application to what our customers need."
Zwiren sees Magic's primary value as investment protection. "We extend existing applications by taking them to the Web or client/server," he says. "We incrementally modify applications that already exist and deliver new technologies to them. That's the foundation of our solution strategy.
"We saw the potential for revenue was the demand for high-end features in business-to-business e-commerce," Zwiren continues. "That's where we feel we can effect the most savings for organizations."