The Interspire Shopping Cart 6.0 Roadmap

Introduction

Last week I posted the upcoming BigCommerce 6 feature list on the BigCommerce blog, so today we’ll look at the features coming up in Interspire Shopping Cart 6.

While some of the features are the same, other features only lend themselves to the BigCommerce product (such as setting DNS records) and as such aren’t discussed here.

Our Thoughts About the E-Commerce Space

There are 1,0001 pieces of software which will let you setup an online store. That’s not the difficult part though. The difficult part is getting people to your online store once it’s built – and this is the part of the equation that almost everybody forgets. We know that as much as you’d like to be an SEO guru AND a search engine marketing guru AND a copywriting guru AND a direct mail guru AND a customer retention guru, you just don’t have the time – you’re too busy running your business.

Knowing this (from our various customer surveys), we took a step back and asked ourselves:

“What can we do to make it easier for our clients to sell more products through their Interspire-powered online stores?”

The answer was simple. Allow me to show it to you in a diagram:

The answer is to become the center of your e-commerce platform while building integrations into the key marketing components any successful e-commerce business uses (including ourselves) to win more customers, which boils down to multi-channel retailing.

Imagine if you could add a product to your Interspire-powered online store and have it automatically (and instantly) listed on eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Shopzilla, Yahoo Shopping, Bizrate, Google AdWords and of course Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines.

Instead of getting the traffic just from people coming to your online store, you could leverage the tens of millions of people already browsing some of the biggest shopping and auction sites in the world.

Now, you can already do this with other platforms. If you have $500,000 to spend and two years to wait. But these guys ignore the small and medium sized businesses of the world and focus on the Fortune 100 – of which you and I are, of course, not members.

Our multi-channel retailing idea is coming to Interspire Shopping Cart, starting with version 6 in the middle of the year.

The Interspire Shopping Cart Version 6 Feature List

Here’s the list of features you can expect as part of Interspire Shopping Cart version 6 around the middle of the year:

Disclaimer: The features listed below may be changed at any time so please don’t plan or build your business around them. While we will do our best to include every feature, one or more may not make it into the final release. The middle of the year is also an extremely rough release date estimate and can (and probably will) change.

• eBay selling integration – As identified in a survey we sent out in late 2009, the biggest problem for merchants is attracting new customers to their online store affordably. eBay selling integration will allow merchants to “push” some or all of their products to eBay, which would then appear in eBay search results and listings. You will then be able to process orders received via eBay just as you would those through your store. This will give you access to the tens of millions of people who shop on eBay every month at little to no cost.
  
   
• Dropshipping and multiple warehouse support – Dropshipping will allow you to sell online without having to stock inventory or ship orders. When dropshipping is enabled, each product is assigned to a particular supplier whose details (including email address) are stored. When an order is placed, an email is sent to the supplier of each product in the order. The email includes the customer’s address, product, quantity, etc. The supplier then ships the item to the customer on behalf of the merchant, who typically pays each of their suppliers at the end of the month.

  In addition to dropshipping support, multiple warehouse support will allow larger e-commerce vendors to use our software. If you imagine an online retailer like Amazon who has at least 6 warehouses across North America, their apparel might be inventoried in one warehouse while their books in another, their appliances in another, etc. With multiple warehouse support, each product is assigned to a particular warehouse (and shelf location) so when a picking slip is printed for an order, it will include warehouse and shelf location details for each item in the order, making it easier and faster for the warehouse clerks to get an order into “ready to ship” stage or to split the order over multiple shipments if need be (which we already support).
  

   
• Shopping comparison export – Sites like Nextag, Yahoo Shopping, PriceWatch, PriceScan, Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, Shopping.com, MySimon and Bizrate allow people to compare prices amongst different online retailers – and these sites are used by tens of millions of people every week prior to buying online. They are, of course, an excellent source of traffic for online retailers, who can list their products on these comparison shopping sites for free. They only pay when someone clicks a link for one of their products, similar to Google AdWords.
  These comparison shopping sites typically require the store owner to import (or auto-sync) a simple XML file containing the details of the products they want to list. Along with eBay selling integration this is a fantastic way to drive hundreds or even thousands of new shoppers to a  merchant’s online store for around 50 cents per click.
  
