Redesigned Early Impact Web site

It's a big day at Early Impact today: after almost 10 years of being exclusively focused on developing and marketing ProductCart, our shopping cart software, we just officially released SubscriptionBridge, our new subscription management system.

Just like with most of what we develop, SubscriptionBridge is born out of our own experience running an ecommerce store. When we started selling subscriptions and processing recurring payments via Authorize.Net Automated Recurring Billing (ARB), we soon discovered that the system was missing a lot of features that we absolutely needed. And that's how SubscriptionBridge got started.

As part of this launch, we've partially redesigned our Web sites.

• EarlyImpact.com now mostly hosts pages that apply to the company as a whole
• ProductCart.com is focused on ProductCart (and basically a replica of what used to be the Early Impact Web site, at least for now).
• SubscriptionBridge.com is focused on SubscriptionBridge
• If you run a search, our custom Google search engine should return results across all of our Web properties (Google is indexing some of the new pages right now, so results will likely improve over time).

If you have any feedback on our updated Web sites, certainly let us know.

SubscriptionBridge officially released

After several months of internal use here at Early Impact, today we are officially releasing SubscriptionBridge, our subscription management system.

SubscriptionBridge adds subscription management features (e.g. HTML notifications, ability to edit a subscription by adding or removing features, etc.) to popular and robust recurring payment systems like Authorize.Net ARB and PayPal Recurring Payments.

• See how SubscriptionBridge works
• Frequently asked questions
• Pricing and free trial

Of course, SubscriptionBridge works with ProductCart too! When you use the two together, you can run an ecommerce store that sells both subscriptions and non-subscription products. SubscriptionBridge support is built into ProductCart v4.1 and above.

And since not everyone uses ProductCart as their ecommerce software (not sure why, but - hey - not our fault), we are integrating SubscriptionBridge with other shopping carts as well, starting with Magento, a popular PHP shopping cart.

Head over to the SubscriptionBridge Web site for more details and sign up for free trial.

Private sales and private shopping clubs: ProductCart can help

Private sales are a hot topic these days (short sales, large discounts, registered users only), with online retailers such as, One Kings Lane, Rue La La and Gilt successfully implementing a retail strategy that's worked very well in Europe for some time (private sale leader Vente Privee had sales of around 1 billion dollars in 2009).

Take Gilt, for example: it has raised $48 million (i.e. investors believe in this model evidently!) and is expected to take in over $450 million in sales this year. Zulily (private sales of goods for "busy moms") has reportedly raised a total of $10.6 million to implement their business model.

Can small businesses do private sales within their budget?
Unlike the companies we just mentioned, you might not have millions to spend. Can you still give this retail strategy a try? Can small businesses implement this type of business model (since it appears to be working quite well), without spending a fortune or having to do a lot of time consuming custom development?

Well, get yourself a ProductCart v4.1-powered e-commerce store and you can get started right away :-)

Restricting access on the entire store
With ProductCart you can turn an open e-commerce storefront into a "private" shopping club within minutes. It's easy to do, you don't need a developer, and you can revert back to an "open" store without any issues, if you want to just see how it would work. Here is a sample store turned into a private shopping club.

• See a demo storefront
• Read detailed instructions

Restricting access at the product level
With ProductCart, it's also easy to restrict access for specific products only. To achieve that, you can leverage the "Not for Sale" feature and "Customer Pricing Categories" to provide special benefits that are not available to all customers.

For example, you could create a "Gold Customers" category, assign customers to it based on certain requirements (e.g. that they fill out a form where they share more information about their purchasing preferences and habits), and give them special benefits that might include...

• Products not generally avaiableIn ProductCart v4.1 and above you can override the "Not for Sale" feature at the Customer Category level, meaning that a product can be "Not for Sale" for everyone except for certain customers (e.g. "Gold Customers" can buy it).
  
• Special prices
  Some or all products can be offered at discounted prices. Only customers that belong to the Category can view the special prices.
• Special coupons (discounts by code)
  You can restrict the applicability of coupons to only customers that belong to the Category. For example you could send an additional, 10% coupon to be spent within 2 days: other customers would not be able to use it (even if they were given the discount code).
• Special payment options
  In ProductCart you can restrict certain payment options by customer category. This is often used when the customer category includes customers that require special terms (e.g. resellers that pay "Net 30").

