E-commerce

SlipStream has addressed the changing needs of e-commerce head on. For example, in today's environment e-commerce must handle non-physical products such as event registrations and electronic downloads. And as your e-commerce volumes grow, the workflows associated with managing your store become more and more important.  You need to be able to post material quickly and accurately, you need to be able to find products with just a few mouse clicks, you need to be able to fill orders more quickly and accurately, you need to be able access comprehensive customer information instantly, you need to have tools to quickly resolve customer service issues pertaining to electronic products, etc. SlipStream is not a technical solution to a business problem: It’s a business solution to a business problem.

Shopping cart The shopping cart paradigm has widespread acceptance and serves as the model for SlipStream’s e-commerce solution. Customers add products to their shopping cart and can either change product quantities or can delete products from it.   Product options Are you selling a shirt? Sell one product with multiple options (e.g. small, medium and large), rather than three separate products. Are you selling a recording? Sell one product as two options – a CD and an MP3 download – rather than as two separate products. It makes more sense to your customer when search and ordering, and it makes more sense to your back office operations.           Product promotion Throughout the shopping process the system can display the most frequently requested products and speakers/authors, along with other relevant material. And it is all context sensitive.   World-class search capabilities Your search engine will drive sales and the more products you add to the store the more important the search engine becomes. Customers can use taxonomy, mult-faceted and retained-filter searches to quickly find what they want, and to even be made aware of things they might want.           Online registration Because customers aren’t directed to a different website or store when registering for an event, you can promote and sell additional products as part of the registration process. So not only can you sell more, while improving the customer experience, you save the fees you’ve been paying for the outside registration service.   Sample audio Help customers order the right audio products, and even sell more, by letting customers hear audio samples of every audio product. It’s automated on SlipStream so there’s no overhead for you. In fact overhead is reduced because it will decrease the order errors.           MP3 downloads Post downloads to the customer’s account so he can immediately download it after completing his order. There’s no e-mail notification to wait for, or to get lost, and there’s no special links the customer needs to remember. From a customer service perspective, by viewing that library you can see at a glance the files the customer has purchased along with how many times he has downloaded them. Need to add complimentary file to, or remove a file from, the library? You do it right in the customer’s library screen.   Audio product generation SlipStream recognizes there’s a workflow behind preparing and posting audio products. Provide a solution and your back office flows smoothly: don’t, and the process becomes a burden not only to you, but to your customers as well. From something as simple as spawning a product from an event activity with a single click, to providing a library of intro and outro audio clips the system can automatically attach to each of your audio products, to automatically populating MP3 ID3 tags, the system does this for you so you don’t have to. Do you have several audio products to process at once? The audio files can be processed, and the CD label images and the site images attached, as a bulk operation.           Automatied user account generation Keep it as easy as possible for your customer when he’s placing an order. If he does not have an account on the system, the system creates one for him automatically during the checkout process. If he does have an account but hasn’t logged in, the system will attach the order to his account anyway.  And if he is logged in?  The system lets him pick from a list of previous shipping and billing addresses he has used, thus speeding up checkout and reducing data entry errors.   Order fulfillment Print a single production list for all the orders in production and use it to efficiently accumulate the products for order fulfillment. Then, in bulk print the packing slips and the shipping labels. Use the slips to fill the orders, confirm you exhausted the inventory you set aside to fill that batch of orders, seal the packages and log each order out using the code printed on each label.           Shipping integration SlipStream can integrate with USPS (United States Postal Service Rate Calculator), with UPS (UPS Rate and Services Selection XML) and FedEx (FedEx Ship Manager Direct). It can also generate its own flat quotes or shipping-weight-based quotes.   Multiple payment gate options You have several options for your payment gateway, among them being Authorize.net, PayPal, or some other. Be aware that most credit card processing companies require you to authorize a credit card charge at the time of the order and to only capture the charge after you ship the product. In other words, you are not permitted to charge the card until you actually ship the product. SlipStream supports this.           PCI-DSS Compliance SlipStream uses the latest in SSL technology and also does not retain credit card numbers in its database. This simplifies PCI-DSS compliance for you, significantly, and it not only offers peace of mind to your customers, but to you as well. Set an internal policy that your staff members are never allowed to write down a credit card number when helping a customer fulfill an order, and you can know, with certainly, you have done everything possible to protect your customers; if you don’t have it in your possession, no one can steal it from you!   Support tickets Your e-commerce package should give you a way to log and track customer issues until they are fully resolved. You shouldn’t do it on paper because papers get lost and, in fact, you really can’t do it on paper if your staff is geographically distributed. SlipStream provides this capability with a web-based support ticket system. It's integrated with the e-commerce package to make it easy to look up the customer's information and attach a reference to the order within the ticket.           Reports Sales reports let you view absolute sales by unit and dollar voluems, along with the mix. The same information can broken down by store categories. There’s also a sales tax report that calculates the sales tax collected, by state, and an order reconciliation report to flag any orders that are over or under-paid.