Review: HipHip MerchandiZer 4.0

Available since 1997, HipHip Software's MerchandiZer e-commerce software is one of the best choices for small to medium businesses seeking to sell products via the Internet. It is most remarkable for its breadth of available features, and unmatched among similarly priced e-commerce software. (Miva Merchant comes in second if you count the third-party plugins.)

Pricing

MerchandiZer is an e-commerce ASP (Application Service Provider). That means the application is hosted on HipHip's servers and merchants pay a monthly fee based on the number of products (SKUs) listed in the store.

Pricing is comparable to, but better than, Yahoo! Store's current pricing system of $100/month for up to 50 products,k or $300/month for up to 1000 products and $100/month additional for each 1000 additional products. (Note: Yahoo! Store is changing their pricing effective 10/1/01.)

Unlike Yahoo! Store, MerchandiZer does not include a payment gateway in its price, but instead offers the merchant a record number of integrated payment gateway possibilities. These include: Authorize.Net v2.5 and v3.0, Netbanx (UK), Banca Sella (Italy), CyberCash, Bank of America, VeriSign Lite and Pro, Banco Comercial Portugues, SurePay, FirePay, and Internet Cash. This makes it easy for non-US merchants to connect with their banks. Pricing for payment gateways varies from $10 to $50 per month; additional transaction fees are charged by some gateways.

Basic Set-Up

Basic store set-up is quite simple using the merchant's password-protected, back-office web interface known as MerchandiZer Manager. The set-up wizard collects information about your company and then asks how you want to organize your products. You can select either a single level of "groups" for a simple store (e.g., CDs, Books, Posters), or a two-level structure of "groups and subgroups" for a more complex structure (e.g., group: CDs and subgroups of Classical, Jazz, Rock, etc.). In my experience, none but the very largest stores require more than two levels of hierarchy.

The basic set-up section also enables you to set up drop-down menus for products that require options such as color or size. Shipping rates, sales tax, and payment methods (credit card options, online checkes, etc.) are also selected here.

Product information can be very simple or quite complex, depending upon your needs. Beyond a basic product name and a brief description of up to 900 characters, you can include a long description of any length, and 6 other description fields of up to 500 characters each. These fields are useful when describing a complex group of products. For example, books might include the ISBN number, title, author, short description, long description, publisher's name, publication date, dimensions, cover type, number of pages, etc. Other fields include list price, selling price, and sale price, whether or not a club discount applies, the image filename, template for a "more information" page, date of first entry, weight, group, subgroup, dropdown menus (up to 2) for options, inventory level, download URL (for digitally delivered products), whether the item is taxable, sales tax rate, personalization label, and vendor.

If you have hundreds of products, you are able to limit your view to only those in a particular department or subgroup. This makes it simple to see what you have and what you need to add. You can also choose to see the quick view for a group of products (such as, SKU, product name, short description, and price) for quick and easy adjustments to products and prices.

While MerchandiZer does allow you to sell digital products, it doesn't contain a sophisticated, unique URL that disappears in 24 hours like some other systems. Instead it takes the purchaser to a simple URL where the product can be downloaded.

Catalog Maintenance

MerchandiZer Manager includes a Catalog (advanced) section that allows for easy addition and maintenance of prices, weights, image filenames, stock levels, and download site URLs. Each of these screens allows filtering by SKU, product name, reference number, and stock level (but, strangely, not by group or subgroup). The system even allows you to search for items that aren't assigned to a group or subgroup so you can round up the strays.

Discounts, Promotions, and Sales

MerchandiZer allows you to set up a Club for members who get a special discount on items. This is a single discount percentage set for the entire store under "advanced settings."

Individual products may be placed on sale by adding a sale price to them.

New and sale products can automatically appear in a "new" section (though not the front page of the store), and then be shown only in their regular location after a set number of days.

Members can be given a membership code as well as an individual password. A price category can be set for each member if you decide to set up multiple discount levels (for an extra monthly price). This feature is important for B2B sites that negotiate particular price structures with different clients or different classes of clients. For example, contractors might get a standard 25% off, large contractors 30%, and the ABC Company has a special deal negotiated for 32% off list. A straight percentage discount based on total sale price of an order is not available.

Shipping and Taxes

Shipping allows for quite a bit of flexibility. Many US and Canadian merchants will want to use the free UPS plug-in that calculates shipping based on weight to most North American destinations. If you like, you can add a flat handling charge to each order on top of the UPS rate calculation. Merchants can construct a "graduated shipping" table with different shipping fees based on product sales total, reference numbers, or weight. Merchants can construct a list of states or provinces of their choice to be displayed as a drop-down menu on the order form. Third party providers BorderFree or From2 can be selected to handle shipping and logistics for international sales.

Sales tax can be determined by state or by VAT taxes used in Europe. In addition, the merchant can decide whether or not to assess sales tax on the product total (including shipping, depending upon the prevailing state law). Companies with a corporate presence in several states can elect (for an additional monthly charge) to use the third-party provider DPC to calculates sales tax according to ZIP code.

Design

The back-office Manager allows you to set up a consistent storewide design for the various product pages. You pick the "theme" or basic color scheme combination that can then be modified color by color. A header or footer can also be applied to all the pages in the site. 

A strong features offers you the ability to select the product page template best suited to the type of products you carry in your store. They supply 40+ adaptable templates. The site navigation bar and the table of contents menu can also be customized. The home page, FAQ, contact us pages are all static HTML pages and not dynamically generated using templates.

