A major advantage of SoftPage is that although it is a content management system, it also has full e-commerce abilities with the use of the shopping basket, checkout and other on-line shopping tools. These facilities are completely customisable and integrate seamlessly with the rest of SoftPage. The e-commerce features are not only limited to physical products, but also subscription and downloadable products too.

The Product Inventory manages your entire product directory. SoftPage has no physical limit to the amount of products or categories.

With this manager you can add, edit and delete products. You can also have a single product existing in more than one category. In fact, a single product can exist in all categories. The product / category relationship is merely a shortcut to the actual product. Thus, when a change is made to the product, it reflects throughout the database. This makes product maintenance quick and easy. Products have a large amount of editable properties, from price description, name and icon to the invisible properties like weight and dimensions for delivery purposes.

The display of these categories and products is controlled via an editable display template, which gives you complete freedom when it comes to the layout of each product or category.

SoftPage also supports bulk uploading through an advanced Excel upload facility. An offline products database maintained on a separate computer can easily be uploaded to SoftPage, which then builds, updates, or removes products. This is especially useful when managing large product databases. The product database can also be exported in Excel format to perform integrity checks and for backup purposes. SoftPage also allows for links to XML feeds, enhancing the e-commerce abilities and possibilities of your web site.

The Transactions List is where all your web site orders collect. These orders are also automatically emailed to the relevant people in your organisation. The Transactions List is useful for viewing the full details of an order and for seeing the status of these orders. Once an order is marked as shipped it is sent to the Order History, which lists all processed and completed orders.

The Transactions List makes it possible for a manager to have a complete overview of the status of the current orders. The colour coded status indicators are editable and as many status settings as you like are available. Each status can have an email attached to it. When the order status changes you are prompted to send the related email. This email then gets sent to the customer who placed the order to inform the person of the status of their order.

The details of each order are captured in an easy to read format allowing you to easily process the order and view related customer information. Fields are provided to add additional comments and delivery tracking information.

The orders are completely editable at this stage allowing a customer to request a change to his or her order. Products can be added and removed and the total amounts can be changed. However, if the order has been marked as paid, these changes are not available. Only the Product Name fields can be changed at this point.

If a customer wishes to cancel the order completely, the order can be deleted where it is sent to the bin. The customer can have the amount refunded to his credit card if the order was placed via credit card.

SoftPage is completely currency independent. This means that SoftPage does not have any currency. You will need to load your own currency and its related exchange rate. Using only one currency is simple enough to do – and the exchange rate would obviously be 1. However, multiple currencies and exchange rates can be added to make your site truly international. You can even price your products in multiple currencies. All you need to do from time to time is update the exchange rate and all your product prices are updated automatically.

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The Banner Manager allows you to easily display banner ads on your web site. With just a few clicks you can start running banner campaigns with Gif Banners, Flash Banners, Google Banners and even your own Custom Banner. Custom banners allow you to continue to use systems like Double Click.Net or any other. SoftPage can also randomly display the banners from the rotation pool, thereby reusing the same area on your web site to display more than one ad. You can also see full reports on impressions, click-through and the CTR (Click-through Rate)

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The Address Book is a very important part of SoftPage and an extremely important part of your Website. The Address Book is where all email addresses are stored. The addresses can be captured from your web site or imported via Microsoft Excel. The Address Book can be divided into mailing lists that are useful when sending more targeted email campaigns.

When sending mailers it’s important to understand its effectiveness. Full reporting is provided on a per batch basis. The SoftPage SMTP service is designed to handle all bounced email, and automatically removes invalid emails.

Sending email is credit based. Credits are purchased in the Marketplace. 1 Credit = 1 Email. The credits are deducted when emails are sent. The email credits pricing is available on-line.

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The most regularly updated part of your web site is usually the news article or press office section. In most cases, media releases or general company news articles are published to the web first and foremost.

SoftPage has News / Portal Manager that allows you to control the articles that appear in your site. It also features an auto-publish function that enables and disables news articles according to a specified date and time.

In most cases the pages that you see on portal web sites today are made up from short bits of information from larger articles. In fact the home page of some sites contains no “real” information only bits from other pages. The Portal Manager is the tool that manages this, and using the articles list or a combination of lists can achieve this portal type web site.

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Allowing people to sign up to your web site is a fundamental feature of many web sites. This allows you to automatically build a customer or client database. Over time you can accumulate an impressive database of clients without any effort.

With other modules like the Address Book you can send emails to your entire subscription list and track their response to the email and website.

Furthermore, the Subscribers Manager can be used to allow or disallow access to certain pages of your site. This means that when a client is a member or subscriber to your web site they are required to log in with a username and password to access specified sections of the site.

Anyone who shops on your web site has to be a registered member. However, you can also have different types of members. These members can have access to different pages.

Subscription can be free or can integrate with the shopping basket facility to collect payment. SoftPage can also allow a member to sign up on a trial basis. If the customer does not wish to continue his/her trial membership, the account is stopped. This would allow the user to view the protected section of the site for a certain amount of time only. 

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Allowing people to contact you via a contact form is a crucial part of any website. Replying and monitoring the reply to the visitor is equally important.

In a single owner environment this might be easy to manage. However, when multiple users are responsible for replies, this feature is vital.

How many times have you heard the excuse, “I didn’t receive that email”? With SoftPage there is no such excuse. All email functionality is centralised and monitored within the Contact Manager, while SoftPage integrates seamlessly with any email program. This means that all customer contact forms are sent to SoftPage, and a copy of the same email is sent to your email program. If the reply is made from within SoftPage, the dates and member names are recorded in full in SoftPage, allowing you to monitor email responses and their relevant details. With the Contact Manager you can always be in contact and in control of the reply.

The forms that a customer completes are completely customisable and can cater for any number of fields. The form can generate text, drop-down, tick box and full text fields. All forms can have the option of an Anti-Spam code that the customer is required to enter. This simple technique prevents non-humans (bots) from continually spamming you forms. 

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The Gallery Manager provides full gallery and album management for a complete on-line image gallery. Each gallery can be independent or be rooted from the main gallery using albums. An easy to upload system automatically adds images from your computer to the site in seconds.

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Everyone now knows what a Blog is! Some sites are even referred to as a Blog. The Blog is a great communication tool. (Similar to forums) Adding a blog to a page allows visitors to comment on the article, effectively creating great interaction with your visitors

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Sometimes the requirements of clients are very specific, and although SoftPage caters for a large majority of features, there is always going to be needs that are outside of SoftPage. This is when custom written modules are written and uploaded to SoftPage. These custom written modules are usually fully integrated into the SoftPage database. They can be created to provide almost any functionality.

As well as the back-end, there is usually the need for some form of front-end interface. The Plug-in Manager is where this front-end is executed from. Multiple plug-ins can be uploaded to SoftPage that can be separately executed. With the combination of the custom written modules and the Plug-in Window – there simply is no limit to SoftPage.

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The Tasks Manager is available to store memos and to-do items. These tasks can be prioritised and sorted. With SoftPage as a hosted solution, this feature becomes quite important considering internal company communication. It especially serves well as a central point for project-based development.

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Possibly the most frequently asked question any website owner would like an answer to is: “How many hits do I get?” With SoftPage you can do this without hesitation. Opening the Statistics Manager provides you with full, real-time statistics including Page Impressions, Unique Visitors and Referrers.

The time span is adjustable to one year and the statistics go back in history to the day you started the site. Although there are options to clear the history and all the site statistics, these options are mainly used when launching a site, as the development hits should not count toward the overall hits.

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