StraightSELL has been building Ecommerce related websites for its clients for a number of years and over this time we have come to realise that successful Ecommerce or customer self service websites need a whole lot more than a simple shopping cart to be successful.

Very few products can be sold well on the net with a vanilla low end shopping cart solution where everything is fixed. Many customers need additional fields against products and customised workflows around ordering.

StraightSELL provides this flexibility and also offers comprehensive functionality in the areas of:

• Retail Shopping Cart Functionality;

• Business to Business online ordering;

• Integration between Ecommerce functionality and your existing accounting, inventory management or Contact Management software;

• Website content management;

• Email marketing campaign management; and

• Contact and customer management (core CRM).

What's more, with training you can set up and administer most of this functionality through the StraightSELL control Panel yourself.

General Ecommerce and Shopping Cart Functionality

StraightSELL has a depth of functionality in terms of B2C and B2B Ecommerce functionality:

• Multiple methods for product data upload including web form, spreadsheet and (with the Catalogue Link integration tool) from a direct link to the inventory file in your accounting system;
• Supports both retail online ordering and online ordering for account customers through secure logins;
• Ability to set default currency;
• Links to real time currency converters allowing your customers to see your pricing in their own currency;
• Ability to run your Ecommerce store with or without integration to your accounting system;
• Complete control over the look of the shopping cart solution;
• Favourites list for logged in customers and ability for these customers to order from previous orders to save time;
• Choose from a number of different credit card payment solutions that are already integrated with StraightSELL;
• Customise what information both anonymous and account customers see;
• Ability to have multiple versions of your product catalogue;
• You can define you own catalogue fields and format- for example if you sell books you can add fields like Author, title and ISBN rather than just have the generic product fields like product name, product description e.t.c;
• You can use a WYSIWG editor to update product information allowing you to display your products nicely without knowing html;
• StraightSELL also supports relationships between products so that it can support things like colour and size options for products and also displaying complementary or substitute products where necessary;
• Ability to define your own categories and the ability to put products in multiple categories;
• Ability to upload and assign images to both items and also to whole categories of items. Ability to search, amend and remove images from products

StraightSELL offers flexible choices as to how you can set freight for your customers:

• It offers a web form freight set up wizard for setting up freight terms for your clients;
• It allows you to upload freight rate spreadsheets from your freight providers that StraightSELL can then use to calculate the freight that is applicable to particular orders;
• You can set up multiple freight options and then set one as default or restrict specific freight options to specific customers.

StraightSELL offers significant functionality for managing your customers. Some of this functionality is discussed under the Contact Management functionality section below but in relation to functionality for managing customers that is specific to those customers online ordering there is the following:

• Ability to set customer specific pricing;
• Ability to approve, reject or revoke a customers online ordering;
• Ability to group customers for the purpose of administration;
• Ability to set custom payment terms and custom freight options for specific clients;
• New- Ability to set a specific design template to the logon of a specific client so that when that customer logs on they see a design that relates to the customer.
• Set an accounting system reference code for a customer (this is automated when using StraightSELL with integration to an accounting system);
• Ability to add whatever additional fields you like against a buyer record;
• Ability to create additional display fields and then restrict this information to specific customers;
• Create login and password details for buyers and functionality to automate both the creation of these details and also the emailing of these to your customers;
• A customisable menu for account customers when they login allowing them to administer their account and set up a favourites list

Other Ecommerce related functionality includes:

• There is stores and locations functionality. By assigning a client to a store or location you can route the orders from those clients to specific people and also have specific ship from locations for each store. You staff members can then be given logins that only allow them to see customer data and orders that relate to the clients assigned to their store or location.
• StraightSELL also offers a lot of functionality to search and sort order data;
• Check the status of the order and add additional fields for recording and displaying other information against orders;
• StraightSELL also generates a number of system emails including order confirmations that can be styled to support your branding;
• You can elect which of your staff receive email notification when an order is raised by a specific client.

There are also many more individual items of functionality but what is more important is that StraightSELL provides flexibility as to how each piece of functionality is used.

StraightSELL provides a platform to manage all of the content you want to display on the web, not just the content that relates to selling things online.

This content management functionality not only allows you to manage all of your static website information through the same solution as you manage your Ecommerce relationships it also allows you to have other dynamic sections of your site so that you can offer client self service to a wide range of data processing tasks (i.e client self registration, clients filling in claims forms e.t.c) The information in these forms then populates your StraightSELL contacts database for reporting or for export to other offline solutions.

The content management functionality of StraightSELL is split into:

• Core content management functionality; and
• Specific content management modules for managing specific content or processes.

• StraightSELL provides a methods for the creation and editing of website content;
• StraightSELL allows you to create, store and edit templates and to then select a template that you wish to apply for each particular page;
• The content of the page is separated from the template. StraightSELL has a WYSIWYG editor for editing content within your web pages without needing to know html;
• StraightSELL has a form generator that allows you to create forms for your website that contain whatever specific fields you need in them. These forms can be linked to the StraightSELL contacts database such that the information captured by these forms can be searched and used;
• StraightSELL provides versioning and limited roll back functionality for your webpages;
• StraightSELL offers features to assist W3C compliance including an editing tool for adding image descriptions, meta and title tag text to assist screen readers;
• StraightSELL has a role based security system that allows you to create roles that give users with those roles assigned to them specific permissions as to what they can and cannot see and do;
• StraightSELL allows you to split the editing and publishing roles for your site to give a company control over what content is published on your website
• StraightSELL allows you to create a directory structure for files, web pages and images and allows content to be either active on the website generally, restricted to specific users, or to be completely "parked" whilst it is not in use.

• StraightSELL provides a module for publishing news articles on your site without the user needing to know html;

There are several other specific content management modules that have been developed in StraightSELL over the years including:

• Bulletin board and web forums functionality;
• A categorised corporate and service directory
• A booking system for booking accommodation; and
• Event registration functionality;
• A membership management module.

These modules have not yet been transferred from the old StraightSELL system to the new StraightSELL system. We expect this will happen progressively over the course of 2007.

Until recently what was lacking in Ecommerce solutions was the ability to effectively manage the relationship you have with your online customers.

The StraightSELL contact management and email campaign management modules have filled this gap and has in our opinion made the StraightSELL platform the most complete platform on the market for setting up customer portals and online stores that become a key part of the way you deal with your clients.

Contact Management functionality includes:

• Ability to create, search, edit and delete contacts;
• The ability to either enter or edit contacts and other types of data through a web form or through a bulk upload;
• The ability to add additional fields to your contacts so that your contacts database mirrors the fields you have in other applications or that you ask clients to fill in on your website;
• Ability to add and edit organisations and their details, add fields against organisations, add and remove contacts from an organisation;
• Set tasks and reminders and assign them to users. StraightSELL generates email reminders when set to do so;
• The role based security allows you to control access to your contacts database by the parameters you choose.

It is easy to send emails to clients but it is another thing entirely to manage this process effectively. The StraightSELL email marketing module includes functionality to help you maximise the results you get from your email communications with your clients:

• StraightSELL allows you to set up email campaigns and assign users and groups to a campaign;
• StraightSELL allows you to apply an email template to a campaign and to save templates.