What is OrderTrust?

OrderTrust's mission is to expand a merchant's business by allowing them to quickly and accurately fulfill complex orders, by increasing sales by easily sourcing products from multiple locations, by screening out fraud, and by rewarding their valuable customers through the use of the leading order processing network. OrderTrust connects the merchant to many participants in the sales process, including payment processors, distribution centers, manufacturers, and customer service centers.

OrderTrust's three customers types (generally referred to as "merchants") are online merchants and catalogers who electronically market and sell goods, via the Internet and telemarketers; points of order aggregation (malls and loyalty/affinity program providers); and, companies wishing to place products into multiple distribution channels (such as product distributors).

What is the need for an order processing network?

Most merchants want to be able to focus their energies and limited resources on building their brand identity, not building and supporting a large technology infrastructure. The challenge is developing the ability to handle customer orders, authorize payments, track shipments, and perform other order processing tasks that are vital to building customer loyalty and strong brand identity.

A merchant who chooses to build an order processing system must make ever increasing, significant investments to produce the necessary infrastructure to ensure reliable order processes that will protect and enhance the merchant's brand. For example, Gartner Group studies show that a web presence alone costs approximately $100,000 - $500,000 including the tools, software, integration, personnel, and ongoing maintenance costs. Over $1 million is required for a minimal back-end solution and near $10 million for a 7x24x365 operations center. Additionally, a merchant must be concerned with technological obsolescence, network support scalability, and software maintenance. However, given enough time, capital, and technical experience, a merchant can build an order processing network. It is, without a doubt, an expensive and labor-intensive effort.

Simply put, merchants need not build their own order processing network. Merchants are increasingly recognizing that these resources may be better applied where they can and must demonstrate competitive advantage - such as building superior brand awareness. Without extensive internal technology resources available, out-tasking is most often the best business strategy. For these merchants, OrderTrust provides several advantages: the ability to scale easily as business grows, the built-in quality of years of development, and rapid time-to-market.

What are some other order processing options?

On the surface, there appear to be several choices. One model is to 'do-it-yourself' with rudimentary scripts, e-mail, and electronic data interchange (EDI). Experience shows that volume, scale, and rate of change usually force this combination of solutions to quickly breakdown. While software tools such as commerce servers provide more scale and better integration, a merchant would have to join together five or more software packages to equal OrderTrust's capabilities, making this activity time consuming and expensive. Custom solutions with large systems integrators often require significant investments and can take several years time to implement.

In the end, only OrderTrust can provide the key advantages of cost-effectiveness and rapid time to market.

How does OrderTrust compare to Web-based commerce products?

Many software packages today are exclusively focused on providing web-based tool suites which emphasize the 'front-end' of web-based commerce. These tools generally involve web page or catalog publishing, database synchronization, management dashboards, culminating in an order transaction capture database. Examples include Open Market, Microsoft Site Server, InterWorld, Netscape Servers, BroadVision, iCat, FrontPage, NetObjects, and many others.

OrderTrust is a service - not a software product - and is designed to be 'transaction agnostic'. OrderTrust works with these order transaction systems, through specially developed plug-ins for each of these transaction systems. OrderTrust "grabs" the order from these order transaction systems to begin the routing, fraud screening, or loyalty applications.

Can multiple merchants share the same order-processing network?

Yes. In fact, by sharing the same network, merchants benefit in several ways. First, OrderTrust works with many different vendors and their business partners. The flexibility of the order processing network makes it easy to expand or change services, and to switch between vendors. Typically, in a "build-your-own" network, services are often "hardwired in" making changes difficult: software often needs to be rewritten and additional connections often need to be established.

Second, OrderTrust has already established connections with hundreds of brand-name product vendors and service providers. Merchants wishing to add new suppliers, distributors, or customer loyalty programs can do so, and at much less cost than it would take for them to build the new capabilities themselves.

And can the network handle each merchant's specific requirements?

Yes, each merchant can individually direct his or her own processing logic within OrderTrust's network; OrderTrust is unique in its ability to capture the merchants' specific business logic and flow. Thus, all merchants benefit from the shared scale, flexibility and robustness, yet the network can still behave as though uniquely created for the specific merchant.

