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Getting ready to start IRCE day 2, and my feet still hurt from yesterday. The conference was really crowded yesterday. If you have been to any conferences over the last 2 years you may recognize this as a really good sign. I spent some time with a couple of vendors who had not been on my radar for various reasons. But first some eCommerce economy news. marketlive, an eCommerce SaaS provider from Petaluma, Ca., published their year-over-year performance numbers for the quarter ending March 2010, and the results were good. Visits were up 22%, and revenue was up 14%. More importantly, the conversion rate was up 20%. Numbers from a single provider can be skewed by unusual results from 1 or 2 merchants, but these numbers are encouraging. In their U.S. Online Retail Forecast (March 2010), Forested Research projected on-line retail sales will continue to grow at close to 10% for each of the next three years. Sales are projected to reach almost 250 billion by 2014 but remain about 7-8% of overall retail sales.

One vendor of interest was the afore mentioned marketlive. They were not on my radar at IRCE, because earlier discussions indicated they were not a good fit for my client. However, I remained impressed marketlive's product, so I decided to visit them at the show. They are a SaaS commerce provider with the features to satisfy most commerce sites. On the surface, marketlive's feature set is pretty complete, but not remarkable. As eCommerce matures the differences between providers seem to narrow. But looking deeper, differences can be seen.

First, marketlive supports Unicode (2-byte) character sets. Unicode characters are required for some languages, especially outside of Europe and the Americas. Even if you are building an English only site, you should care about Unicode support. Commercial software companies recognize that we live in a global economy, and most (recently developed) commerce solutions support Unicode. Lack of Unicode support speaks to the age of the code base. An old code base implies a whole series of ailments including fragile code, difficulty in responding to future market changes, and potentially obsolete foundation libraries.

Second, marketlive provides a dedicated virtual server environment rather than a multi-tenant solution. Multi-tenant solutions are not necessarily bad, most lost cost web hosting services use multi-tenant architectures. Multi-tenant hosting becomes an issue when other tenant are aloud to run custom programs or modules. When these programs go ary, so does your hosted environment. For this reason tenants, including you, are typically limited in how customization can be performed.

marketlive also provides commerce expertise to help you get the most return from your commerce investment. While commerce business support is not unique among SaaS providers, make sure that you are getting the level of support that you expect for your SaaS service fees.

A vendor who flew under my radar was Bridgeline Digital. Bridgeline, like marketlive, is a SaaS commerce provider whose has a stomp feature set. Bridgeline stood out on a couple of points. Uncommon among SaaS providers, Bridgeline offers a developer license for their product. If you are implementing commerce in a development shop, access to source code can overcome loss of control anxiety. Another strength of Bridgeline is their understanding of event products. If your commerce needs include events in addition to more traditional hard products, your choice of commerce providers drop considerably. Bridgeline gets it. They understand event product presentation, they get participant registration, and they even get participant registration when not all participants are known. Other commerce vendors claim they can support events, and I actually believed some who said they could. But no vendor gave me the confidence Bridgeline did that they naively supported events.

More tomorrow on day 2 findings and more on how the HTC EVO performed as my mobile computer.