The People behind the People behind E-commerce

Think back to last December. It was the season of the Web -- the season that proved, once and for all, that the Web was the future of commerce. Everything was coming together. Everything was falling apart. It was hard to tell one from the other. At least that's the way the world looked to CEO Jim Daniell, 35, and to almost everyone else at OrderTrust, the four-year-old, 130-person company that Daniell runs, in Lowell, Massachusetts, about 40 minutes northwest of Boston.

Hundreds of e-commerce companies are already outsourcing all the back end of their business to OrderTrust: the tedious, complicated, and expensive processes involved in taking and fulfilling orders over the Web. This past holiday season, hundreds more began to realize that they could use that sort of help. Daniell sent out "Merry e-Christmas" cards to his prospective e-commerce customers. On each card was a picture of snowbound cars; the question "Was your e-store able to handle the holidays?" was written underneath. Everywhere in the world, people were waking up to the selling power of the Internet. Things were exploding online: The growth was much faster than anyone expected. Explosions like that make people rich overnight. Explosions like that also leave behind a lot of rubble.

Daniell remembers the 1998 holiday boom: "Everybody bought on the Web. The party ended after 18 days straight of pulling all-nighters at these e-commerce operations. And afterward there was infrastructure heartburn. One of our customers -- ToySmart -- used to have a dozen employees. Over the holidays, it grew to 135 people. Those people need help." At OrderTrust, and at almost any company that's doing business on the Web, the reality is hitting home: The race isn't just about which companies can get their domain name and brand identity on the Web first and fastest; it's also about which ones can keep up with the agonies of growth. And the winners are those that can actually get all of those products to all of those customers -- accurately, swiftly, economically -- and make sure that their customers are happy. That's no simple task. It requires a lot: a lot of experience, a lot of equipment, a lot of people, a lot of networking -- and, once again, a lot of experience. It requires what you can't buy off the shelf.

The lesson of 1998 was that e-commerce was going to change everything. The amount of Web commerce vastly outpaced all expectations, achieving in the single month of August what everyone thought it would take the entire year to do. According to Forrester Research, online sales nearly doubled compared with 1997, vaulting from $5 billion to $9 billion -- and that number is expected to shoot to $3.2 trillion or more by 2003. In 1998, online purchases made by women rose by 300%. The average shopper spent $629 online. The Gartner Group predicts that by 2003, almost all business relationships will be driven by the online infrastructure. Daniell himself estimates that one-third of the total U.S. economy is already being "reassigned" because of the Internet.

According to industry pundits, these numbers are a sign of the revolution that is upon us. According to OrderTrust, that revolution is old news. If the lesson of 1998 is that e-commerce has arrived, the lesson of 1999 will be that the arrival of the products of e-commerce depends on the coordination, the concentration, and the detailed hard work of an invisible back end -- the part of the Web where Jim Daniell and OrderTrust make their living. To the people at OrderTrust, e-commerce won't truly arrive until they deliver it. They are the people behind the people behind e-commerce.

In a year and a half at OrderTrust, Daniell has created an outfit that integrates all of the back-end order-processing operations for the business of e-commerce: finding products from alternative sources, expediting orders, keeping customers informed, handling financial settlements. All of that involves a lot of thorny specifics: taking care of credit-card authorizations, routing one order to multiple suppliers, routing status updates from those suppliers to customers, handling order cancellations and product returns, and pushing software development to keep improving all of these services. OrderTrust offers an end-to-end solution to any company that wants to hand over all of those worries to someone else. You fret about where to put the order button on your Web page; OrderTrust takes care of everything after that button gets clicked -- and charges you a small fee each time that happens.

Here's the model: Millions of people are buying things on the Web. OrderTrust doesn't want to sell any of those things. In fact, OrderTrust doesn't want to get rich on any one transaction. What OrderTrust does want is to make a tiny sliver of money every time someone purchases something on the Web -- by making sure that the right order is delivered and that the people who provide the product get paid. OrderTrust isn't working on the next killer app. It isn't trying to devise a new operating system to bring down Bill Gates. It doesn't even want to become the invisible hand of a new marketplace. OrderTrust is content to be the invisible fingernail on the invisible hand.