Abivia Web Development and Hosting

For many businesses, there is a lot more to eCommerce than building a simple on-line store. The best approach to launching an eCommerce site depends on the scale of your business and the type of product or service you are selling.

eCommerce for Web-Only Enterprises

For web-only enterprises the challenge is mostly one of getting your product catalogue onto your site, which involves the preparation of product descriptions and images, organizing your product line, and setting pricing. The appropriate solution will be based on both the type of product you offer (physical goods, services, or products delivered over the Internet) and your overall web presence. Abivia offers several open source solutions in this area, including ZenCart and "Joomla!™" with the VirtueMart extension.

eCommerce for Small Businesses with Web and Retail Operations

For businesses that require both on-line and retail outlets ("bricks and mortar" stores) the appropriate approach to a web presence depends on your POS and ERP systems. POS stands for "Point of Sale", basically the system that runs your cash register. ERP stands for "Enterprise resource Planning" and covers everything from sophisticated inventory and supply chain management systems to a basic accounting system.

Without looking at your specific needs, it is impossible to determine the best approach. However, here are some of the possibilities:

• If you have no POS/ERP systems, or if your existing systems don't track inventory, then it may be possible to do integrated inventory management through ZenCart, and use a web browser for your POS system.
• If you have no inventory tracking and your existing POS system or budget prohibit using a PC based POS, then manually reconciling inventory with the online store is probably the best approach.
• If you manage inventory through your ERP system, but don't use it to maintain detailed product information, and your ERP system provides open web services, then ZenCart can be customized to integrate with your ERP system.
• If you manage all of your product and ERP needs through one or more systems, then a customization of our NDEA solution may be the best approach. See the next section for more information.

Abivia can work with you to determine the best approach for your specific situation. Please contact us for more information.

Enterprise Grade eCommerce

Larger businesses have spent millions of dollars while building an online presence. With Abivia's NDEA solution, you don't have to. NDEA is a sophisticated distributed solution that interfaces with ERP and product management systems through web services, database connections, and back-end networks. The NDEA back end will integrate with multiple host systems to create an online product catalogue, and publish that catalogue to the on-line store. The NDEA front end provides a flexible user interface that displays the product catalogue to the user, provides a shopping cart, and processes sales transactions.

Major features of NDEA include:

• Support for multiple currencies, languages, and product catalogues, allowing different product mixes depending on region or brand.
• Automatic time-based product changes. Set future dates for new product introductions, sales, shipping specials, etc. Publish to the site, and forget. NDEA will automatically update the catalogue at the specified date and time.
• Integration with back end customer databases, inventory, and order processing systems. Give your customers order numbers and customer identifiers that integrate with your existing operations. Streamline customer service by never forcing customer service staff to use two systems to find a customer or an order.
• Integrated product information. The NDEA publisher will gather all the information related to a product, including description, images, pricing, and other attributes.Then it pushes this information to the web site in an incremental update mode. Automated checks flag issues with missing information and can either stop the publication process entirely, or simply remove incomplete products from the catalogue while informing administrators of the problem.
• Scalable. The NDEA front end is organized into separate modules for user management, order processing, and web site presentation. Scaling the system to support multiple front-end web server or a server cluster is simple.

NDEA is a base solution that requires significant customization during the implementation process. The cost of implementation depends on the integration requirements, but they will be a fraction of a fully customized enterprise solution. Abivia is actively developing NDEA as a stand-alone product, with the intent of releasing a "Joomla!™" based solution under an open source license.

For more information on Abivia's eCommerce solutions, please contact us.