Before you can select the right setup for your e-business, you must determine exactly what you need to be competitive online.

    Most likely, you'll need some software to help you manage your products, your promotions, your customers, and their orders. You may also need some additional programs to handle the tax, shipping, and payment processing of your orders.

    A number of popular off-the-shelf solutions have evolved over the past few years that give you these core features and allow you to plug-in other software modules to handle the complexities of taxation, the varieties of shipping options, and many of the popular forms of payment. Each option offers its own set of pros and cons.

Solutions like Yahoo's Stores provide storefronts that are ready to go. Just pick a design and pop in your products: You are ready for business.

Other applications, such as Intershop (offered through a variety of Intershop hosting partners), allow you to change standard templates that come with the packaged software so that you can customize the way your storefront will look and feel. These solutions also let you extend the standard features and behaviors contained in the templates — assuming you can "speak" their application languages.

And then there are solutions that act more like e-commerce application platforms. These include Microsoft's Site Server Enterprise, which relies on
*-    Microsoft's ASP (active server page) technology;
*-    Macromedia's ColdFusion application engine CFML (Cold Fusion markup language);
*-    IBM's WebSphere solution; and more costly
    high-end e-commerce platforms like
     *-    Broadvision,
     *-    Blue Martini, or
     *-    Commerce One.
or easy solutions like
      *-    eCatalogOrder.com .

    Many of the above solutions rely on other e-commerce software from CyberCash or OpenMarket for payment processing, Taxware for tax calculations, and Tandata for up-to-date shipping information. (Note that we'll take a closer look at the plug-ins in Lesson 3 and software solutions in Lesson 4.)

But which is the right solution for your e-business? To figure that out, you need a plan.