ezimerchant^® v5 is now available!

During the past few years ezimerchant and netmerchant have been major players in facilitating a significant share of the spectacular growth in online purchasing.

In 2008 our customers processed online sales in excess of $70,000,000 – an amazing increase of 23.9% over 2007. Currently, we are processing seamlessly and safely over 40,000 transactions each and every month.

To ensure we had the expertise and resources to continue meeting the current and future needs of the rapidly changing and expanding ecommerce market we formally merged ezimerchant and netmerchant under the corporate umbrella of On Technology Pty Ltd. This merger brought together a team of people with an exciting collection of award winning technical expertise and many years of ecommerce and commercial experience.

Since the merger the new team has been applying this experience and development skills to our first new product – ezimerchant v5.

We have approached the development of v5 very differently to the typical development methodology of our industry of trying to make the technical capability and the limitations of their development environment relevant to the customer.

Our approach was to start at the customer end and look at ecommerce / online selling though a benefits filter rather than from a features perspective using three major criteria.

The three key criteria being:

SAVE TIME / REDUCE COSTS • SELL MORE • REDUCE RISK

To determine the “nice to have“ and the “must have” benefits we adopted a vigorous process which included considerable merchant and end user involvement.

As you would imagine this approach set many difficult challenges for our development team.

To meet these challenges and to future proof our ability to meet the needs of the dynamic ecommerce market and very importantly, meet the increasingly demanding security requirements of the Banks (you will hear a lot more about PCI compliance) 1000’s of man hours were invested in designing and building a very sophisticated, powerful and flexible development engine - one that is already achieving international acclaim.

Some of the features and benefits of ezimerchant v5 are detailed below.

We are in the final stages of testing and have several customers currently doing business on v5. Public release is imminent.

We are very excited about our new team, our new product and we look forward to working with you to help you grow your brand and your online sales.

SAVE TIME / REDUCE COSTS

The site can be managed “real time” anywhere in the world where you have an internet connection.
For maximum efficiency and productivity the “Control Panel” has been optimized for ease of use and subject to authorization levels, set by you, allows multiple users to use the site simultaneously from multiple locations. This means site maintenance can be delegated, eliminating the cost of staff waiting for access.
Any changes to website data can be made visible to the site visitor immediately. This avoids any potential customer dissatisfaction caused by making purchase decisions on superseded information.
Dependant on the website’s configuration / complexity, hosting costs can be reduced by up to 75%. We have examples that achieve greater than that. One customer we have tested will achieve a saving of 90%.
Images are able to be uploaded to the “Control Panel” in their original size due to complex algorithms resizing them “on the fly” to fit the dimensions set by the template. This eliminates the majority of the worry and time consuming “messing about” of working with images. Our approach to this also ensures a higher quality, more consistent and faster presentation of images on your website.
Packaging and delivery can be streamlined through the new DYMO printer integration. This eliminates errors while retyping or handwriting delivery details. The DYMO information is taken from the customer delivery information. This feature coupled with the benefit of the optional and very clever “Address Verification” service will eliminate much of the cost and aggravation of late or lost deliveries due to incorrect delivery details.
Easily process orders (capture payments and mark items shipped) with the simplest point and click interface
Tightly integrated real time payment gateway:
- eliminates the need to maintain yet another business relationship to run your online store.
- provides the option of deferred payment capturing for merchants who prefer to review orders before capturing payment.
- eliminates invalid credit card information such as incorrect expiry date entered by your customers.
- no need to juggle two systems for tracking your orders - track payment history, refunds and balances through ezimerchant.
- More at http://www.ezimerchant.com/ezimerchantdeferredrealtime.asp

SELL MORE

Branding

Our new “Avalon” template engine eliminates the common restrictions of templates and its flexibility makes it much easier for web developers, web designers and users to achieve the desired look and feel.
This includes the ability for your look and feel to be applied across your entire site - even the cart and checkout pages. This ‘Fully Brandable Checkout” facility eliminates the visible brand disconnect that is prevalent in most ecommerce solutions when the customer gets to those key pages.
Unique in ecommerce your international customers can see prices in their local currency (subject to site configuration). The customer can then select to view or transact in the currency of their choice. This is designed to achieve the branding attribute of professionalism and to generate more sales due to higher customer confidence because of greater clarity around the value of the transaction.
An unprecedented development, ezimerchant will simulate packing shopping cart contents into boxes you make available to calculate real package counts and weights. This simplifies configuring freight rules so you have more control over freight margins. Operate razor thin in competitive industries or build some of your margin into your freight costs. This is cumbersome if not impossible in other ecommerce packages.
In addition freight options are customizable to – country, state, city, and postcode detail.
The option of a “Vanity Domain” for the checkout is built into v5 (e.g. secure.yourdomain.com). This builds greater customer confidence by ensuring that your website address with your own SSL certificate remains visible through the entire checkout process. It might sound simple but research shows that this is very important to the majority of online purchasers.
Customers can select to use any of their existing User Name / Password that they have with Google, Live, Facebook, PayPal, Open ID and Twitter to manage their account on your site - eliminating the need of creating yet account on yet another website.

Selling

v5 facilitates an almost limitless capability in the very important area of pricing. Whether - volume discounts for large quantity purchases - product specific pricing/discounts - Customer specific pricing including volume discounting. Basically, your offline day to day pricing structures can be offered online. Any customer specific special pricing is visible only to them and is displayed through the entire site while they are logged on. Most importantly though, while the rules can be complex, they are still very simple to define.
Sales Promotions are well catered for, based on a concept of conditions and benefits. Conditions are highly flexible and can contain any combination of rules based on order subtotal - products purchased - currency selected - buyer location - customer or customer group - freight service selected or payment method selected. Benefits can be an amount, a percentage off (optionally limited by product or category). Alternatively the promotion benefit can be a product, which can optionally be assigned a price, in which case the promotion becomes an offer.
The option of “Address Verification” if taken up suggests address details (for Australia at this stage) while the customer is entering the delivery address. This will virtually eliminate the well known brand sapping cost and aggravation of lost or late deliveries due to incorrect or incomplete delivery information. The significant time saving for your customers that rapid address input provides will also have a positive impact on conversion rates.
Google site Map is employed. This is demonstrably more efficient at getting your site recognized and indexed by the major search engines.

REDUCE RISK

Control the geographical regions you wish to conduct business with to limit the amount of nuisance orders.
Terms & Conditions – you can select to have your terms and conditions acknowledged by your customer in the checkout process.
Give your customer the highest degree of confidence in transacting through your website. The option is available to use our significantly improved “Enhanced Fraud Protection” and EV SSL. The EV SSL certification promotes the highest level of security of your website.
PCI DSS compliance is a set of standards set by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) in how customer specific data is used and stored. v5 has been developed in accordance with these standards. Even though they are not yet being vigerously enforced, they are great practice for protecting you and your customers.
We are currently being audited in the process of achieving certified PCI compliance status. We have chosen a PCI specialist external auditor at great cost to ensure integrity in our compliance. We have learnt from the process that most ecommerce solutions used in Australia will never achieve compliance in their current form.

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