In order for you to make an educated decision in whether this program will meet your needs, then you need to know all of the details and aspects of the program. Selling things on the Internet is much harder than you think. If you can't build the trust of the customer, and process orders correctly day after day, your store will simply fail. Whether times are good or bad, your store has to generate sales revenue. If you buy this program and deploy it correctly, you should be able to pay off the program cost in the first 6 months of operation. The rest is pure profit after that, or gravy.
Internet Commerce Engine 5 is not about bells and whistles. It’s all about the daily reliable operation of your store, while retaining very high levels of customer satisfaction, with no abandoned carts. On the back-end, it's about processing orders in an organized manner, regardless of how many employees participate in the process.
Over the last 6 years, many customers have called in looking for a certain feature or feature set, which was very important to them. At the time, we were not able to provide the feature but went ahead and wrote it down on our list. So over the last 6 years, we have developed most of the features that were requested, while building the foundation to create the more complex features that seemed to be the way into the future.
Many other features such as exporting to QuickBooks, mobile phone support, Google cart, Amazon support just to name a few, have been put on the back burner, because nobody that has called, or uses our product has ever asked for them. We constructed the most important features first, which is building and getting the item into the cart, so the customers can check out and make payment. The features in our program are the features that business owners, marketing and IT staff has asked for over the years.
Please take the time to look at the features and detailed aspects of Internet Commerce Engine 5. If you have any questions, please feel free to call or email us, and we will explain it more in detail. To see the features in action, go to the Web Live Production Websites page, and test drive a live production site.
Our main priority for Internet Commerce Engine 5 is called the Dynamic Shopping Cart. The Dynamic Cart is capable of accepting anything you can imagine. If you can write a program to create the item, then you can place it in our shopping cart, make payment, and then wait for it to arrive. Dynamic cart is capable of storing the customized item, and capable of reproducing the item again for manufacturing and shipping.
Static items are tangible, in other words you can hold them or are considered wealth or property. Unlike a service, they require transportation to the one that has made the purchase. So you have to be able to put them in a shopping cart, figure out the price of transportation to the customer, give the customer a quotation on shipping, and if they accept the final price, let them make payment. The accord is now complete.
These type of items are pretty simple to handle, and just require a part number or sku to represent the item in general. Thus, the part number for the apple could be APPLE-RED.
Dynamic items get a little more complicated. Let's take the Hanes T-Shirts above as an example. This is the Hanes Beefy T-Shirt that has a Hanes part number of 5180. Behind the part number is a suffix code that represents the color of the shirt. This shirt is available in around 32 colors total. So now you have two options available to you when you list this item. You can list it by style and color, and use the size suffix to narrow it down to the final selection. Or list the item as a style and color, and just add the size suffix.
Dynamic Cart gives you more flexibility in how you list and sell items, and is capable of storing anything, while letting the customer complete the checkout process in a accurate manner. This example can be applied to many different products, and you are only limited by your imagination during the setup process.
Dynamic Cart was originally written to handle orders for Replacement Windows, Countertops, Kitchen and Bathroom Cabinets, and whatever else you can think of like custom built computers. We have written 2 prototype programs that have the capability to build counter-tops and replacement windows online, and then be able to place them in the cart, get a shipping quote, and then make payment.
These prototypes were written over 5 years ago, but we lacked the technology to get a shipping quote at the time. The other hurdles we ran into were the ability to unify the program so that any Build2Order Module can be written, and easily installed or uninstalled into the program matrix. Today, ice5 is now ready to pick up where it lifted off 5 years ago. It has been completely rewritten from the ground up to handle the task today.
One of the neat features to dynamic cart is the ability to write g-code for CNC driven milling machines, and to store them in the cart for checkout. We had developed one prototype for counter-tops in which the customer was able to design the item to their specs, and we were able to draw a picture of the items representing each change in measurement or color, while generating the g-code to mill the item out of a sheet of 3/4" MDF with cut optimization. We still have some old code laying around such as the Laminate Manager, that allows customers to select from over 400 Laminate colors and style from 5 US manufactures like Wilson art and Formica.
The possibilities are unlimited with Dynamic Cart. Were looking for ASP.Net developers to pick up where we left off, to develop Build2Order Programs for ice5 Commerce. If you’re a manufacture, then you can be one of the first to offer custom build home improvement products direct to the consumers.
