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Dynix Vision - E-Commerce

One of the most excited areas that we have received a lot of positive feedback from customers is the area of e-commerce. There are two main areas of e-commerce focus for Dynix. The first is with users.

User E-Commerce

Our goal is to expand Horizon Information Portal to enable users to make electronic payments to cover fines, pay rental fees, printing fees, special fees for access to specific electronic content and any interlibrary loan fees. The demand for this is pretty universal.

What is not universal, but of interest to some libraries, is the idea of selling books online. With portal e-commerce, libraries will have the ability to sell books online and ship directly to users if they choose to. Most library book jobbers also service the online book stores and do the book warehousing and direct shipment to customers for them, so they can easily do them for you. (Both Ingram and Baker & Taylor serve online book stores, for example.) Or instead of direct selling, it could be done through a partnership with an online book vendor.

An interesting scenario could be this: the user searches the catalog for a new title, sees that all items are checked-out, places a hold and gets an estimate on how long before he/she receives the book. If he/she decides they do not want to wait that long, they could push the "BUY" button on the portal. The user is asked for payment information, which could be stored, and makes the purchase. The book is shipped directly to them.

Another variation is that the library does a purchase sharing with users for selected books. If a book is a popular item, the library may set up rules to allow the user to pay for the book and then when they are finished and bring it in to the library, they are given back a percentage of the book's purchase price. Again, this transaction could be electronic or simply credit on their account.

As any e-commerce service, Dynix will not only support standard credit and debit cards, but is also looking to support smart cards, mobile phone payments (regional support like Finland) and even micro-payments, a promising technology that is not quite available yet.

Vendor E-Commerce

Part two of e-commerce includes better electronic integration with the book and serials jobbers. Today Dynix supports EDIFACT and Enhanced EDI with a number of book jobbers. This allows purchase orders to be sent by Horizon Acquisitions and acknowledgements to be received from the book jobbers.

But this doesn't meet the full potential of integration between Dynix and the book jobbers. Here are some scenarios that we are working on:

Phase I – allow users from within Horizon Acquisitions to enter an ISBN and send a search against a vendor database to determine availability. If item is available, bibliographic information is returned and displayed to the user along with discount price and availability. Dynix just announced the ability to provide this capability with the Book Vendor Integration Protocol. For more information, see the June 21, 2003 press release "Dynix Offers Book Vendor Integration."

Phase II – when the technical services person is in the Horizon Launcher, they click on the book jobber "collection development" button. Let's say this is Baker & Taylor. This action automatically takes them to the B&T Title Source II web site. The staff member uses all the collection development services on Title Source II to build a shopping cart. Then they enter distribution and budget information. When the staff member is done, they click the "create PO" or "create PR" button. All the information is automatically exported from Title Source II right into a Horizon created PO or PR.

Once the order is filled, the staff member downloads the MARC record into their Horizon Catalog, which automatically creates the Bib record if necessary, and adds a new Item record.

Phase III - Often times, a purchase order or purchase requisition cannot be fulfilled by one book jobber. Dynix is working with these vendors to do searches off of a PO or PR to find out which book jobber has the books in stock. If more than one vendor is required to fill the entire PO/PR, then Horizon will automatically break the PO/PR into the appropriate number, one for each vendor, so that the orders can be immediately filled.