Take complete control of your marketing and sales strategy

eCommerce supports all product types, from single items, to complex products (think movies available in DVD, Blu-ray or other formats), bundles and kits.

eCommerce takes advantage of key CMS400.NET technologies, including Smart Forms and market-leading taxonomy and search. Product entry Smart Forms standardize the way that products are entered; all of the information, attributes, and descriptive text is entered in one place and goes into the database as structured XML data (making it easy to repurpose this content wherever and whenever you need it).

Enhance product SEO in the Smart Form by setting attributes, adding metadata and including photos and other media. Adding images of products auto-generates thumbnails and gives you complete control over sizes and number of images, as well as a clickthrough image gallery. Images can also be defined for the product type via the taxonomy.

Control over product extends to cross-sell and upsell features and Ektron’s taxonomy enables products to be classified in multiple ways, providing even more options for you to direct your customers to the product they are looking for.

CMS400.NET’s Web 2.0 content review tools find new uses here, letting your customers post their opinions and 5-star ratings on products they have purchased. Searching for product uses Ektron’s unparalleled taxonomy, and those searches can be filtered by price, ratings, reviews and more.

Existing product data can be imported into eCommerce and the CMS using Ektron’s flexible, scalable API.

There is no login necessary for purchases (but you can make it a requirement), and when a customer is a member of your eCommerce site, they can name and save shopping baskets for future purchases or as wish lists and registries. Your site administrators can always see what baskets are still open.

Checking out is a multi-step process: display all of the steps on a single page or distribute them through multiple pages. While they are checking out, users can save as many shipping addresses as they want, or simply check “same as billing”.

Shipping uses real-time rates by plugging into external providers or you can use your own rates by setting up an internal shipping provider. Rates allow for a lot of customization: they can be set up by package size, product weight and even product price ranges.

Payment options are flexible with eCommerce too: you can decide what credit cards you want to accept and gateways such as Payflow and Authorize.Net are supported out-of-the-box to authorize and capture transactions. Or, override this to create your own payment gateway (one that allows terms or any other payment option).

Once the order is reviewed and submitted (and payment is authorized), it can go through a simple or complex routing through your own processiing setup or plug-in to your existing CRM or ERP to process the order. When the order is processed, the CRM/ERP notifies CMS400.NET that it is complete. Online inventory is kept up to date; you can set properties so that when items on hand drop below a certain level, it triggers a sequence to notify your inventory control.

eCommerce supports a complete array of pricing schemes: individual pricing, separate pricing within complex products, tiered pricing to support volume discounts and more. Online coupon capability is also included, letting you set the type (for example, dollar amount, percentage or free shipping) and at what level those coupons are applied (product level, basket level and type of item).

For global business opportunities, all international currencies are available. You are able to use conversion rates to determine prices or set flat costs for each product. This goes hand in hand with the tax options available. Set tax classes, including country, state, and local (by postal code) as well as taxes for specific classes of goods, and be able to sell to even more customers.

Ektron eCommerce leverages the advanced core functionality of CMS400.NET to give developers a complete toolset that works out-of-the-box or can be completely customized (and everything in between). Powerful Web 2.0 controls of CMS400.NET, including memberships, ratings, forums and commenting, enabling you to quickly implement an e-commerce site with the community-based information they want to help them to make buying decsions.

As a .NET application, eCommerce uses the same database as CMS400.NET to maximize efficiencies and takes advantage of SQL cluster capabilities to be truly scalable. There is no need for glue code to tie a third-party e-commerce application to your Web site. Ektron eCommerce utilizes CMS400.NET’s existing customizability to enable integration into any IT infrastructure. Open architecture and a new ektron.cms.commerce API makes any commerce configuration possible, letting you tie it in to your backend systems.