J2EE™ Technology in Practice: Building Business Applications With the Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition

8.4. Altura Merchant Operating System

Catalog merchants have, over long years of trial and error, developed a very successful business strategy. They rent mailing lists, ship catalogs, take orders, get revenues, and then mail out more catalogs. It is a simple but elegant model that has proven itself over and over again.

But it is, as officials at Altura International realized in the mid 1990s, a strategy that entirely ignored the emerging world of the Web. Even in its infancy, the Web was turning the tables and creating an environment in which customers did not need to wait to receive a catalog to place an order. Indeed, the Web was clearly evolving into an environment in which a consumer could actively seek out, compare, and purchase products ...