Community Edition

Target Groups

1. Telcos, ISPs and other Service Providers that want to provide e-Business hosting infrastructure to small and medium-sized enterprises with entry-level e-business requirements.

2. Enterprises with a large number of small and medium-sized distributors and resellers that want to enable each of these companies to sell products online through their own hosted e-Business site.

Scope

ISPs are constantly seeking to leverage existing infrastructures and core competencies to generate new revenue streams from new and existing customers -without substantially increasing overhead. ePages™ Community Edition is the ideal application for ISPs to build and operate successful and profitable e-commerce communities. They can offer scaleable and economic e-business solutions by hosting ePages™' Community Edition and leasing B2C stores to end merchants.

ePages™ Community Edition enables ISPs to offer "self-service" B2C e-commerce to their customers via a simple web browser interface. Using ePages™ Community Edition, merchants can choose from pre-designed templates to create their shop’s look and feel, and manage the shop via a password-protected back-office.

Since the Merchants setup and design the shop themselves, the costs to the ISP are minimal. When Merchants require further customisation or functionality the ISP can offer "feature packs" to add functionality to the shop, or the Merchant can easily upgrade to a more advanced solution such as ePages™’ Hosting or Merchant Edition.

top

Supported Business Models

For Telcos, ISPs, ASPs and Portal Operators

• e-commerce Communities
• Industry Marketplaces
• Regional Marketplaces

Business Models for SMEs

• e-channel integration

Hosting model

• Mass market Hosting

Benefits in Brief

Provide entrylevel e-Commerce hosting infrastructure for small and medium-sized businesses as an enhancement of your basic internet service offerings.

• Reduce overheads by offering "self-service" e-commerce.
• Gain market share through rapid deployment of shops and communities anywhere in the world.
• Increase margins by of fering optional features and functionality as an addition to the standard shop.
• Better serve existing customer base and attract new customers.
• Improve customer retention.
• Create new revenue streams and increase profit margins.
• Differentiate your company from the competition.
• Open sustainable avenues of growth for the future.

top

Key Benefits for Internet Service Providers

Acquire new Customers and Generate New Revenue Streams. ISPs can offer customers an advanced set of Internet and commerce services. With ePages™ Community, a portfolio of e-commerce services can be made available that were previously unattainable for most businesses. It comes with all of the intuitive navigation, reliability, low-cost and high volume capacity that SMEs have come to expect from their e-commerce services.

Benefit from a Greater ROI

ePages™’ automated technology allows Merchants to do more of the work themselves, thereby reducing the need for large teams of sales, service, and operational personnel. ISPs can therefore support and manage thousands of self-sufficient stores using limited resources.

Greater Revenues and Customer Loyality

For an increasing number of small and mid-sized businesses, this is the method of choice for conducting business on-line. ISPs that take advantage of this market trend through the deployment of ePages™ Community will in turn benefit from greater revenues and customer loyality with a comparatively low cost of maintenance.

top

Key Benefits for on-line Merchants

Small to medium-sized Online Merchants want to increase revenues and expand their business opportunities through e-Commerce - with minimal financial and technological risk. In their daily business they want to focus on selling rather than technology and they are looking for professional assistance and support from their local ISP - from entry-level to advanced e-business.

• No cost and time-intensive acquisition of specialist IT expertise required
• High quality of services in comparison to running your own IT operations
• Benefits from the latest technologies and current software. Updates, upgrades and extensions are done by the community operator.
• Applications are more easily scalable
• Very good cost/performance ratio
• Faster response to requirements on the customer side
• Concentration on the core business Lower total financial and technological risk

Functions and Feature List

Configuration of the Community by the Provider

Through the ePages™ Community Edition an ASP can configure any number of different shop types and offer a flexible pricing structure, dependent on the levels of functionality. For example, the number of categories and products the shop allows, the ability to upload product images, special offers and statistical reporting can all be configured as features available to the merchant.

One particular "shop" type is the Business Card. In this case the merchant can create and manage simple pages of information containing data such as company info, news, events, help pages and additional free content in a simple content management format with no product or shopping features.

The shop owner can choose and configure the most suitable shop type and later, simply by clicking a button, switch to another shop type. This is done on the same platform with no need for data migration or design work.

In addition, a shop owner can extend his / her shop’s functionality through Feature Packs provided by the ASP. These are defined in the same way as shop types, and can supplement existing shop types in a number of ways. Using feature packs the merchant may choose to increase the maximum number of products displayed by 20 without necessitating a change of shop type.

If required, shops can be listed on the Community Homepage by category in the style of a business directory, allowing potential customers to browse the sites by business type (e.g. furniture, sporting goods, books & CD’s).