More information
For more information, see these step-by-step guides:

• Creating a Private Shopping Club with ProductCart
• Creating a Private Sale for specific products with ProductCart

Mobile Commerce Add-on for ProductCart

Mobile Commerce is growing rapidly. While Q2 overall ecommerce sales grew 14% over the same quarter of last year, many retailers are reporting m-commerce sales growing in the triple digits, with Amazon making headlines for selling over $1 billion via mobile devices in the last 12 months.

ProductCart users will soon be able to take advantage of this trend. This month (August, 2010) we began development of a Mobile Commerce Add-on for ProductCart, and we are keeping the project small (on purpose) to deliver it to you by the busy fourth quarter.

Here are some initial specifications for the project, so you can start getting an idea of what's coming:

• Ready before busy shopping season: BETA available by the end of September, 2010
• Quick shopping experience: find, add, checkout
• Easily browse through search results
• Checkout strictly through PayPal Mobile Checkout, to start (PayPal Express Checkout for mobile devices: quick and easy checkout)

Build To Order products will not be supported in this initial version due to the complexity of displaying the configuration page effectively on a mobile device. We'll try our best to support Apparel products. We'll see how it goes.

We'll keep you updated and will look for early adopters that want to start testing it as soon as a BETA is available (contact us if you want to be on list of BETA testers).

Visualize before you buy: meet the Spotlight Visualizer

The best part of our job at Early Impact really is to see how companies use our ecommerce software to setup all kinds of successful online ventures. Spotlight Retail is one of those companies, with over 30 niche-oriented, ProductCart-powered stores under its belt.

We recently met with Spotlight Retail's CEO John Montague, and he pointed out a tool that they've implemented across many of their online stores, and that we particularly liked. They call it the Spotlight Visualizer. In a nutshell, it helps you visualize the product that you are trying to buy, in the real-world setting where it will be used.

For example, assume you're looking to purchase an outdoor basketball hoop and you want to see how it's going to look in your driveway, before you install it. No problem: just upload a picture of your driveway, and the "visualizer" helps you take care of the rest.

Here is how it works.

First, you upload a picture of your driveway (or use one that's provided by default).

Then, pick a product from the available ones, and drop it onto the image.

Finally, move it and resize it so that it properly fits in the picture.

There you go! You now have a pretty good idea of how things are going to look once the product has been installed.

Great idea, well implemented. If you want more information, contact them (contact info at the bottom of the page).

Congrats to Spotlight Retail (which is growing fast and opening more stores, by the way).

Smart content management in ProductCart v4.1

Have you already taken advantage of ProductCart's content management features? If not, this is a good time to get more familiar with Content Pages, as they have been expanded and improved in version 4.1. Let's take a look.

Save a draft, publish later
In ProductCart v4.1 you can create a new content page and save it as a draft. Drafts are not visible in the storefront, and can reviewed, edited, and published later.

Save changes to a live page as a draft
Sometimes you need to make changes to a content page, but don't want to alter the live page until you're done. No problem, in ProductCart v4.1 you can save your changes to a draft, while the live page remains unedited. When you're done, you can turn the draft into the live page with one click.

Drafts and users with limited access
If a store administrator who does not have publishing rights edits a live page, the changes are automatically saved to a draft. The live page is not affected until a store administrator with publishing rights reviews them and makes them live. More control and more flexibility.

More about Content Pages
Learn more about the many content management features in ProductCart v4.1

• Test the admin tools on this demo Control Panel
• See how the pages look in the storefront
• Read the documentation on Content Pages

ProductCart v4.1: here we go!

We've been developing shopping cart software for almost 10 years, releasing lots of versions of ProductCart over time. Yet, every time we make available a new release, it's always a special and exciting time.

So, here it is: ProductCart v4.1



ProductCart v4.1 contains over 270 new features, improvements, and bug fixes. We truly hope you like this new release, and that it'll help you run even more successful ecommerce stores.

• If you're enrolled to receive our newsletters, you'll get an announcement in your mailbox tomorrow
• You can download the new update using the "Check for Updates" link in the Control Panel (enroll your license in the Support & Updates Plan if you haven't already done so: that's how you support our development and customer service efforts).
• For more information and detailed installation instructions, head over to the ProductCart Wiki.

Almost "hidden" in this release, you will also find a soft launch of Early Impact's latest project: our new subscription management system: SubscriptionBridge. Much more on that in the upcoming days!