Review: StoreFront 5.0 AE and StoreFront BizPlaces

StoreFront 5.0 Advanced Edition
www.storefront.net/default.asp?REFERER=rfwilson
StoreFront BizPlaces
www.bizplaces.com/default.asp?REFERER=rfwilson

LaGarde, Inc.
5040 West 15th Street
Lawrence, Kansas 66049
(785) 830-9800

E-commerce software company LaGarde claims that approximately 35,000 online stores use its StoreFront software. This fifth-generation of the program includes a number of features not widely available in competing products.

Historically, LaGarde's primary sales channel has been through website developers rather than end-users. LaGarde has marketed StoreFront to developers as a companion piece integrated with Microsoft FrontPage, and more recently with MacroMedia DreamWeaver. StoreFront desktop software provides a live connection between the desktop development environment and your online store. Changes are made on the desktop; when you click "Save," the changes are automatically transferred to the online store. Alternatively, you can work offline and then publish all the changes when you go online.

LaGarde has taken its StoreFront AE feature set and built a hosted, web interface version that is marketed under two names. It is licensed to web hosting services to resell to their customers under the name StoreFront Now (www.storefrontnow.com). Recently, LaGarde has marketed this online application to small business end-users as StoreFront BizPlaces (www.bizplaces.com).

For this review I looked carefully at the hosted BizPlaces application, which is much like StoreFront AE (Advanced Edition) in its feature set and functionality. It differs, however, in pricing and some features. Purchase of a StoreFront license allows a developer to use the software in multiple applications for clients; BizPlaces charges a monthly fee based on the number of products.

Because of StoreFront's very strong features, it is worth a close examination. What I found was a feature-rich application with some remaining rough edges.

StoreFront Pricing

The StoreFront SE, Pro, and AE products are designed to run on any NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 server running IIS 4.0 or 5.0. Pricing is somewhat confusing, since LaGarde offers slightly different products for both FrontPage and DreamWeaver applications. But essentially it comes in three flavors: (1) Standard Edition (SE) is a basic e-commerce application that uses an online MS Access database. (2) Standard Edition Pro offers the same features as SE, but provides support for the more robust MS SQL database. (3) The Advanced Edition (AE) provides a large variety of features, Access and SQL support, and is the focus of this review.

Developers can work with any of these three varieties. When the online store is complete, they would provide their merchant clients with two add-on software pieces -- Merchant Tools ($129) that allow merchants a web interface to manage the business aspects of the store, and QuickBooks Add-On ($149) which facilitates importing store transactions into the QuickBooks accounting system.

Pricing for StoreFront SE, Pro, and AE are as one-time license fees to the developer. A developer could then use the software to develop multiple stores for clients without paying additional licensing fees. Note that in addition to the prices below, merchants will need to figure on (1) a monthly hosting fee, (2) a monthly payment gateway fee, and (3) merchant account fees.

StoreFront BizPlaces Pricing

The hosted ASP model that I studied for this review was BizPlaces, aimed at end-user merchants. Their pricing structure is:

A six-month plan saves 10% over these prices. A 12-month plan saves 20%. Ordering a domain name and your own SSL digital certificate, if desired, are additional. I see pricing as quite competitive. In addition, merchants will need to include monthly (1) payment gateway and (2) merchant account fees, unless PayPal is used as the only payment method. Manual processing is also available.

Set-Up Wizard

The BizPlaces application contains two set-up wizard tracks -- a basic system for novices, and an advanced wizard for experienced developers. (StoreFront SE, Pro, and AE include only the advanced wizard.) I followed the basic wizard and found it to be quite straightforward and intuitive. Though it doesn't set up every parameter in the store, it does get you started without wondering what to do next. Here are the set-up steps:

1. Enter store name
2. Pick color scheme from among 15 choices
3. Select menu location (left, top, or combo top and left)
4. Customize homepage using online webpage editor
5. Set merchant notification e-mail address and customize confirmation message to purchaser
6. Select payment types
7. Select shipping method
8. Set price and shipping charges
9. Select sales tax calculation
10. Create categories in which to organize products
11. Add products

Most of these steps are simplified to pull the novice through the process. Full configuration for each element is completed later. I felt this was a helpful wizard.

