Build Your Business Locally and World-Wide

Web-enable your business, and you'll have access to the global marketplace - an
entire world of potential customers. Your e-store gives your customers or members
the convenience of visiting, browsing and ordering 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Working closely with Crescent Technologies, the Hydraulic Institute
has developed a highly successful e-Store that sells dozens of highly
specialized technical reference and research products to a worldwide
audience of industrial pump suppliers and users.

Our e-commerce application makes building and maintaining your e-store
easy, fast … and fun! Everything's included in one convenient package:

Inventory Set-up and Control: Add, delete or change product offerings any time. Develop the most effective product mix for your Web clientele.

Immediate Delivery of Software Products: Built-in ESD (Electronic Software Delivery) functions let customers purchase software products and receive them immediately via download after checkout. ·

Special Pricing and Promotions: Easily designate special pricing for members. Build traffic, promote customer loyalty and control inventory with price-off or percentage-off incentives. Set promotion starting and ending dates. Test promotion and pricing alternatives to determine the most cost-effective strategies.

Cross-Sell and Up-Sell: Automatically display related products so customers can quickly click their way to add-on sales.

Intuitive Shopping Basket Model: Customers select merchandise and place it in their shopping basket with just one click. Items may be added or deleted at any time, making it easy for customers to change their minds before checkout.

Fast, Secure Real-Time Ordering, Checkout and Payment: Everything's automatic. Your e-store's secure real-time ordering process lets you offer 7 ways to pay, including built-in verification for all major credit cards. Orders are automatically confirmed via e-mail to customers, with notification copies to suppliers.

Convenient Shipping Options: Offer your customers up to 6 ways to receive their purchases. Unlimited customization gives you complete control over the shipping methods you can provide - both national and international.

Automatic Tax Handling: Tax rates and amounts are automatically added to the customer's invoice, based on the state or country in the shipping address. Customers know and approve the full price of their order before completing checkout.

Complete Reporting: Built-in reports let you track Product Sales, Sales Totals, Sales Tax and Shipping Charges … plus User Statistics, and Browser Type reports help you refine your e-store to improve functionality and effectiveness.

Features

Member or Non-Member Pricing
Special Member Pricing -- A system administrator can easily change user security settings to provide access to special member pricing.

1) An automatically-assigned user name and password allow registered users to log in quickly, with automatic access to special member pricing. Registered users who are not members log in quickly, but have access only to retail pricing.
2) Members' security settings can also allow the use of purchase orders.

Retail Shopping
Relational (hierarchical) product categories make it easy for users to order a single item or bulk quantities, with simple turn-page navigation. Retail functions include:

1) Discounts for bulk quantities.
2) Storage of customer information in the database.
3) International transactions and shipping.
4) Customer order verification by email.
5) Printable invoices.

Checkout
Built-in editable and intuitive shopping basket functions include:

1) Checksum verification for credit cards.
2) Secure real-time payments·
3) Seven payment options, including Visa, American Express, MasterCard, Discover, fax-in, call back, and purchase orders.
4) Automatic sending of e-mail order notifications to the customer, supplier, and another contact.·
5) Support for a fax gateway, allowing supplier who do not have Internet access, to receive completed orders securely via fax.

Security
Two levels of online administration access allow for convenient administration and maintenance of the e-store. All administration is accomplished with a Web browser.

1) A system administrator can make global store-operating changes and maintain the user database.
2) A merchant administrator can add inventory and customize their store's design.

Inventory Control
1) Add product inventory using three levels of hierarchical categorization.
2) Speed page creation using the intuitive copy feature.
3) Easily and quickly develop page designs using styles, wizards, custom headers and footers. ·
4) Track stock on hand and reorder levels with easily-enabled inventory control features.
5) Enable automatic e-mail notification to alert merchants when it's time to reorder products.
6) Use Product Quick Edit, with search capabilities and individual field selections, for single-page editing of large numbers of products.

 Electronic Software Delivery (ESD)
Deliver any type of file to your customer immediately.With real-time payment processing, after the transaction has been approved the customer simply clicks a link on the invoice page to begin downloading the file and ESD does the rest.

 Cross Selling of Related Products
Display on-screen links to related products to motivate additional purchases.

1) First, add your inventory to the database. Then you can easily search the database for related products and "attach" them to the product name.
2) Links to these related products will appear with a link to these other related products.

 Discounts and Specials
1) Set up custom dollar or percentage discounts for a selected quantity of items ordered.
2) Advance planning features allow you to set up product specials to appear for a selected date range.
3) Create promotional copy that will appear automatically with your discounts and specials.
4) Select the Specials Wizard to quickly create an entire page devoted solely to featuring your discounts and specials.

Custom Shipping
Select from six different shipping class:

1) Flat fee per order
2) Flat fee plus weight rate
3) Flat fee based on order total
4) Percentage of total order
5) Flat fee based weight of order total
6) None (include as a product option).

You may also add custom shipping methods for each type of shipping class. There's no limit to the number of custom shipping methods you can add. Each shipping method may be assigned to a specific country and taxed accordingly.

Taxes
Easily add state tax rates. At checkout, the customer is automatically notified of the sales tax rate and amount, based on the state given in the shipping address.

Reporting and Statistics
Easily track of the who, what, where and when of customers' buying habits. View log files of customer information such as IP address, items bought, pages viewed, and more. Built-in reports include Product Sales, Sales Totals, Sales Tax, Shipping Charges, User Statistics, and Browser Types.

Cookie Support
Crescent Technologies e-commerce solutions work with or without cookies. A cookie is a small text file placed on the customer's hard drive that enables you to recognize returning customers so you can:

1) Welcome them back to your e-store.
2) Provide convenient, immediate log-in, without requiring re-entry of a username and password.
3) Continue building your database of information about the customer's usage of your e-store.

Cookies provide a safe and reliable way to track usage of your e-store, enabling you to improve its effectiveness based on customer behavior.