So the only limitation of what you can sell is in our Product Display Module. Our current Product Display module is just a basic module that is capable of selling simple items. We are calling upon developers to create new Product Display programs that will cover the most popular items first, or specialty items. You will be able to purchase these modules soon after they are created, or you can hire a asp.net programmer to create a module for you. You can replace the existing Product Display module, or add as many Customized modules as you need.
Let me explain in detail. You can put anything in the Shopping Cart, thus the term dynamic shopping cart. But you just need the ability to package items into groups of items, represented by a group of part numbers. Let's take a computer for example. The master part number could be AA-2000T, but it only represents a group of part numbers such as the screen, keyboard, power supply. Because of the flexibility offered in this program, it takes more time to add features such as inventory, shipping and so forth.
We upgraded the Product Display Module, and have added a Image Viewer that is capable of displaying 1 main image and up to 3 additional images. You can also zoom the product image now, and pan the images using the mouse. The movie program has also been incorporated into the viewer, in which you can click on the film icon to view the movie. Another upgrade to the program has been the additions of more add 2 cart buttons, in which many more avenues are available to add the product item to the shopping cart.
This module has been rewritten to now include JQuery, which is sort of a JavaScript extension. This has resulted in making the program more smooth and silky, instead of being boxy and clumsy. So we have stripped out the Microsoft Ajax, and replaced it with pure JQuery. Now information is updated in the background, without having to make a complete round trip to the server, and now provides very smooth fading and information updates.
Product Display supports limited items. A limited item would be like a limited Edition Elvis Presley Album in which there are only 20 of them in existence. Once they are gone, that's it, no more are available.
Keep in mind that the background color and the font color of the display can be changed to any color you choose. You can have white pages with black text, or black pages with white text. The colors are set in the property panel of the control on each page. You just select the control, hit F4, and the property panel will appear. Then you select your color and save the changes for the page.
We went modal on add to cart and add to wish list. We wanted to keep the page count down, and experimented with keeping the customer on a single page, without navigating away. So far testing on customers has proven successful, and no one has called in to complain about them. The main problem we had in the past, was crawlers and bots adding items to the shopping cart and populating the tables. We have eliminated the problem now to zero.
The human mind is capable of solving this in a matter of seconds. It is so simple for a human to take items, place them in a box until its full, and then weight the box and measure it. The information is then entered into shipping computer, and a rate is presented. I was watching Modern Marvels one night on FedEx, and I got a glimpse into how airplane containers are loaded with packages. Did you know that FedEx can measure every package with a laser and calculate how much space it occupies, and total it up on a scoreboard until the plane is declared full. But it takes humans to distribute the packages into the containers, and make the final determination on whether the plane is full or not. FedEx says that they are 92% accurate at this moment in time, so the margin of error is only 8%.
This program name is really called SCSOMRC for short. It took 3 years to get it to work on a reliable basis. This program is capable of calculating the total dimensional weight of an item or quantity of items, and then compares it against the gravitational weight. If an item is out of bounds, then the algorithm advances to the next level of service until it fits. Once a fit is made, the program is capable of splitting an order into a limited amount of package or pallet units. Max package units are 165. Max Pallet units are 2200. At the end, each package or pallet unit is reversed dimensioned back into a simple shape for easy quoting.
If this just went over your head or was too technical in nature then good. That's how complex this program is. This program will save your company so much money in lost shipping revenues, which the program itself will pay for itself in very little time. Shipping and labor cost will make or break your internet store. It represents 32% of your overhead, which is 1/3 of your business revenue.
This is the next version of the movie program that support FLV movie playback, and will soon support H264 movie playback as well. You can upload movies from your iPhone, and convert them using FFMpeg to a FLV movie file. We have written our own FFMpeg wrapper from scratch, so it works on Server 2003 and Server 2008 no problem. You can also select the current flv_http_player or the pending flv_rstp_player for streaming from an Adobe Media Server. The RSTP Flash player will be available soon sometime in 2012. Or you can purchase the source code for the player and modify it yourself.
Support for other movies formats are still available, and H264 has been added to the collection. You can extract a thumbnail image from within the movie using a slider control to select a place in the timeline.
Support for up to 4 aspect ratios, including HD formats
The movie program tightly integrates with the product module, in which movies are tied to the products that you select. When a movie is assigned to a product, the customer can watch the movie in a modal interface, without having to navigate away from the original page. When you close the modal movie player, the movie object is automatically destroyed, shutting down the audio in play. If the customer is not able to load the movie object, they can download the movie and play it in a player loaded on their computer. You can also click the movie share textbox, and automatically copy the url text to the clipboard. The movie can now be shared in emails, facebook and twitter, or posted on the customers website for linking.