I choose four categories: e-books, videotapes, seminars, and consulting. Of these only my Videotape Learning Package is a tangible product that needs shipping calculations (and is taxable in California). The rest of these are either services or downloadable products. I selected short category names that will fit easily on the menu. Then I set up a few test products.

Ordering Process

I selected my popular "Guide to E-Mail Newsletters" e-book and clicked on the "Add to Order" button next to the product. Strangely, the system pops up a confirmation window that informs me that a product has been placed in my cart, but doesn't take me to the cart. I have to look for the cart icon in order to get there. From my standpoint, failure to take customers automatically to view their purchases will lose some shoppers in the process. With StoreFront AE, developers have a choice of whether selecting a product will take the shopper directly to the cart or not; in BizPlaces you don't have this option. A work-around is to use the confirmation window to display a check-out button and cross-selling message.

One feature of StoreFront AE and BizPlaces is a wish list on which shoppers can place products they aren't quite ready to buy yet. To put a product in the wish list, you're asked for your e-mail address and a password so you can get back to it later.

Finally, I go to check out to complete my order, I find my e-mail address already filled in (since I had registered for the wish list). I fill in my billing information and can skip shipping information if it's the same. Returning customers who identify themselves with an e-mail address and password don't have to fill in their billing and shipping address information again -- it's all there for them.

When I click the "Continue Checkout" button, the next page summarizes all my order and customer information. There is no "correct mistakes" button, so I try my "back" key, make a change, and click on "Continue Checkout" again. Sure enough, the change appears in the order summary.

Now I submit my credit card information (in this case, phony card info to test the system) and the order goes through properly. StoreFront software does a quick check for credit card number validity using the Mod-10 algorithm, but a real-time credit card authorization doesn't take place until I set up a payment gateway and merchant account later in the set-up process.

StoreFront BizPlaces back office web interface is called "E-Commerce Manager" (similar to the Merchant Tools module for the standalone software). It contains a number of sections to help manage the store:

• Wizards
• Store Management
• Sales and Promotions
• Store Inventory
• Web Pages
• Store Settings
• Design and Layout
• QuickBooks Tools

Store Management

Store Management consists of store reports, edit customers, and manage affiliates.

Store Reports

First of all, I looked at Sales Reports to see if the software registered my order. It did.

Store Reports provides a wide variety of reports to help the merchant track sales. I was able to find the order I had made, and could print it out. I includes the handy feature of allowing me to mask the credit card number, keeping it secure from order fulfillment employees who don't "need to know" this sensitive credit card.

Store Reports allows me to create reports by date range, today, week-to-date, month-to-date, or year-to-date. Reports include: sales details, sales summary, transaction service report, affiliate partners report, product sale report, and retrieve order by Order ID, First Name, or Last Name.

Edit Customers

The Store Management interface allows me to "Edit Customers" which are selected from a drop-down menu. Such a drop-down menu might work well for 20 customers, but doesn't seem designed well for 200 customers or 2000. It gives me the customer's name, e-mail address, username, and whether the customer has opted-in for an e-mail subscription. I would expect to find a way to send an e-mail to a selected customer, but that feature isn't available.

I can also edit affiliates from this interface. (See my comments on the affiliate program below.)

Sales and Promotions

The Sales and Promotions section allows me to handle sales, discounts, coupons, and to send promotional e-mail to my customer list. The discount and coupon features are especially strong.

Sales, Discounts, and Coupons

The Sales and Discounts section allows me to set up a global discount based on an order's total sales price, as well as free shipping over whatever threshold I set. Very nice!

The Coupons interface enables me to set up any number of coupons, set an expiration date if I like, allow a discount in terms of either percent or a dollar amount, and indicate the minimum purchase for which the coupon is good. It does not allow me to restrict the coupon to purchase of a particular product.

