Books “R” Us will update Customer A’s buying profile (or open a new one) in order to better serve that person in the future. Books “R” Us’s focus is on retail sales and Web-site design; this is the key to its success. The transaction processing is a necessary evil. In order to do this, Web merchants typically, purchase three to four software systems—one each for credit and payment processing, inventory management and fulfillment, tracking, and customer-information storage and mining. All these systems must talk to one another, which means that interfaces must be maintained. This interfacing is a nightmare.
