Review of ShopSite Manager 3.1

Smaller storeowners have two special needs when it comes to setting up a shopping cart system to sell products in their online store: (1) moderate price, and (2) the ability to maintain the store themselves, several times a week if need be. ICentral's ShopSite Manger 3.1 meets both of these criteria rather well.

ShopSite Manager's "back office" allows the storeowner the ability to update the store with only a Web browser. From the main menu you select "product," from which you may add a product or edit an existing product. Information for a product must include a name. Optional information can include SKU, price, graphic, description, size or color options, a "more information" screen, etc.

You may list some of your products as "sub-products" under a main product. For example, a laptop computer might come with 5 accessories (e.g. 16 MB of memory, carrying case, etc.) which need little explanation. The accessories could appear under the laptop description with just a name and a price as "sub-products," making it convenient to select several items which go together (though the full description with photo could also appear on a separate "Accessories" page).

Next, you can create a "laptop computer" page and place products on this page in any order you desire. You will probably also want to create a "Specials" page on which you feature and rotate your more popular products. You place a product on the page just by selecting a checkbox next to the product name. The page templates allow Web designers to cut and paste HTML code into the customization areas, but storeowners with little HTML skill can still do a great deal, once they learn how to use <P> and <BR> to put breaks between lines.

A "universal header" and "universal footer" feature allows you to give each page a uniform look and feel. I've been able to use this to create a "side menu" with either imagemap or text links, for example. Each page also allows a background image, and the ability to link to other pages.

While most shopowners will use their Web browser for maintenance, you could administer your store from a desktop database from which you upload the most recent product and page information for a complete change. While this feature can be quite powerful, the more complex the product or page, the more difficult it is to get everything exactly right on the database upload. Unfortunately, you can't download your existing site into your desktop database for alteration.

Each time a set of changes is made to the store, you click on "update" to generate completely new HTML pages from ShopSite's internal database. What you end up with, however, are static Web pages which can be searched and indexed easily by Web search engines, which is often not the case for other shopping cart systems. ShopSite uses cookies to distinguish between shoppers. If a shopper doesn't take cookies, shopper ID defaults to the shopper's IP number.

If you just want to add an ordering capability to existing Web pages, ShopSite's "easy embed" feature allows you to copy the HTML code from ShopSite and paste it into your existing Web pages. These pages do not need to be on the same server as your ShopSite store, and work rather well. Conceivably, you could have several sites which use your ShopSite store for their ordering capability, though a single store name would be used on all the receipts. Separate store names and URLs require a separate store license.

When a shopper places an order, both the shopper and storeowner are sent copies of the order (omitting for security reasons, of course, the credit card number). The store owner then points a Web browser to the back office, views the order, and prints it out on a printer for fulfillment. ShopSite can be completely configured for nearly any language (except high-bit languages such as Korean and Chinese).

While ShopSite gives you a product which makes store maintenance easy, you also end up with some frustrations about things you can't customize. The "show contents of shopping cart" page needs some reworking, and should allow for additional customization. Selection of shipping options is clumsy and not intuitive. The shipping tables should also allow more than 7 different weight ranges. (On the other hand, ShopSite gives a greater than average number of options for how shipping cost is figured.) Higher volume stores will wish ShopSite included a way to download order files rather than have to print them out and re-key them into the shopowner's desktop fulfillment system. (We are told that a free upgrade form version 3.1 to 3.2 next month will allow order data export in tab delimited format.) Nor does ShopSite presently allow for real-time credit card authorization. The shopowner would probably run the credit cards from a desktop program card authorization program prior to fulfillment.

All in all, however, ShopSite Manager 3.1 is an excellent product for the smaller shopowner, and wins our Web Commerce Today Editor's Choice designation for its ease-of-use, feature, and price combination. We recommend this for stores of a few products to several hundred products. Stores with thousands of products probably need a program more adaptable to SQL databases. (We'll be reviewing some of these in the future.)

• Comparison with other shopping cart programs
• ICentral's Tina's Toy's Demo allows you to see all the back office features