According to Jupiter Research retail analyst Patti Freeman Evans, "online retail growth continues at double-digit rates, and will continue that way over the next five years." Moreover, says Freeman Evans, "traffic to retail sites is growing at twice the rate of the rest of the Internet," which is why a lot of small retailers have turned to the Web and e-commerce to market and sell their products.

Sure, just about anyone can put up a Web site, even an e-commerce site, these days. In fact, says Freeman Evans, "about half of all small and medium-sized businesses have a Web site... [though] not necessarily an e-commerce site. And, when you think about how many small and medium-sized businesses are out there... [there are] probably hundreds of thousands. That's an awful lot. So it's very competitive. What you have to do is to think through how you're going to get exposure. And you don't have it to do it all on your own. There are a lot of ways that you can leverage existing larger businesses experience or traffic in order to help your business gain some traction early on."

That's where IBM comes in.

Targeting Small Businesses
Although known predominantly as an enterprise/big business solution provider, IBM's software group has been spending a lot of time and energy the past few years actively wooing small and mid-sized businesses (mainly companies with 100 - 1000 employees), particularly in the e-commerce space. Building off of its success with WebSphere Commerce Business and Professional editions, IBM's WebSphere Commerce - Express specifically targets SMBs who want to look and feel like the big boys, but without the big price tag.

"Our SMB customers are benefiting from all of the best practices that we have garnered in working with our top enterprise customers," explains Katie Kean, vice president of software retail solutions for IBM, which includes the IBM WebSphere Commerce line. "We've leveraged all of the experience from working with the world's top retailers — retailers that are executing e-commerce — and we've basically included that in the box. We've focused on providing more out-of-the-box functionality [to our WebSphere Commerce - Express product], so that there's less customization required and a smaller retailer can get up and running quickly and actually be successful."

Why IBM?
Okay, let's face it. At $20,000 per processor license, which includes the first year of maintenance, one developer license, installation on one processor for production use and a second for pre-production staging, IBM WebSphere Commerce - Express is not for every SMB. Especially when you also consider that you will probably need to hire a third party, most likely an IBM business partner, to help you integrate IBM WebSphere Commerce - Express with your other systems and software.

That said, for the money, IBM WebSphere Commerce - Express provides small and mid-size business with a quality and depth of features and services that other products can't touch.

Among the goodies that come bundled with WebSphere Commerce - Express are IBM DB2, IBM WebSphere Application Server Advanced Edition, IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer, IBM HTTP Server, and IBM WebSphere Commerce Analyzer, a nifty little program that allows e-commerce businesses to monitor, analyze, and understand customers purchasing behavior and then create targeted marketing campaigns and promotions.

IBM WebSphere Commerce - Express also comes with easy-to-use, customizable B2B and B2C starter stores, which include search and ordering features as well as a wish-list capability, customer service tools (such as the ability to instant message with a customer service rep), and a variety of preconfigured discounts and promotions. The product also comes with a catalog import utility that makes importing existing online catalogs easy. Once you've imported a catalog, IBM WebSphere Commerce - Express has tools that make updating and managing that data, as well as creating new catalogs, a breeze.

Reliability, Scalability, Security, and Performance
"We're seeing a lot of customers in the SMB space — and in the enterprise space — doing what we're calling 're-platforming,' because what they have isn't what they need," says Kean. "They may have used a vendor that's no longer in business. They may have tried to write something on their own and realized that they didn't want to be in the infrastructure business."

Or they may have realized that they just needed a more robust, scalable platform. That was the case with IBM WebSphere Commerce customer Carrot Ink, which was recently profiled on ECommerce-Guide.com.

Those big-thinking, small business customers looking to re-platform are exactly the customers IBM hopes to appeal to.

"WebSphere Commerce comes out on top because it is built on the WebSphere platform, which is used across the world and is probably the top application server platform," explains Kean. "And it's known for its reliability and scalability. The WebSphere Commerce product was designed to scale with the organization. So if [you] start out on the Express product, and then decide [you] want more of the features that are in the Professional or the Business edition as the organization grows, it's essentially the same code base. There are no real migration issues. You don't have to go buy WebSphere Server Application separate from WebSphere Commerce. It's in there. This is one of the things that IBM is doing to appeal more to the SMB customer base is make it easier for them to buy, install, and deploy."

Success Stories
While IBM does not give out ROI figures for customers using WebSphere Commerce, based on the feedback Kean has received, the software clearly has "helped [customers] reduce the overall cost of their infrastructure and their business and also added to their revenue."

"We did several thousands in sales within weeks of going live," says Robert Ernst, the IT manager at Mike Castrucci Chevrolet in Milford, Ohio, and an IBM WebSphere Commerce - Express customer. "We created an entirely new sales channel for our company by using IBM technology. As a result, our customer base has grown substantially."

For online retailer Carrot Ink, "IBM WebSphere Commerce is probably the best investment we've made," says founder and president John Howard. Since switching to IBM WebSphere Commerce, the company reports a customer conversion rate of 8.5 percent, with a 10 percent increase in average order size.

'We Love SMBs'
"I love SMB customers," gushes Kean. "I think it's the growing area of the market. Our SMB customers are trying to compete with the larger customers and our WebSphere Commerce product gives them the opportunity to level that playing field, because they can act just like a large company, right of the box."

Additional information
For more information about IBM WebSphere Commerce - Express, including supported platforms, hardware requirements, success stories, and access to an IBM software expert, visit http://www-306.ibm.com/software/genservers/commerce/express/.

Jennifer Lonoff Schiff (www.schiffandschiff.com) writes about business and technology and is a contributor for ECommerce-Guide.com.