PFSweb Releases Entente Suite for E-Commerce
PFSweb, Inc. (Plano, TX) has released an expanded suite of electronic commerce offerings that will broaden PFSweb’s current e-commerce capabilities.
The new Entente Suite will allow current PFSweb clients to extend and simplify transactions for real-time inventory, order management, order processing, a variety of warehouse functions, and payment. It also offers shopping security, catalog merchandising, access to shipping/receiving confirmations, and visibility into the PFSweb system for business analysis of real-time customer order information. Entente Suite ties into a customer’s message broker system, to communicate with their ERP system on the back-end.
“We can provide a complete Web-based package or even an integrated partial solution with EntenteWeb,” says Michael Willoughby, vice president of E-Commerce Technologies at PFSweb. “With EntenteDirect or EntenteMessage, we can provide completely transparent access to our order management and fulfillment capabilities.”
“The market for Entente Suite are companies who have well-established brand names that want to quickly get into e-commerce and don’t want to ‘stub their toe’ and endanger their brand by doing it on their own,” commented Willoughby. “Customers come to PFSweb, because we’re a proven company that knows how to do e-commerce fulfillment direct to the consumer and outsource it, delegating that responsibility to us.”
“Some customers of EntenteSuite use legacy applications that we have migrated into this suite. We did this in such a way that it was transparent to end users, so they won’t see any difference in performance or capabilities,” noted Willoughby. “We just rolled the legacy application features that they were already using in a downward fashion, so we didn’t disrupt the business they were already doing.”
The Entente Suite consists of EntenteDirect, EntenteMessage and EntenteWeb. EntenteDirect is a set of real-time Java, COM and AS/400 interfaces that provide high-speed interactive transaction support for a client’s Web site or back office systems. Entente Direct gives customers an e-commerce Web site to view the warehouse and order management systems, as if they had those systems installed on their systems.
“It’s a virtual back-office setup where customers have all the advantages of real-time access, without the overhead of writing and maintaining the warehouse setup on their own,” says Willoughby.
EntenteMessage is a set of XML-based messages that provide interactive and batch access to the PFSweb systems. Translation capability is included for converting PFSweb transactions into various XML-based standards. Support is also provided for flat file exchange in order to support older legacy systems that are not XML compliant. EntenteMessage is the interface that handles all the feedback for dealing with customers, such as orders shipped today, items received into the PFSweb warehouse and business transactions that PFSweb gives feedback on—so customers can import that data back into their own systems.
EntenteWeb is a Web-based e-commerce system that provides advanced order management, product management, catalog management, merchandising capability and account management capabilities. It can also be tailored to each client’s unique business-to-business or business-to-consumer requirements, including a complete Web interface or participation in shopping cart hand-off and check-out process. EntenteWeb upgrades the PFSweb SOLOnet Version 4.0 product.
In most cases, pricing for Entente Suite is based on a site license, with certain features typically included in service offerings. In the case of EntenteWeb, the price is dependent on the complexity of the interface provided.
Related Information:
PFSweb, Inc. (new window)PFSweb E-Commerce Solutions Overview (new window)