MICROSOFT MOVES AGGRESSIVELY INTO INTERNET SHOPPING

A study last year by VeriFone Inc. of Redwood City, Calif. and MasterCard International of New York City and Visa International of San Francisco, Calif. concludes that electronic commerce over the Internet is on the verge of widespread acceptance.

The study showed that 32% of World Wide Web users have already bought products and services over the Internet and that 91% plan purchases in the future. In addition, 62% indicated a high level of interest in using credit cards for making purchases.

Therefore it is not surprising when last month Redmond, Wash. software giant, Microsoft Corp. purchased San Mateo, Calif.-based eShop Inc. Microsoft will incorporate eShop’s on-line commerce technologies and expertise into its Merchant product—a solution for Internet retailing that provides server tools to build and operate on-line stores and malls.

Unique in the eShop product is eShop Plaza. It provides fast 3D graphics displays of goods and services, a Personal Shopping Assistant that provides recommendations, discount coupons, quick and easy product searching, and more.

Acquisition of eShop brings together eShop Plaza, launched in November 1995 and Microsoft Network Mall. The former includes stores from several leading on-line merchants. The latter offers shopping for over 1 million members of the MSN on-line service. MSN will work with eShop Plaza merchants to transfer their offerings to MSN.

Together eShop Plaza and MSN Mall will help Microsoft establish new relationships with retailers and shopping Web sites. MSN plans to be a shopping destination on the Internet and a place where merchants can reach and sell to millions of on-line customers.

Merchant is built on the Microsoft Internet Security Framework to provide businesses with secure electronic-commerce solutions. A beta of software is planned for shipment in August 1996 through a special preview program. The product is scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter of 1996.

Merchant provides a server that generates WWW pages from databases and enables order processing and secure financial transactions. The server runs on Windows NT and the Internet Information Server.

The software also provides Workbench that enables merchants to create and manage on-line stores and customer service. Finally, there is Shopping basket that enables shoppers to shop in an easy to use and consistent fashion. Merchant will utilize the Microsoft Wallet that will be a part of future releases of Windows.

In addition to enabling individual businesses to use the Internet for retailing, Merchant provides the retailing component for Microsoft’s new commercial services platform for the Internet, “Normandy.”

Normandy will support tens of thousands of concurrent users, the scalability to support millions of users per day, and the openness to work with applications and extensions developed by Internet developers. The platform will include service to enable Internet Mail, News, Chat, White Pages, Personalization, Information Retrieval and Replication.

How successful is Microsoft likely to be? One sign is that merchandising giant Wal-Mart has bought into the Microsoft vision. It has chosen Microsoft as its supplier for Internet and Internet retailing products.

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