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Create and Manage Your Store with ShopSite
By Wayne Kawamoto
April 7, 2004

Continued from Page One.

Different Editions for Different Needs
ShopSite's three editions -- Starter, Manager, and Pro -- provide increasing levels of functionality, ranging from handling e-commerce fundamentals to providing sophisticated add-ons. Starter is targeted toward businesses with limited catalogs, while Manager supports unlimited products and pages, and offers real-time credit card processing. Pro adds additional support for coupons, product searches, discounts and inventory tracking.

Starter users will miss out on two important features found in the Manager and Pro versions of ShopSite. Both higher-priced editions include confirmation/preview pages that let customers review their orders before submission, and site publishers' changes before they go live.

The Manager and Pro versions also offer integration with UPS rates and services, enabling users to validate addresses, calculate shipping costs and taxes. The editions' shipping engine also can support merchant-supplied rate tables, enabling e-tailers to offer free shipping or discounted handling charges when orders meet certain thresholds or are placed from specified locations.

The two products also enable businesses to edit "required" order fields and design HTML e-mail order receipts.

A myriad of still more elaborate extras makes Pro the edition of choice for the advanced e-tailers. The product lets businesses add custom form fields to shopping carts -- enabling storeowners to offer add-on options (such as gift wrapping,) to provide additional information (like an explanations of service terms) or to gather information and conduct surveys.

Pro also offers a coupon feature that lets businesses provide discounts based on customers' order sizes.

Additionally, the Pro edition integrates e-mail, sending verifications to customers after they place orders and warning store managers when stock is low -- while also preventing customers from ordering out-of-stock products.

ShopSite Pro also supports and tracks sales through affiliate Web sites, enables merchants and customers alike to search for products based on keywords and Boolean logic, and provides universal editing -- allowing store managers to increase catalog-wide pricing by a certain percentage, for example.

Released last year, Pro Version 7 adds powerful customer registration. With this feature, a Web store can save customers' payment information, preferences and shipping addresses -- eliminating the need for customers to re-enter their data when they return.

The customer registration feature also enables businesses to define customer groups -- such as wholesalers, retailers, or regular customers -- and to assign discount levels to each. For example, customers who qualify as frequent shoppers can be automatically recognized and offered discounts.

Other useful new Pro features include automatic multi-page generation, which limits the number of products displayed on a page and generates new pages with navigation links; an ability to copy pages and a variable pricing feature -- enabling shoppers to input their own price for a product, which is useful for gift certificates, donations, or auction payments (naturally, the payment must be exceed a merchant's specified product cost for it to be accepted.)

Continued on Page Three: Pricing and User Profile.

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