Promotional E-Mails

The e-mail feature is pretty basic. For example, there is no easy way to send a test e-mail to yourself before sending out the larger e-mailing. You can select customer groups by the date of their last purchase or by the product they've purchased. But these don't seem to be particularly useful way of filtering the customer database. E-mail is limited to text only.

Store Inventory

Product Information Fields

Product information is quite extensive. Instead of displaying all the information on a single screen, product data is divided into six screens: general, shipping, categories, inventory, attributes, and sales/discounts.

General. These are the possible fields, though not all are required: product ID (SKU), product name, product name plural, product price, product manufacturer, product vendor, activate product checkbox, small image, large image, and confirmation message. I can also check boxes that publish my products to DealTime and Infopia Market Place Manager (see below). A product message field is displayed to customers after they select a product to encourage them to purchase another complementary product.

Each product item is assigned a single image. Ideally, the product page shows a large image while the search or sectional pages show a smaller image. If no smaller image is available, the program reduces the graphic size (but not the file size) of the image by reducing the height and width attributes of the IMG tag.

Shipping. Here you can select gift wrapping (and set a gift wrapping price for each product), set an optional flat shipping fee for a product, and enter product box dimensions for UPS or other shipping service (weight, length, width, and height). You can also activate or deactivate state and country tax for each product.

Categories. In this section you can place the product under one or more categories or subcategories. This causes a link to the product page to appear under these category menu pages.

Inventory. Check boxes allow you to track inventory, allow back order, show stock status on the search page, and notify the merchant when stock reaches a low threshold. You can manually enter the quantity in stock and the low quantity flag threshold.

Attributes. StoreFront has rather flexible product attributes, such as color, size, format, etc. You can set up various attribute categories such as color, size, video format, etc., and then within each category, specify the various sizes or colors available. You can also increase or decrease the price depending upon the attribute. For example, size XXL could increase the price of a garment by $2 and S could decrease it by $1. This system is outstanding compared to most other shopping cart systems.

Sales/Discounts. StoreFront has one of the most flexible product sales and discount features I've seen. They have 7 levels of quantity discount, such as 3 for 10% off, 10 for 15% discount. In addition, you can set a flat sales price if you like. These savings show in the store by crossing out the regular price, giving the sales price, and displaying the amount of savings in dollars.

Categories

The "Manage Categories" interface allows you to set up multiple levels of categories. The category "boys' apparel," for example, might include subcategories for "pajamas," "jeans," and "shirts." Unfortunately, there is no place to provide an introductory paragraph and graphic for the category or subcategory.

Manufacturers and vendors can be entered and then assigned to each product, though this is not required. Merchants selling brand name products will find this useful. Customers can also search by manufacturer and this way find all products of a particular brand. A name and short description field are available for each manufacturer and vendor.

Data Imports

StoreFront BizPlaces (though not SE, Pro, and AE) allows you to export products from your desktop database or spreadsheet application and import them into your StoreFront online store. For a few products, the web interface is quite handy, but when you are offering hundreds and thousands of products, maintaining them offline is vital to your sanity. This import feature allows two format types: character-delimited text files (using commas, tabs, or semicolons to separate fields) or dBASE format. Most popular databases and spreadsheets can output data in either format. Unfortunately, category, inventory, attribute, and sales/discounts fields are not uploadable. The web interface allows you to map fields into the correct product categories.

Web Pages

Most stores can function quite well with just a few separate webpages, perhaps for "About Us," "Shipping Policies," and other information functions. The system creates dynamic on-the-fly webpages for each product. However, you can also build custom ASP webpages using FrontPage or DreamWeaver versions. BizPlaces allows you to use the online webpage editor and place a featured product at the bottom of the page.

The online webpage editor is only available in the BizPlaces version, and works quite well. If you want to, you can paste in HTML code that you have prepared offline in FrontPage, DreamWeaver, etc. But novices may be quite happy to prepare webpages online that automatically fit into the menu system. Pictures can also be uploaded to appear in the product pages.

