2TheMart.com Shooting for Two Million Products Online

Software Magazine,  April, 2000  by Virginia Gagliardo

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2TheMart.com, based in Irvine, Calif., is a "product portal in the business-to-consumer commerce arena, competing with and seeking to differentiate from other portal sites such as Ariba and Commerce One.

The company credits its technical software architecture for this differentiating capability, an architecture heavily rellant on the Lawson Collaborative Commerce Suite from Lawson Software, St. Paul, Minn., and the IBM NetCommerce suite from IBM.

"The biggest benefit we get from Lawson is a strong competitive edge in a dynamic, hotly contested marketplace," says Robert Allende, chief technology officer, 2TheMart.com Inc.

2TheMart.com's transaction-based model allows merchant partners the ability to quickly list their products on the site. The company also offers both fixed-price retail and auction pricing formats.

Allende says, "Lawson allowed us to create a seamless, automatic process from our IBM e-commerce engine to our financial and purchase order generation process. That gives us maximum efficiency with minimal manual intervention, and the automated sales cycles allow us to provide faster service and better value to our customers. The Lawson package also allowed us to get up and running quickly, from concept to online debut in just 75 days."

After flowing through the Lawson interface and registering the transaction, a purchase order request is generated and encrypted on behalf of the buyer, and the information is automatically sent to the registered merchant partner to process and fulfill the order. The Lawson Financials Suite and Lawson Business Component Integrator complete the solution. 2TheMart.com plans to incorporate Lawson's Analytic Suite later this year.

2TheMart.com went live with its Web storefront in November 1999 and plans to offer two million products online by summer.

The new additions to the Lawson Collaborative Commerce Suite, released in February, include the Lawson Trade Communications Services, Payment Server Integrator, Site Builder, AuctionMax, Mail Server, and e-Resource Management.

"Lawson's collaborative commerce applications leverage its architectural underpinnings in tandem with new technologies like XML and Java to better enable e-commerce and e-business processes," says Sam Clark, senior research analyst, META Group, headquartered in Stamford, Conn. "Lawson is building on its core transactional system to Integrate the front- and back-office, assist stakeholders with access to enterprise information, and help companies better tailor e-business solutions to fit their specific needs."

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