Merchant's Back Office

The real revolution in store-building software is in the merchant's back office Web browser interface which allows complete maintenance of pricing, tracking, and sales. The primary back office tasks are these:

Tracking Shoppers
Have you ever momentarily left your shopping cart in a grocery store and few seconds later found that someone mistook your cart for theirs, and left you with 20 boxes of gourmet fortune cookies? Store-building software must differentiate between shoppers -- long before they tell you who they are at check-out time. Programs use three ways to track shopping carts:

1. A cookie (small computer file) containing your cart number is transmitted to your Web browser and remains on your hard disk during your visit to the store. The use of cookies is quite widespread and used by most store software, since this is probably the most efficient method. Some people see cookies as an invasion of privacy, however, so alternate tracking methods are sometimes needed.

2. The temporary IP number automatically assigned by your ISP when you logged onto the Internet can identify you. While you never see the IP number, it can be read by the store software.

3. A randomly-generated cart number can be appended to the URL appearing in your browser's "Location" or "Address" field. Whenever you go to another product page, that cart number goes with you.

More important to the merchant than mere cart numbers, however, is keeping track of shoppers. Some software includes a "membership" feature that attempts to get information from shoppers in exchange for a discount or other special offer. The better software products keep a database of customers which can be used to e-mail information about sales and special offers, as well to present the shopper with an offer tailored to her past store-browsing patterns. Customer tracking enables a very powerful cross selling ability, and is available in some of the more sophisticated software packages.

Many programs provide some reports on products viewed and purchased. However, Yahoo! Store (http://store.yahoo.com) has perfected an awesome array of statistics which not only tell you what products were viewed, but the most common paths customers take in your store (great for design analysis and improvement), what link the shopper clicked on to get to your store, and which banner ads or search engine links produced the highest per capita sales for your store.

Order Pick-Up and Accounting Integration
While the customer is most aware of security when she places an order, unless the merchant retrieves the credit card information using a secure means, security is compromised at the back end of the transaction. Most store software allows secure pick up of orders in the secure back-office by means of a secure Web browser and SSL secure server. Typically, orders can either be viewed one at a time on the screen and printed out on the merchant's printer, or downloaded as tab-delimited or Microsoft Excel files for importing into the merchant's accounting or order fulfillment system.

Integration with accounting systems is still in the early stages, however, and is hardly seamless. If your accounting software doesn't readily accept one of these formats, you'll probably have to do some programming to format the order data for easy import. But programming may be less expensive in the long run than manual re-keying of online orders into your system.

Product Additions and Editing
Any healthy retail store is constantly changing. Previous generations of store software required HTML coding for each product. The latest software allows you to set up your products in two ways:

1. Database Upload. Larger stores, especially, enjoy the ease of maintaining their product database on a desktop computer, and then uploading the database periodically, automatically updating the store which draws on that database. This can be a bit tricky to set up, but for stores with more than a few hundred products it is necessary.

2. Browser-Based Maintenance. The new crop of store software allows product maintenance using only a Web browser in the store's password-protected back office. Storeowners can add products, hide out-of-stock products from view, or change prices with ease.

Sales and Promotions
Using your browser in the back office you can easily place items on sale, move them to a specials page, or (with more sophisticated software) set up percentage discounts for certain customer classes or on orders of $100 or more. These powerful features make store software without a back office obsolete.