You edit the home page separately from the database-driven product templates by typing in regular text and uploading pictures, or pasting HTML code into a box provided. 

Dynamic vs. Static Pages

Like many store-building systems, MerchandiZer creates dynamic webpages from a database. They only exist in real-time when requested by a customer's web browser. This means that individual product pages are not indexable by search engines. While you can set up META tags on the home page and any other HTML pages you want to upload, the lack of searchability -- at least on sectional pages -- limits the marketing potential of a MerchandiZer site. Large stores really need to use dynamic webpages in order to organize their sites, but smaller stores might consider systems such as ShopSite (www.shopsite.com) that allow you to create and maintain search-engine-friendly, static sectional and product pages.

Flexibility

MerchandiZer is one of the most flexible merchant-accessible store-building systems I've seen. The wording on every screen can be changed so the site can be translated into any single-byte language, or to adjust and customize the wording on pagges, buttons, confirmation e-mails and error messages. The store can be set up with or without a frame navigation system.

The advanced set-up system enable the merchant to limit exposure to fraud by giving you the option to require the billing address to be the same as the shipping address. Requiring a positive AVS (Address Verification System) check of ZIP code and address costs an extra $15 per month. I am assuming that merchants can also elect to purchase fraud check services through their payment gateway provider at no extra charge.

Other features built into the basic system are coupons, the ability for customers to put free items in their shopping cart, designation of a minimum order size, and a built-in rudimentary affiliate program. (A password-protected affiliate interface is an additional module.)

Order Management

One of the attractive features of MerchandiZer is the ability of customers to check the status of their order online. Merchants, too, can track the progress of orders by marking the shipping date and tracking number when shipped. The system can handle both partial and full order fulfillment and a separate e-mmail can be generated when products are shippped. 

A screen that allows manual entry and editing of customer data.  However,  I also found it difficult to search for a particular order without knowing the date of the order. The merchant does manual entry of telephoned, faxed, or mailed orders using the regular storefront interface.

The program makes it easy to scan inventory levels to see which items need to be reordered. It also allows scanning of sales by affiliate code, as well as orders that require engraving or personalization.

Each of the database "tables" that drive a merchant's store -- Catalog, Prospects, Customers, Order Summary, and Order Details -- can be exported in CSV (comma separated value) format that can then be imported into a spreadsheet for further analysis. Or, if you were ever to leave the MerchandiZer environment and move to another store-building program, all the data is easy to access. HipHip Software says that this CSV format allows direct import into QuickBooks. 

Although the third-party desktop Stoneedge Order Manager for ShopSite and Americart stores (www.stoneedge.com/OrderManager.htm) provides more functionality for order, purchasing, and vendor management, MerchandiZer's system is good and getting better.

Statistics

I am quite impressed with the statistics section. For these purposes a "prospect" is a visitor who has not yet made a purchase but filled out a contact form. A "customer" is a visitor who has made a purchase. Merchants can get reports for whatever dates they desire, detailing:

• Sales prospect keywords
• Customers by source
• Site traffic
• Sales prospects by day
• Sales by day
• Sales analysis by month
• Associate (affiliate) analysis by month
• Sales totaled by SKU

These reports allow a merchant to get a pretty good handle on customers, sales, and traffic.

Purchasing, Sales, and Marketing

The program includes a way to enter the names and addresses of vendors. Catalog items have a drop-down menu that lists all available vendors, so when it comes time to reorder, vendor information is accessible. An additional module is available to allow vendors external access to their sales and inventory reports. 

The Sales and Marketing section of MerchandiZer Manager allows merchants to customize the "how you found us" options and areas of interest in the site "contact us" form. There is also a feature allowing limited mailing to prospects responding to information requests. There are pages to help merchants submit to search engines and see how many have links to their site, but the interface looks dated -- some of the search engines no longer exist.

Additional Modules

As MerchandiZer's merchants have requested special features, the company's programmers have made valuable extensions to the program's functionality, improving MerchandiZer year by year. When those features are likely to be used by many merchants, they are included in the core code, which is updated at no charge.  Some features, however, are available as add-ons for an additional monthly fee for Gold and Premium Merchandizer merchants. These include:

• XML import and export, especially useful for B2B sites
• Multiple languages per website, for merchants seeking an international clientele
• Vendor access to sales and inventory reports, for high volume B2C and B2B merchants
• Advanced drop-down menus that include different SKUs and/or prices
• Graduated discounts by customer group, especially useful for B2B sites that negotiate prices for different classes of customers as well special prices for large-volume customers
• Advanced cross selling, linking items placed in the shopping cart to other products a customer might be interested in buying at the same time.
• Affiliate access to the affiliate's own sales report
• Gift wrapping
• Whole site passwording, useful for B2B sites especially
• Shipping costs by zone and method
• Secure server with your own digital certificate
• Full text indexing
• Address verification

Recommendation

MerchandiZer is a great e-commerce platform for serious small to medium size online merchants. The program allows for growth in store size as well as a great breadth of features and functionality. For many merchants, the online order and sales tracking -- with their desktop accounting program -- will be all they need to run their business.

The smallest merchants will look to low-priced beginner systems such as BigStep (www.bigstep.com). Others may opt for Yahoo! Store (store.yahoo.com) for the extra traffic generated by Yahoo! Shopping, to ShopSite (www.shopsite.com) static product pages, or Miva Merchant (www.miva.com) for programmability. But many merchants will find MerchandiZer exactly what they are looking for and will be hard-pressed to find features they need that MerchandiZer hasn't already perfected. Strongly recommended.