Is OrderTrust the only order processing option available?

There are network options including value-added networks (VAN's) which are the most "mature" commerce technology on the market, using the 20-year old Electronic Document Interchange (EDI) standard. Trading partners using EDI agree to share documents, such as orders and invoices, that are formatted according to EDI standards and are stored in a mailbox on a value-added network or VAN.

EDI is industry-recognized as a costly business-to-business solution. Implementation requires every partner in the trading chain to install or revamp systems to use the same data formats. To store and forward the forms, VANs charge not only monthly rates, but has additional fees per transaction and per byte size of data. While EDI does a very effective job replacing paper business forms with an electronic equivalent, its design does not allow it to manage the complete lifecycle of an online order or address the standards issues of online commerce.

What is the criteria for selecting an order processing solution?

A merchant can use the following guidelines to assess the appropriateness of an order processing solution to ensure it fits their unique business needs.

Is the network easily extensible in terms of features, data formats, and business partners?

How quickly can the network incorporate your business into its service?

Can the network handle and track different line items in an order from/to different suppliers?

Does the network provide an on-line interface for consumers to check order status?

Are payment transactions settled before goods are actually shipped?

Can the Web portion of the business be easily integrated with other parts?

Will order processing be monitored around the clock for any problems that might occur?

Does the network provider understand the merchandising side of the business, not just the technical side?

Is the network scalable and fault tolerant?

What types of business experience does OrderTrust bring to order processing?

OrderTrust occupies a unique position in the marketplace by blending two disciplines critical to providing a complete order processing solution. OrderTrust's founder, Thomas J. "Tim" Litle has been a pioneer in providing transaction processing support for direct marketing businesses, such as catalogs, infomercials, telemarketing, and now the Web. Among other
accomplishments, he founded two of the leading payment processing companies devoted to servicing the direct marketing industry. Tim clearly understands non-face-to-face marketing - the essence behind both the catalog and the Web.

Recently, OrderTrust has built a strong team of electronic commerce specialists including CEO Dr. James Daniell who, prior to OrderTrust, was Chief Operating Officer of AT&T's Networked Commerce Services. This unit includes AT&T's business Internet, electronic commerce, managed networked services and other vertical market business offers. While in his COO role, Jim was responsible for the day-to-day operations, international planning, and strategic and business development functions. Further, OrderTrust's staff of over 120 includes some of the industry's most experienced and knowledgeable people in areas of online merchandising, electronic commerce, network operations, and software development.

How long does it typically take to set up a business on OrderTrust's order processing network and what is involved?

It usually takes just a few weeks, and not more than six weeks to have a merchant in 'production' with OrderTrust. The first step is to carefully review a merchant's business, its order processing requirements, with whom it does business and how orders, products, payments, and other pieces of information flow among the various participants. Connectivity solution is then provided; custom functions and interfaces, when necessary, are created and installed-both at the merchant and at the business partners. Very often,
OrderTrust already has a transaction processing capability in place with a business partner which is easily customized to accommodate the additional needs of the new client. Once the service is up and running, network activity is monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In addition, around-the-clock customer service is available through the OrderTrust help desk.

How does OrderTrust charge for its services?

OrderTrust charges merchants in three ways: setup fees for access to the network, small ongoing maintenance fees, and a usage fee based on volumes of transactions.

Setup fees charge for initiating a new merchant and designated partners on the network and the price depends on the amount of customization involved, the scope of services provided, and the number of connection points. Of course, this set-up fee is only a fraction of what it would cost to build a order processing network from scratch.

OrderTrust charges on the number of transactions that go through the network- not a percentage of the value of order transactions. This means that the OrderTrust component of your cost will not increase as you are able to generate more value on a per-transaction basis.

Will OrderTrust continue its ESD business?

OrderTrust was an early pioneer of the electronic software distribution (ESD) business and has become one of the registered clearinghouses for major software companies. However, within the last year, the clearinghouse model has begun to evolve, and the industry is still unclear as to the outcome.

As a result, OrderTrust will closely monitor the industry developments and be prepared to address the evolved business model. OrderTrust will continue to serve its existing customers, but not engage in new opportunities at this time.