Dynamic Page Pros and Cons

In the BizPlaces version, a meta tag editor allows you to insert one set of keyword and description tags for the entire site so the same tags show up on every single page. However, since most of the webpages are dynamic, ending in storefront.asp?pgID=5 or more complex URL for product pages, many of the search engines will not index them. Many will stop at the site's homepage and not even index sectional pages. This could make it more difficult to get consistent search engine traffic without using various combinations of doorway or gateway pages.

One advantage of dynamically-generated pages, however, is that StoreFront BizPlaces can show shoppers how many items are currently in stock, assuring them that their order is likely to be filled rapidly. If items are out of stock, the storeowner can decide whether or not to allow backorders.

StoreFront contains a search engine submission tool that can be used to submit webpages -- one at a time -- to a wide variety of search engines, and see the result page showing whether the submission was registered by the search engine. This may be handy for a page or two, but is very tedious if you want to submit many pages or to many search engines. JimTools.com submitter (www.jimtools.com) makes that task much easier.

Store Settings

The Store Settings section allows the store owner a great deal of flexibility in setting up a store to meet a wide variety of needs.

The program allows an optional wish list and the ability to e-mail product information to a friend. You can integrate LivePerson interactive chat on every page, though this requires a paid account with LivePerson.

E-mail notifications can be sent to both a primary and secondary address, and you can personalize the beginning of confirmation messages that are automatically sent to shoppers after an order has been placed.

Global Customization

The store can be configured for many countries, languages, and currencies. An optional OANDA currency conversion system can be installed, though this requires setting up a paid account. The program also allows you to designate clearly to which countries and/or states and provinces you ship.

You can select which credit cards you take, and add cards that aren't included in the built-in list. You can also choose one or more payment methods from a list that includes: credit cards, electronic checks, purchase orders, COD (with a place to indicate the COD fee), PayPal, and phone or fax. You can also indicate whether or not to include back-ordered items in order totals. You can choose to leave credit card information on the server, or automatically delete it every preset number of days.

Transaction Processing

Transaction processing can be set up through a wide variety of payment gateways: Authorize.net, Barclays, CardService (LinkPoint), E-Commerce Exchange, PayPal, Planet Payment, PSiGate, SecurePay, VeriSign Payflow Pro, SecureSource, and WorldPay. The inclusion of Barclays, PlanetPayment, and WorldPay mean that non-US merchants can use this software. I found that PayPal installed easily, but VeriSign Payflow Pro set-up wasn't nearly as easy. StoreFront has links for online account sign-up for CardService International/LinkPoint, WorldPay, and Wells Fargo.

Shipping

The shipping set-up screen allows you to specify (1) carrier-based shipping, (2) shipping based on the total purchase price, or (3) shipping charges specified on a per product basis.

I'm surprised that there is no weight-and-zone-based shipping system as an alternative to carrier-based shipping. Certainly weight is the most intuitive way to determine shipping costs, and will be sorely missed by international merchants, even though international carrier DHL is an option.

However, for North Americans there is a built-in interface with the US Postal Service, Canada Post, DHL, and United Parcel Service. FreightQuote is also available with the AE version. You'll need to set up an account ahead of time with the service(s) you prefer.

Tax Calculation

Tax can be set for multiple states, as well as for multiple countries. It is a flexible. Merchants in New York State, for example can add their own taxable regions (counties). There is currently no provision for a third-party taxation system such as Taxware.com.

Design and Layout

The FrontPage and DreamWeaver versions of StoreFront provide developers a great deal of design flexibility, since they can build custom ASP templates and webpages.

However, the web-based BizPlaces version provides a wide range of options, too (though you can't access the ASP code). For example, you can decide whether or not to include navigation links to categories, sales page, new products, affiliate program, mail subscription, or retrieve previous order. Even the output of the product search feature can be configured in a variety of ways.

If you don't like the 15 pre-selected themes, you can create your own. The system allows you to set background colors, images, hyperlink colors, upload banner images, set table width, and fine-tune navigation for each of the areas of the webpage template.