   
• Pre-order/Back order support – Imagine for a minute that you sell books online. Your customers are waiting for the latest Twilight book and because you know stocks from suppliers will be limited upon release, you setup the ability to pre-order the book on your website before it comes out. You accept 1,000 pre-orders for the book (which might be all your supplier will send when it’s released) and when it’s released, you simply look up these orders and ship the books.
   
  Back order support allows you to continue selling a particular product even when its inventory dips below zero. You’ll be able to display a message to shoppers showing an estimated date when they will receive new stock and/or when their order will ship. When the new stock arrives, you can look up all back orders and ship them as usual, reducing your inventory count in the process. This is incredibly useful for merchants who experience seasonal variations in purchases or for those who under estimate demand.
  
   
• Printable shipping labels – FedEx, UPS and USPS all have their own branded, specifically designed shipping labels which make it easy for the shipping carrier to route the package to its destination electronically, simply by scanning a barcode on the shipping label. These labels are easy for us to design using the publicly available API’s through UPS Online Tools, Endicia (USPS), etc. You will be able to easily print a shipping label for an order through your label printer, place it on the box and have the shipping company do the rest. This can save 2-3 hours a day if you’re shipping a sufficient quantity of orders.
   
• iPad/iPhone template – As we all know, mobile is hot. People love to browse prices and products on their phones but why not let them buy right from their phones as well? The iPad/iPhone template will make it easy for merchants to sell to customers when they’re on the go, and if they enable one or more API-based payment gateways then the customer wont ever have to leave their store.
   
  
• Picnik.com image editing – Think of picnik.com as an online version of Photoshop but with fewer bells and whistles. It’s free and is an excellent tool for making quick and simple image edits such as resizing, red eye removal, etc. From the control panel you will be able to edit any image simply by clicking on it. The image will be loaded into Picnik.com and changes will be pushed back to their store in real time.
   
• 301 redirect support * - When switching to Interspire Shopping Cart (which hundreds of merchants do every month), the last thing a merchant wants to see is his hard-fought search engine rankings go down the drain. 301 redirect support will allow you to “tell” Google about your new store and will preserve their search engine rankings as they switch platforms.
   
• “Down for maintenance” page * – Self explanatory. You can take their store down for maintenance and show a customized message during the process.
   
• Improvements to the tax calculations and settings – Includes support for per-product tax rates, multiple tax rates per product, etc.
   
• Being able to set the starting order number * – No one wants to see “Your order number is 1″. This will allow you to set the starting order number when you open their “virtual doors” for business.
   
• “Customers who viewed this product also viewed” panel - A great online merchandising feature which will drive more page views in your store, which will result in more sales.
   
• Match up the import/export data formats – Right now they’re not the same which is time consuming for bulk editing.
   
• Various reported bugs and quirks – As listed in our tracker.

* These features will be included in a minor 5.6 release in or around April 2010 because they’ve been asked for the most and are easier to build while our engineering team continue the focus on version 6 concurrently.

Conclusion

Our goal with this release is to really step up our multi-channel retailing support. Of course it’s dead simple to setup your online store with Interspire Shopping Cart 6 but you’ve told us that’s not the problem. The problem is getting people to your store once it’s ready to go, and that’s how version 6 will help you – significantly.

Remember that multi-channel retailing really doesn’t cost that much extra to use as a business owner. For example, to list on eBay it’s just a few bucks. On shopping comparison sites such as Shopzilla and Bizrate you only pay when a shopper clicks on one of your product lists and arrives at your store, and even then it’s only around 20-50 cents a click for a targeted, i’m-ready-to-buy-right-now shopper.

As mentioned earlier, Interspire Shopping Cart 6 will be slightly different to BigCommerce 6 in terms of featureset, however our goal remains the same: to provide you and your clients (if you’re a designer) with the most innovative e-commerce platform available which will allow you to sell more online, streamline your business processes and reduce your staff requirements through the automation of common or mundane tasks.

We’ll keep you posted with regular updates as we continue to build out this monumental release.