Analysis: Not Banking on a single sales Channel
Gateway is Web-based ordering system serves as a logical extension of their phone-based direct channel. And, even though Gateway management feels that Web sales will constitute only a small fraction of total sales for some time, they also feel that it will continue to grow. For example, Web-based sales, which first started in April 1996, accounted for 100 million in sales by the end of the year, yet this was but a drop in the bucket when compared to total sales of 5.04 billion for the year.
Because Web-based sales were not expected to be the main source of revenue for Gateway, the company is management wanted to be able to set up their commerce server as cheaply, quickly, and easily as possible. These were some of the main reasons they chose to first use Internet Information Server, and later added Merchant Server, for their operations. At the time when Gateway wanted to move to online ordering and integrate more of the processing with their.
Web-based sales constitute a small, but not insignificant, percentage of the business.
Using the inexpensive, customizable Merchant Server reduced the impact on Gateway is bottom line