Purpose
This module was developed to allow for the online sales of products, downloads, and links to privileged areas within the site. This module allows for full ecommerce sales, including integration with credit card fulfillment agencies (Verisign, PayPal, Authorize.net, Ticketmaster, and Bank of America).
This module offers a Reporting: Product Catalog module, which is the receptacle for all orders placed, allowing you to query and export this data (in any format needed) to re-use for reporting, and to populate your back office systems (Inventory, Accounting, Shipping)
Description
This module allows for the online sales of products, downloads, and links to privileged areas within the site. This module allows for full ecommerce sales, including integration with credit card fulfillment agencies (Verisign, PayPal, Authorize.net, Ticketmaster, and Bank of America).
Each product (or record) within the module includes a caption, full description (including images and html, if any), thumbnail image, large image, wholesale and retail pricing (allowing you to manage different pricing schemas between private and public site visitors), dim weight (used to calculate real time shipping), File upload (intended for downloads that site visitors may buy, like research reports or articles), and even alternative links (in the event some products are being fulfilled via amazon.com within your catalog). This module also allows you to relate 'products to products' in order to suggest up/cross selling between products, taxonomy (allowing users to search for products based on their type, or sub types (Example: Books, Fiction, Paperback). It also allows for the relationship of ancillary media files (From Media Manager, such as flash commercials or product specifications), and related accessories (in the event a product has related products which 'must' go with it, to bundle a product suite).
This module DOES NOT manage your back office inventory or accounting....and requires that all incoming transactions are emailed to your staff, and/or exported from the Product Catalog reporting module, which may then be periodically imported into your back office systems. Although these exports can be modified to represent scheduled routines....it is not realistic to treat this module as a full scale ERP/Online order management system (meaning it cannot manage live inventory, and count down per order). It is merely an online ecommerce shopping cart, but with all of the best practices leveraged within.
How To Use
This module is found within the Ecommerce tab of your Client Console. To add a new product, simply click on new. This form will allow you to enter a title, caption, full description, upload thumbnail image, large image of the product, dim weight, relate to other products, accessories or media files that may already be entered, and categorize what type of product it is by its taxonomy types. Once this record is submitted, it can be found within the Product Catalog relative to the taxonomy type that it was submitted for.
Based on the audience types and sites selected, this will determine where the record appears within the site. Applying this record to ALL will allow it to be found throughout the entire site, and applying it ONLY to a specific audience type (or group), will ensure that it is only seen within those site areas only.
This is especially beneficial, in the case of a portal which is fundamentally e-commerce driven. In this way, the site can be segmenteded by Audience Type (representing the different genre of products that you may manage. Example: Audience Types could be created for Adults, Teens-Girls, Teen-Boys, Children). This would allow for a stand alone web site for each of these consumer types....showing only those products within those individual sites.
Additional Form Items, allow you to capture more information than the standard registration options. This field has been added so that you can ask more questions of the user, which may be needed for ancillary items such as market surveys or how did they hear about your site. We recommend using the Survey Manager module to create these questionairres, but you can use whatever tool you like, and copy and paste this form into the record, within the Additional Form Items field. In this way, your reporting module will not only capture the order information, but this information as well....giving you everything you need to take orders online.
Tips About This Module
Some clients will use this module to fulfill subscriptions to magazines, using an email based order processing only, while others will use it to sell research documents and downloads (videos, pdfs, etc.). Most clients use it to sell conventional products such as calendars, mugs, tote bags, and is also often used as a company store to sell merchandise for retailers, dealers and distributors.
Many clients prefer to take advantage of the 'tree view' of taxonomy, which follows the user through ecommerce, presenting other 'types' of products as links, to keep the user from searching again the different types of products when they 'continue shopping'. Please visit different ecommerce websites before getting started to better understand how you would like to present your products, and a good study of your Product Catalog taxonomy would be advised, before getting started. To learn of detailed taxonomies of your product types, search others in your industry who may already offer ecommerce, and it might help guide your set up.
This module will require that you set up a record within Ecommerce/Administration in order that these orders will be processed accordingly, in line with your Verisign, Authorize.net, paypal, or email based order workflow.
Additional Form Items, allow you to capture more information than the standard registration options. This field has been added so that you can ask more questions of the user, which may be needed for ancillary items such as market surveys or how did they hear about your site. We recommend using the Survey Manager module to create these questionairres, but you can use whatever tool you like, and copy and paste this form into the record, within the Additional Form Items field. In this way, your reporting module will not only capture the order information, but this information as well....giving you everything you need to take orders online.
This module supports promotional/discount codes...giving users the ability to get discounts at checkout. This module also supports the ability to manage a variety of different tax rates at the Country, State and Local level...including the ability to manage these rates yourself as they inevitably change.