As we continue to improve our Content Management System (CMS42) we're also expanding its functionality and the features it offers. We've made a lot of progress with the system over the course of its on-going development and are happy to announce the release of our new ecommerce platform.
The ecommerce systems offers everything our previous system did and much more. It's written from the ground up and fully optimised and is available in many different configurations for use on your shop or booking site.
1. Speed/Performance
The speed of your website is important for SEO, it's important to your end users and it's important to you - so we made it a top priority. That's why with the new ecommerce systems we've put a lot of time ensuring customers receive the best experience they can. This includes the responsiveness of the site and ease and speed of finding products (even in systems that contains thousands upon thousands of unique products). The new ecommerce platform ensures customer experience is smooth and fast right the way through the order process.
We've ensured our new systems works well under pressure and can deal comfortably with high volumes of traffic and sales. The CMS side of the new ecommerce system also has these same improvements ensuring your CMS is always accessible, fast and reliable, even when your site is extremely busy.
2. Products
We've completely re-invented how the products section works in our new ecommerce system; making it more efficient and providing far greater flexibility to how you can utilise products on your site.
Options and Variations
Our Options system allows you to create groups of options you can apply to a single product, a range of products or your entire catalogue. Options may range from a list of different sizes commonly available on your site, to bespoke customisations you can specify against the product you're adding to your site. Options set against products create variations of a product, making it quick and easy to create just a few to potentially thousands of variations of a single products in a few simple clicks. These variations can be altered at a per variation level for further specification across your site having their own prices, stock, etc… Options can then be used through the site to filter and sort products making it easier for your customer to find the exact product they're looking for.
Attributes
Attributes of a product have always been something we wanted to illustrate well. We want to allow your users to search and filter by attributes in certain scenarios and not to affect the products price. The CMS attributes system lets you describe certain aspects of a product in a standard, formatted and searchable way, tailoring the actual display of attributes to your requirements.
Attributes can be fully controlled through the CMS and can be used to illustrate information like the material of an item or size and weight. You can share these attributes amongst other products on your site. You're not limited to this type of information, you have full control over the grouping and attributes through the CMS.
Categories/Departments
Our categories and departments system isn't strictly a new idea, products can belong to multiple categories and those categories can belong to other categories, letting you build the structure of your site. We've completely rewritten and overhauled this system so it's easier, quicker and more intuitive to use. Categories can feature their own page content, Meta data and navigation structure.
Sorting
Sorting products has always been a bit of a pain in my experience. In the new CMS42 ecommerce system sorting can be achieved easily through our new drag and drop system. Products can be sorted within each category, visually and quickly. The defined sort can be used on the front end of your site so you can really highlight your best selling products, or just those products you want to give a higher presence to. Product sorting isn't limited to this though; depending on your sites design, customers can define their own sort ordering of your products by price, popularity or by name.
Searching
We really took a long hard look at our search functionality. We wanted to build something fast, something easy to use and most importantly something that would return results even when the customer hadn't got their search term exactly right. The new search functionality on the site searches various fields and attributes associated with the product, comparing them to each individual word the customer is searching for and returns them sorted by relevance to the term. The entire process is near instant, return relevant results helping your customers find the products they're after quickly.
3. Orders
Orders are what you're after on your ecommerce system, and our new CMS system can handle all the orders you can get thrown at it. We've simplified the order process considerably blurring the lines between baskets and orders. This gives us much greater control over what customers can achieve in their basket, simpler recall of existing baskets as well as a detailed order history and product information.
Order History
Order history is complete, we store all the information about a customer's order indefinitely. Customers can look through their order history finding items or entire orders they want to order again. The level of detail we store for orders now helps us perform quick and efficient reporting on your sites order performance.
Manual Orders
Our telephone and manual order system lets you take orders over the phone, in person or on behalf of your customers. It accepts multiple forms of payment and has all the features your customer facing site has. It also gives you some additional functionality, allowing you to define discounts, shipping costs and price adjustments on the fly.
4. Reporting
We store a great level of detail on everything that passes through your system. From visitors and the orders they placed, to the popularity of items on your site or how a promotion has been performing, our new reporting systems is flexible and will help you analyse your orders and customers. Our quick report system allows you to produce graphs and tables on screen and in PDF form so you can easily present and compare your figures.
5. Multisite
Our CMS multisite system has been extended to cover elements of the ecommerce system including products, departments and orders, but we appreciate these need to work differently than pages. Our ecommerce multisite lets you take orders from different sites, yet maintain statistics, navigation and products for each site separately, where required.
Products on your sites can be defined separately, shared as required or shared in their entirety across any of the sites in your multisite system, saving you time and allowing you to maintain a connectivity/relationship between your two sites.
6. Promotions
Promotions come in lots of different forms. From simple "£x off your order" to "buy any x of these products and get these products for £y". Our promotions engine is flexible enough to let you tailor your promotions to your products, orders and customers. All promotions can be set for an individual customer, for a limited time, with a limited number of daily, user and lifetime uses.
Got an imaginative promotion you'd like to run on your site, but the CMS doesn't offer it yet? The new promotions engine has been built so it can be extended to meet your needs.
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