To take advantage of Everest’s e-commerce features, you’ll need to subscribe to the entire system. But once you’ve establish inventory, shipping and receiving, your full-featured e-commerce Web site is a near given.

Business Basics
At its core, Everest Advanced is a comprehensive business management system that is available through a subscription or as an on-site solution. It offers solid accounting capabilities to generate invoices and purchase orders, track sales, manage points-of-sales through terminals, process credit cards and oversee payroll. The system also reconciles bank accounts, tracks and manages currency exchange rates, creates and tracks budgets by divisions and supports multi-year accounting.

Inventory features support barcode scanning and allow for serialized inventory so you can track items by supplier, price and age. The system provides a complete inventory history that shows where items came from and how much you paid for them. You can also conduct stock counts based on location, bins or specific items; buy, sell and stock products using different measures and obtain information on available stock by location.

The system offers in-depth shipping and distribution features. Beyond printing packing slips, you can apply and manage “drop” and “blind” shipping options. Just as your vendors can drop-ship items for you to your customers, the system tracks your shipments on behalf of your customers. When you drop-ship an item for a customer, your company’s name does not appear on the packing slip. Rather, the product appears to have come from your customer and can even feature its logo. For support after a sale, the system has a feature that automatically manages returns.

E-commerce
Everest’s inventory, shipping and e-commerce capabilities work together seamlessly. And once you’ve established inventory, it’s an easy matter to create an e-commerce store. Everest automatically builds an e-commerce site based on the information that you’ve already entered into the system. The resulting sites are attractive, fully-functional and secure Web stores that require no technical knowledge or understanding of HTML to create.

To build an e-commerce site, you access the “Shop Administrator” function and enter a name for your site; tell the system where the images and e-commerce pages will reside; select products that you wish to sell online, which have already been entered into inventory; and then select a template that determines your site’s appearance.

The system offers six template options: Amazing, Aquarius, Modern, Sapphire, Tabstyle and Value, each with its own color schemes. The pages are attractive and professional-looking and have pleasant color-coordinated schemes. (Click here to view the Everest templates.)

While six templates may sound limiting, and there’s no means to customize the look and feel of the pages, most businesses should be satisfied with the attractive pages that Everest generates in its resulting e-commerce Webs sites. (To view a sample Everest store, click here.)

Catalog Sales
After selecting a template, Everest populates the pages with products. Here you can edit “item profiles” to change items and inventory types, descriptions and pricing information and levels. E-commerce pages may be configured to display video (AVI) and play audio (MP3) and suggest add-on accessories and related products, which are easily selected and added. And when new items are configured in inventory, they’re available for display and sale on the e-commerce Web site. When a product is purchased and shipped, it immediately shows up as an invoice, and the change is reflected in inventory.

Beyond standard shopping cart features and the ability to accept credit cards and PayPal payments, the Everest e-commerce page offers some solid extras. Guests can register with the site to create accounts that track their activities, display products by category or brands and create and maintain “wish lists.” Shoppers can also obtain tracking numbers to monitor the status of their orders. After the sale, the Web site can consider return and warranty periods, assign merchandise authorizations and process RMA return requests.

The e-commerce site also collects marketing information through the use of surveys. When you want to analyze e-commerce marketing data, you can view the results based on date ranges or customer parameters.

On Demand Versus Premise
Everest offers two means of installation. "Everest On-Demand" is a turnkey solution that relies on professional off-site hosting that’s provided by Everest. Businesses access Everest Advanced through an Internet-enabled PC.

According to the company, this type of installation costs an estimated $200 per user per month (including hardware and hosting costs) for a typical five-user configuration. There is no long-term commitment and the company offers quarterly “pay-as-you-go” billing. Everest On-Demand delivers its hosting services through Equinix, and offers data protection and backup features. This option is for companies that lack in-house technical expertise.

With the “On-Premise” model, your company purchases a license and maintains Everest at its location. This option requires in-house technical expertise, but offers some options for customization, as well as CRM and additional analytical features that are not offered in the turnkey version. According to Everest, this option is for companies that process high volumes of transactions and want the lowest possible cost of ownership over the long term, a period that Everest estimates should last between three and five years for most businesses.

Everest Advanced offers powerful e-commerce features, but to obtain and use these features, you must buy into the company’s all-in-one business management software. As such, Everest Advanced is a viable option for retail, distribution or e-commerce businesses.