Construction and Administration of the Shops

The shop registration, creation and administration take place as follows. A merchant registers their business and contact details and enters a three step store building process:

1. Select the shop type (i.e. Shop Type 1: including 20 # products, 3 sub categories, eBay integration, etc)
2. Enter a shop name and description, select the category
3. Choose a template from a selection offered by the provider

All of this information may be changed at a later date in the back office. The merchant can now manually or automatically import catalogues and products, load images, define shipping methods, change buttons and template colours etc. Merchants have the option to create and manage more than one shop and can sell shops to their customers. New shops are defined by the ASP as being in "test run" mode. Once the merchant decides to purchase the shop s/he clicks a link in the back office committing to the payment terms of the ASP and receives a password – the shop can now commence trading. At this point the ASP receives an e-mail notification that a shop has been purchased. If at the end of the "test run" phase the shop has not been purchased, the shop is automatically taken off-line and then deleted.

Since the building, design, purchase and management of the shops is completely automated there is no intervention required from the ASP. This minimizes costs in delivering e-commerce solutions to the mass market.

top

Marketplace and Storefront Features

End-users visiting Community shops may do so through special marketplace pages and use features such as „search all shops" for products and prices, browse special offers across the marketplace and compile global shopping baskets, purchasing goods from multiple shops across the Community but checking out with only one basket. By browsing the category list (a directory of businesses within the community) the end customer has an overview of what the marketplace offers.

Customers can, via the catalog, product, and special offer pages, browse, search, check information and contact details and make purchases. Merchants and end-users receive an e-mail notification when orders are placed. At this point the merchant can see the order in the Back office and change the status as the order is invoiced, fulfilled, and paid.

Feature Description

Definitions of shop types and feature packs - The provider defines these as offerings to merchants that wish to trade on the internet.

Simple Store Creation - Create stores in just three simple steps.

Community-wide search - Search across all shops in the community using product name and description, maximum price etc. Results are displayed as a list.

Marketplace special offers - Places the special offers from all shops on a single Community page.

Global shopping basket - Shopping baskets from all shops are listed one after the other, and the total price is displayed. Orders are routed to the respective shop.

Single sign-on for customers - One time registration gives access to all shops in the Community.

Premium Placement - The provider can offer shop owners top slot within a business category.

Categories and subcategories - Shops can display one or more categories.

Definition of Net and Gross prices - Net and gross prices for all products.

Shop/Homepage/Logo - Shops include a company slogan, address, text, company logo etc.

Catalog and subcatalogs - Up to 1,000 catalogues with up to 10 subcategories.

Products/Special offers - Up to 1,000 products and special offers per shop.

Images - Can be attributed to catalogues and products.

Supplementary product attributes - Up to 10 supplementary attributes per product.

Shopping basket & order process - E-mail order notification for merchants and end-users, Shop owner can manipulate order information in the back office.

Order management - Search orders and change their status (edit, delivered, paid, cancelled)

Customer overview - Customers who have made purchases in the shop are listed with their order number and date of order.

Free Content pages - For advertisements, Community information, news etc.

Terms and Conditions - Merchants can display the Terms and Conditions of Sale.

Contact page - Customers can fill out a contact form that automatically e-mails the shop owner.

Help page - Free content area for the shop owner to enter support information for the end-user.

Statistics and Reports - Top 10 products, sales, hits per day/hour etc.

Domain Connection - Connect the shop to a vanity domain - end-users can visit the shop from outside the Community via a .com .co.uk .net domain name.

Shipping methods - Enables a variety of price calculations (pre-defined flat fee, or dependent on shopping basket price, weight or product count) and price thresholds (incl. Shipping cost exemption for all orders over €X or £X)

Tax calculation - Set separate tax classes and rules, display the sum of all tax classes.

Payment methods - Enables the shop owner to choose online payment methods as provided by the ISP or ASP - see cartridges section.

Shop design modifications - Change the color, font, and process for the navigation of the shop. The provider can offer any number of template designs.

Deactivate control menu - Unused navigation buttons can be deactivated and are not displayed.

top

	Cartridges for ePages™ CommunityEdition
	Marketing/Sales
	eBay Cross Selling Tell a friend Newsletters/ Coupons Discounts		Price Scales Button Upload Free Shop Kelkoo Integration Search Engine Export
	Community Management
	VCM
	Search
	Advanced Search
	Integration
	Web Services Customers Web Services Products		Web Services Orders BMEcat
	Storefront
	Product Variations Basket Quick Pick		Storefront Service

top