SurfiOnline

I’d like to introduce you to Interspire’s upcoming Interspire Shopping Cart product allowing users to set up their own e-commerce store. There’s a particular reason I’m writing about this and it isn’t because of the mention on this page (more of that later this week) but more because of what Interspire Shopping Cart brings to the market.

At the moment there are several open source and commercial e-commerce scripts written in PHP. OS-Commerce, CubeCart, and X-Cart, are a few of the more popular solutions with MonsterCommerce and Shopify being hosted equivalents. With the exception of Shopify, what each and every one of these solutions does wrong is assumes that store administrators have some sort of knowledge in the IT industry whether it is for running the store or customizing it. The majority too, are not aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

Interspire Shopping Cart wins hands down on e-commerce done right - something that is powerful, easy to use, flexible and very customisable. This is a product that has been designed from the ground up, properly with lots of thought going in to the interface and usability. This may sound very hypocritical, for the reason linked to above, but this product is going to become one of the industry leaders in the PHP e-commerce market because it seriously is an awesome product.

Why do I think this?

Design Mode

Design Mode allows administrators with absolutely no or very little IT experience to customise their store. You can arrange the content on your store until you’re happy with the layout all via a drag and drop interface. You can also edit the front end language of the store directly inline quick editing similar to what flickr has.

Not only the above, but for those with experience in web development (or basic HTML knowledge) can edit the different panels, HTML and style sheets from the front end via a popup window called the Design Mode Editor. It provides a flexible interface similar to a text editor with syntax highlighting, resizable panels and very quick AJAX based file loading & saving routines.

An screenshot of Design Mode: (and video showing off the functionality)

The Design Mode functionality has also been completely rewritten and kicks way more ass than the demonstration above.

Product & Search Recommendations

Amazon’s product cross-selling and recommendations are a major player in their business model. They rely on product recommendations for a large amount of sales. Whilst Interspire Shopping Cart cannot exactly match the powerful recommendation features in place by Amazon (Amazon have hardware & custom developed software specifically designed to drive their recommendations system), it can do a damn good job of showing recommendations in several places.

When viewing a product, you’re shown a list of popular products also purchased by users who bought the item you’re viewing. Interspire Shopping Cart can also either automatically (based on title & description) or manually (a predefined list) pull a list of related products for the product a customer is viewing.

The brand new (as in finished and announced today) search functionality provides a list of related searches other users have performed as well as offers suggestions for misspellings.

I don’t know how many times, personally, I’ve visited a store and looked at a few products only to get distracted by something else and when I come back to the store in a few days time, I’m unable to remember exactly what products I was previously looking at. StoreSuite stores, for each customer, recent items they’ve viewed - a very powerful, and in my opinion necessary feature.

Customer Messaging

One of the pitfalls of all of the e-commerce solutions mentioned above is customer service & support facilities, or lack there-of. If you can’t provide good service to a customer then chances are you’re going to lose that sale - and that is a sale you’ll never actually make back.

Interspire Shopping Cart has a unique built in messaging platform allowing customers to quickly send a message off to the store for any queries relating to one of their orders. The messages are stored, staff are notified and replies can be made through the administration interface. Customers are then notified via email that there has been a reply to their support request.

Custom Saved Searches

Whilst it may seem like a really simple feature, saved searches are quite possibly a very powerful feature. I speak from experience when I say most stores (both online & bricks/mortar stores) generate sales reports on a daily basis.

Saved Searches are exactly this. You specify your search criteria, enter a name for your search and it is saved for quick future access. Example saved searches would be “All orders awaiting payment”, “Orders made with totals over $5,000″, “Frequent customers with 50 or more orders.” The good thing about Interspire Shopping Cart is that these searches are not hard coded and can be completely customised to view the kind of information that is important to your business.

Custom searches can be performed in the administration interface for the following:

• Orders
• Products
• Customers

Product Comparisons

It’s often a pain to manually have to differentiate between two different products in the same category on a store. Either you’ve got a store with a very long title containing all of the product specific features or you need to open each of the products you wish to look at, memorise the features and then do compare it with the others.

In Interspire Shopping Cart, customers can easily compare two or more products in a single list. This will definitely help with sales as customers can quickly & easily differentiate between features of a specific item.

Dynamic Promotions

It’s a no brainer that setting up a promotion on your store will guarantee you additional sales and stores often go about setting up promotions such as “The Bargain Bin” or “10% off.”. What most stores do wrong, is incorrectly advertise and market these promotions. As a result, they’re not getting the same throughput of sales as they could have been receiving.

StoreSuite makes it easy to place promotional banners on a site. You select your promotional image, enter the page you want it linked to and decide on the placement. StoreSuite does the rest with no template modifications on your behalf necessary.

Enhanced with AJAX

Interspire Shopping Cart makes extensive use of AJAX based functionality.. For those of you playing at home this allows users to quickly view extra information without an additional full page refresh or reload.

Interspire Shopping Cart allows administrators to quickly see all orders for a particular customer nested in a list below their customer information. Of course, this information is only shown & loaded when you request it.

You can manage the status of an order or view the products within an order all from the “View Orders” - two very powerful features.

StoreSuite also allows product & option inventory management directly from the product listing page. Updating the stock level of a particular item is as easy as expanding the product, entering the quantity and clicking Save. You can then carry on with the next product you wish to update without reloading the page.

Of course, Interspire Shopping Cart has many other powerful features and the above are just a few of what I believe are the most important and I’m most excited about.

• The easiest shipping configuration that you’ll ever see including real time shipping quotes
• Supports the leading payment gateways by default as well as manual payment methods
• Ability to browse a store via price point
• Real time inventory control - AJAX based
• Ability to specify shipping tracking numbers for a particular order
• Supports both tangible and intangible products (you can sell software downloads for example)
• Full customer order tracking via the web interface
• Multiple customer shipping addresses
• What product these days does not have tag clouds?
• Advanced search functionality which makes use of the powerful MySQL Boolean Fulltext search capabilities
• Product ratings & reviews
• Integration with SendStudio for powerful email marketing & campaign support
• + More!

You’ll be hearing more from me in the upcoming days - but for now, go have a good read through the Interspire & Interspire Shopping Cart websites.