Scenario 1:
Ecommerce

Dilbert Vinyl runs a profitable business selling hard-to-find recordings. After expanding from retail to a successful mail-order business, he decides to go online. He is enticed by the possibility of building a web site that contains up-to-date listings of the recordings he has for sale, complete with data about the musicians, reviews, and other relevant information. He even wants to include short selections from each recording that can be listened to online.

Dilbert starts looking at available Ecommerce solutions. He mainly finds simple canned solutions that are only suitable for businesses with a limited number of products, not thousands of recordings that are constantly changing like he has. Most of these solutions can't even tell if an item is in stock.

He finds a few high-end solutions, but they are extremely expensive. There is nothing in the middle for a medium-sized business like his. He bites the bullet and buys an expensive solution, thinking his problems are over, but they have just begun.

Customizing the web pages to meet his needs is a nightmare. Worse, the expensive solution he just bought comes with its own inventory system, and there is no way to keep it in sync with the inventory system he already has for his mail-order business. Nor is there any way to interface to his existing back-end systems, like shipping. The vendor of his "solution" says that he will have to pay expensive consulting fees to customize his site. To add insult to injury, after several months the consultants tell him that half the things he wants to do are impossible.

Dilbert has lost a bunch of money and is about to give up when he discovers an Ecommerce solution built with Spin. The Spin solution can access his mail-order inventory system using its built-in database connectivity, as well as his existing back-end systems. Dilbert finds that he can customize his web pages himself, and even add advanced features like streaming audio, without programming.

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