The Site Administrator is the backend GUI based management system that is used on a daily basis. The program contains everything needed to setup your store, and process orders on a daily basis. Setting up the program is pretty easy. GUI based programs are provided to setup your mail server, your payment gateway, and all your shipping vendors.
The Site Administrator is the backend management program for your online store. First you login to by entering your secure credentials and the order scoreboard will then be display. The order scoreboard will give you a quick heads up on what activity has occurred, and will guide you in processing your orders. The site administrator offers 5 levels of security. The screen shot on the right is showing Level 5, in which you have super user access to everything. Security Level one just gives access to order processing, while security level 4 gives you access to everything but program setup.
Setting up your payment gateway has been reduced to this simple GUI format that we have developed over the years. Although each payment gateway service has a different set of credentials and result codes, we have been able to create a unified structure or foundation that allows ice5 to work with any payment gateway in the industry.
The unified payment processing system has been 5 years in the making, but the final results have been well worth it. We can handle the ability to change payment gateway vendors on the fly, without skipping a beat. Orders that have been processed with the previous vendor will retain full functionality as long as the gateway service is still active. This means you can go back to previous orders and issue a credit, or a partial credit refund, while still using the original Transaction ID.
This is an example on how the payment gateway is setup and programmed. The same applies for shipping and freight as well. We offer a GUI in which all of the payment gateways that we offer can be menu selected by just clicking on your choice. You can also click on the activate button to switch gateways on the fly. The beauty of this interface is that additional gateways can be downloaded and added to the list. So for now, we offer 4 payment gateways, and have plans to add another 5 more by the end of 2011.
Setting up your shipping credentials can range from a simple procedure of just entering your username and password, or can be an extremely complex task. Each shipping vendor we have encountered has a totally different way of thinking, in terms of the information needed to process a transaction.
We still fully support DHL, even though they no longer participate in US Domestic shipments. DHL can still be used for internet stores that are based in Canada or Mexico, and International shipments from the United States. We figure that DHL may enter the US market again sometime in the future.
We have full international support for FedEx and FedEx Ground. We are currently working with FedEx on FedEx Freight for the continental US, and will offer the LTL services as soon as possible.
Setting up your FedEx account information has been streamlined into a 4 step process. You enter your credentials, and our program will generate your meter number and encrypted passphrase for you, and register the information automatically. The same process is available for DHL and UPS as well. If you have never setup FedEx before, you'll appreciate the time we put into writing this program.
We have full international support for UPS Ground and Air Services. We will start looking into support for UPS Freight services, for LTL shipments.
We realize that many items sold require LTL support, and have been able to provide a limited amount of services for now, until the next rewrite of the LTL Shipping modules. As of right now, we support Freightquote.com for LTL services, and expect to rollout FedEx Freight next, and then UPS Freight.
Once again just like in payment gateways, additional shipping modules can be downloaded in the future, and added to the list. Our modular design, allows us to add shipping companies with just a simple download of program data. If a shipping company upgrades or changes their format, the update will be available as a small download.
The Program Management module takes care of your vendor, products, movies, categories, product navigation menus, sales tax collection and rates, shipping rate or service selection, promotion codes, manufacture rebates, user accounts, customer accounts, contact us and more.
Below are some sample screenshots of how Program Management looks and feel, and should give you a clear idea of how valuable the ice5 Site Administrator is. These Management functions took a very long time to write, and contain the input from hundreds of testers. The samples below are the most common tasks that you will live in, while setting up your internet store. All of the modules share the same look and feel, so your learning time should be quite short.
There are so many more features to tell you about in Program Management. We wish we could list them all right now, but were trying to give you the quick view right now.
We have a CRM program module that allows you to cloak your email address from the internet. You can program in an alias name, and point it to an individual, or a group of individuals. You can use the CRM module to answer customer questions straight out of the program, and each email conversation is logged and saved in the database. The next version of CRM will include a Constant Contact type of program, which allows you to generate email campaigns, and transmit them to customers on your mailing list.
Email Addresses are automatically collected with a customer opt in option. Any time someone uses the Contact Us Program, they are allowed to subscribe to the email list by choice. CRM also includes a program for managing email addresses. With the program, you can import email addresses from the customer database.
