Online Shopping - Big Wave for SMEs

ShopSite 7.1 Helps You Build It Better
ShopSite has long offered an accessible e-commerce service for small busines owners who want to develop and publish Web-based catalogs without speaking HTML.
It also offers greater depth for Web site designers who want to create more sophisticated online stores. In its latest version, 7.1, it adds support for gift certificates and additional payment gateways, XML upload capabilities and intrusion detection — all of which make a first-rate product even better.

At its core, ShopSite allows you to set up a professional-looking online store through a Web-browser interface. You can use the program to build a site from scratch, or add ShipSite's shopping cart feature to an existing Web site. After building a site, you can use ShopSite to accept credit cards through major payment gateways and manage the store through a Web browser.

The system offers support for two new payment gateways: WorldPay, which is used by many international customers, and YourPaySM. These gateways augment the existing payment options, which include VeriSign's PayFlow Pro, Authorize.Net, Cardservice International, eBay's PayPal's IPN (Instant Payment Notification) and Paymentech Orbital Gateway.
Building Online Catalogs:
ShopSite works through a Web browser and doesn't require you to download or install programs on your desktop to create and manage a ShopSite store.

ShopSite actually consists of three products:
ShopSite Starter, ShopSite Manager and ShopSite Pro.

> ShopSite Starter is for merchants that have relatively few products to sell and are getting their feet wet in online sales.

> The more powerful ShopSite Manager supports an unlimited number of products and pages, can send e-mail receipts, offers custom templates, data upload and download features, and can calculate shipping costs and taxes based on zip code.

>ShopSite Pro allows stores to work with coupons, gift certificates, volume and other discounts and affiliate sales. It also offers sophisticated product searches, can alert businesses to low stock situations, and edit product prices and other parameters based on percentages.

Moving Product Data Online
If you have existing product database, you can upload inventory as tab-delimited text files and the program provides good options for matching database fields with those in its catalogs. Pictures, however, aren't as easy to manage because ShopSite can't modify image sizes or depths. You have to edit images offline, using an image editor such as Adobe PhotoShop. You can see how they look only after you've uploaded and published the picture in your online catalog.