ON-LINE CARD (sm) Service - 'On-Demand' business-model

Why 'On-Demand' (ASP)?

In this rapidly evolving ‘Brave new world’ of interconnected web-services and modularized e-commerce business-processes we are all witnessing, the traditional choice: “buy, build or partner?” may be supplemented by yet another and maybe even more attractive possibility: “buy service from a service provider”. Using a ‘hosted application’ or ‘managed application’ combines certain attractive features of ‘buying’ and ‘partnering’ while minimizing such an important overall parameters of your business-decision as ‘time-to-market’ and ‘cost of ownership’.

Service provider is a ‘vendor’ in the sense that he is selling you the concrete capabilities of the system he has built as a commodity, but he is your ‘partner’ as well, because he is doing his best to support uninterrupted functioning of the complex hardware and software infrastructure involved. Also, the Service Provider is interested in continuing the development of additional capabilities of his product/service, so, by committing yourself to ongoing relationship with a service provider you always stay on the very frontier of innovation; this is too more of a ‘partner’ relationship, than a simple deal.

The costs and cost structure are always vitally important, however in nowadays the issue of timing may be even more important, especially if you are launching a new e-commerce business to fill an emerging market niche or are re-engineering business-processes in order to achieve a higher level of security and usability in your ongoing business.

Bottom line: ‘buying’ a complex solution always involves not only a high up-front investment, but the costs of deployment (hardware and qualified labor), support (labor and hardware maintenance costs) and security measures (may be comparable or even more than the first two) as well; ‘building’ a complete solution involves the cost of developer’s team possessing the knowledge of the concrete business-domain on top of all costs listed above. ‘On-Demand’/ASP model – is the future of ‘partner’ relationships between on-line businesses, it is cost-effective, speeds up your 'time-to-market' and keeps you on the very 'tip' of ongoing innovation, ahead of your competitors!

What ON-LINE CARD (sm) Service can be used for?

The challenge of building a successful commercial on-line business almost always involves an implementation of customer subscription management and billing/payments processing sub-systems. These modules *must* have a much higher overall level of software and hardware security than the main business-process of ordering a merchandise or content and its’ delivery or tracking.

Traditionally customer subscription management modules were implemented without any advanced security measures, with the help of most basic programming techniques:  data collection through ‘web-forms’ and ‘login/password’ authentication. This made the first generation of e-commerce services vulnerable to multiple types of attacks, including ‘phishing’ and direct intrusions into the data systems for the purpose of theft of customer’s personal data and Credit Card account numbers.

Rapidly growing number of reported fraud attempts some of which were astonishingly “successful” makes a ‘modularized’ e-commerce architecture with a separate ‘ordering/delivery’ system with a lower level of security and enhanced security standalone module for customer personal and financial data storage and security/authentication functions particularly attractive. Happily, in the interconnected world of web-services you are not required to build and maintain such sub-system yourself, you may outsource the whole business-task to the Service Provider, while keeping the core business-process of ordering/delivery tracking inside your own system.

Another group of functions that can be ‘outsourced’ to 'third parties' are payments processing, billing and resolution of disputes with customers, regarding their payments. Traditionally e-commerce systems were interfaced to a third party payment gateway or to a credit card processing provider, which applied the boundaries of mandatory rules and procedures of card-processing, established by those entities, card associations and banks-issuers on an on-line merchant. The 'rules' may in many cases contradict the very essence of Merchant’s concept of his on-line service as a whole, bend its business-logic and, hence, make it less attractive to the consumer. At the same time the present price of each individual payment, paid by Vendor/Merchant to card processing infrastructure providers is relatively high for mini and micro transactions (from $50 down to fractions of a cent) which represent the major part of on-line purchases according to the statistics.

That is why many on-line Vendors and Merchants prefer to establish a password-protected billing system of their own as a part of their service for consolidation of small transactions. You may think of payments processing/billing capabilities, which are integral parts of our Service functionality as of such sub-system;  we only have shifted as much job as possible into the customer ‘self-service domain’ and added a Customer Resource Management tied to payment transactions for dispute resolution.