The messaging system below allows you to read the message off the index, and either reply, or send them to the trash. If the message was sent to the wrong alias or group, then the message can be redirected to the proper department or group of people.
This has reduced span to your email address to zero. And also ensures that all conversations are recorded in the journal, so they can review it at a later date. If a dispute occurs, you'll have the data you need to backup your claims.
The Payment Processing Module is like a virtual credit card machine, in which you can perform many of the same tasks as on a regular credit card machine. The only difference is that the functions are directly tied to orders. So you can credit a order after capture, void a order before capture or auto settlement time.
Once again just like in payment gateways, additional shipping modules can be downloaded in the future, and added to the list. Our modular design allows us to add shipping companies with just a simple download of program data. If a shipping company upgrades or changes their format, the update will be available as a small download
Order Processing manages the final 4 stages of the sales process. When payment is complete, orders are queued up in Order Fulfillment.
The main focus of Internet Commerce Engine 5 is fraud prevention. Keep the money you earn, and not give it away to thieves. Sometimes, honest customers have no clue what their shipping address is, so we created Order Held for Review. If payment results in an AVS Error on the front end, the customer can push the order through for further processing. The order is them queued up in Held for Review. From there, you can fix the payment error and if successful, the order will advance to Order Fulfillment. On orders held for review, A Google satellite map shows you an image of the shipping address for final confirmation, so if the shipping address looks like a dirt lot, you can trash the order. We are also in the process of adding US Postal Verification as well as an automated process. Orders that do not pass can be dumped when you have exhausted all resources. You can also force an authorization through without AVS Checking if you feel the order is legitimate.
The Order Processing module is designed for multiple users, knowing the status of each order without having to talk to others. This keeps everyone in sync during the day. This is the beauty of the 5 step process we call the Automated Workflow Process. A centralized leader or orchestrator is not required for operation during the day. Each member of your labor force can simply do their task at the required times during the day, without skipping a beat.
You can pull up previous order information for up to 45 days after fulfillment. Order information can be viewed on the screen, or a PDF document can be generated and printed on paper. Each function in Order Processing has a PDF Option for printing. Fulfillment and shipping tickets contain no payment information, or pricing. We feel that warehouse staffs have no business knowing what the price of anything is.
When a order is submitted for final shipping, you enter the price quoted to you from the computer, the tracking number, and any other information needed such as carrier seal number, bill of lading number, FOB and so forth.
NASE 2012 is now very stable. There were about a hundred little bugs in the 2010 version that has now been fixed, and tested in a live production environment. Most of the bugs were simply perception errors, in which we developed new methods to convey the message. Other bugs were programs errors that were never fully tested under a hundred different scenarios.
Many new features have been added to the program to make the entire process faster on both the front and back end. Basically this is a much more polished version of the 2010 release. Fresh new graphics for the Site Administrator and better recovery methods for broken database connections have been added in the backend.
The final release of course will be in 2012, in which changes will be made based on customer feedback.
The orignal program was designed for a single location company with their own warehouse full of product. The next version will be a single Internet Store representing up to 10 manufactures, and they never touch the product.
We are seeing a trend in which many companies are operating Internet Stores with limited functionality, or using EBay to sell products that they do not warehouse. In other words, they advertise the product and run the website, but the product is shipped dirctly from either a distrubution center, or direct from the manufacture. Many of these new Intenet Stores have up to 10 manufactures or distrubution centers. Internet Commerce Engine 5 has the foundation to provide a shipping quote from multiple origination points to a single destination. We are 3 steps away from being able to provide that functionality on a reliable basis. What is holding us back are some issues with FedEx and UPS that we need to clear up, and adding the final lines of code to futher split up real time quotes.
The trend is shifting from companies stocking product to direct shipments from distrubution or manufactures to end users. I predict in the future that only manufactures and distrubutors will stock product, and that all orders will be generated from sales or marketing partners. Sales and marketing partners will only have to build trust from the customer, and process the payment and order information. From there, the manufacture will be able to pull the sales data from the Internet Store, and automatically ship the goods to customer. The Internet Store will automatically take a commission on the sale.
We've been making ecommerce and shopping cart components for over 10 years now. Most of our products are used in the infomercial industry for payment processing and shipping.
Our goal is to make ecommerce software that is simple and effective, yet powerful in processing and ease of use.