My career in the E-Commerce field began in 1998 while I was working at SCO. There became a demand to sell a Promotional version of the UNIX operating system online. SCO had no system in place and limited resources. It was decided a website would be built that included a shopping cart. We would need a separate fulfillment house other than the one that was filling our full-priced product. Along with this, we would need a merchant account, and with this a company who could process the payments from credit card orders and offer real-time authorizations and charges, along with credit card fraud protections.

Once we determined the needs of this full-service e-commerce site, we needed to find out how to market this. How would students, and people who need this product know where to buy a promotional version? Throughout the ordering process, we would ask personal questions for our sales and marketing teams to use for further sales calls, and to keep a tab on who our market was. A good database was needed and a tool to extract the information from the databases was something I had to look into.

Once we had a system in place for customers to place these orders, we were able to sell other types of products online including licenses,support, e-learning, and supplemental documentation. The policies vary for each non-physical and physical sites.

Flash was not something widely used at the time, but 4 years later the corporate website has changed to have lots of Flash, (not necessarily animation) on the website. Each Website should be evaluated by the needs of the customer to determine which tool will be used to create the site. While evaluating the needs of the customer, Usability should become the key focus of the site.

Years after this site and many others were built, I left on Maternity leave. While I was out the ecomony took a turn for the worse. It became evident there weren't enough customers ordering from us to support the site. The COGS (cost of goods sold) were was started to exceed any revenues we had been receiving from the site. The credit card processing websites were eliminated, and replaced with a static form where a customer would email sales requesting a fee copy. Giving away the demo products for free actually saved money. The Program was later broadened for SCO's distrbutors to order from a website inputting a PO#. There would be no credit card processing on the order, but it was a cost saver in terms of 24/7 for a product with a high customer base in Latin America and Asia.

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