Though the color combinations of the themes are quite attractive, I was surprised to find that in several instances the text color was difficult to read against the white background. For example, "Brown Sandstone" theme offers light brown text. If you switch to "Understated Tan" it's harder to read yet. "Checks" was better, but slate gray against white is tough. However, you are able to modify colors and fonts in any theme, allowing you to change the text color to black on white.

While the novice can set up an adequate site template modifying the pre-selected themes, a professional developer could develop a webpage template for StoreFront to meet exacting design criteria.

QuickBooks Tools

One of StoreFront's most helpful features is an easily configurable set-up system to download invoices, sales receipts, and customer data into QuickBooks. You set up account names to match your existing QuickBooks system. You may have to spend considerable time setting up product information for every product in your store, designating a SKU, product name, and account for each. When everything is set up, you can extract the set of orders you desire by designating the range of Order IDs.

Help System

I found BizPlaces' contextual help system quite helpful. If there was an item on a page I didn't understand, a click on the help button popped up a small window that nearly always answered my question.

Customer Interface

StoreFront has a customer interface feature that enables customers to insert an e-mail address and password so they can see their order history. The interface shows a history of orders with order numbers and items purchased, and allows customers to add to previous orders. Unfortunately, there is no indication of which orders have been shipped, the date of the previous order, etc. This kind of feature could be an extremely valuable tool to help customers, but is poorly designed and of only marginal value in its present form.

Affiliate Program

StoreFront includes its own optional affiliate program. Since I've reviewed many systems in my Report on Affiliate Management Software e-book, I was quite interested -- but quickly disappointed.

The sign-up form assumes a company rather than an individual name and doesn't ask to whom a check should be made out. It doesn't provide a place to secure the affiliate's tax ID. Nor does it provide a link to a page explains commissions or the affiliate agreement to which the prospective affiliate is agreeing -- a legal no-no. Once you sign up, it provides a basic link to the website, but doesn't provide any explanation of how to implement the links, or make available any banner images or product graphics. While it may be possible to link to product pages on the site, how to do it isn't at all clear. While this system may track sales well enough, at this point it's pretty primitive and needs to be thought through carefully.

Publishing Products to Shopping Services

Yahoo! Shopping gives Yahoo! Store merchants a big advantage at Christmas by sending lots of retail shoppers to their stores -- for a slice of the sales. In an attempt to duplicate this feature and bring traffic, StoreFront BizPlaces has partnered with DealTime (www.dealtime.com) and Infopia Market Place Manager (www.infopia.com). These are shopping venues that expose your products in various online sales sites. Infopia charges a monthly service fee to manage your products on many sites, while DealTime sends you traffic on a per click basis with a monthly minimum. StoreFront BizPlaces allows you to share the product data in your store as the basis with these other services. This way you maintain only one product database, rather than multiple databases for multiple services.

Third-Party Add-Ons

StoreFront has been quite successful in extending the functionality of their products by third-part add-ons. Several are built into the BizPlaces Product. However, an impressive number of add-ons are available for the SE, Pro, and AE products from third-party developers.

Sandshot Software (www.sandshot.net) provides a variety of solutions for store management, promotional e-mails, tax calculations, wholesale pricing levels, zone-based shipping by weight, freight shipping, and search tools.

Greybeard Design (www.greybearddesign.com/gbdgstore/ecommerce_sf_dnld.asp) provides a digital download system for StoreFront.

InterWeb Technologies (http://www.interweb-tech.com/storefront/sfaddons.asp) provides a list of helpful free add-ons. Their paid add-ons are vital, such as a search engine optimizer for dynamic pages, online order tracking, pricing and invoicing tools.

Ikaika Web Solutions (www.iwebsolutions.net/) provides both StoreFront hosting as well as a wide variety of add-ons.

The StoreFront Insider (www.sfinsider.com) provides a variety of add-ins such as a file delivery system, multiple product orders, order locator, catalog builder, super search, discount manager, and pack, ship, and drop-ship modules.

Short Order Software (www.web-shorts.com/sos/) provides an image manager and e-mail extension.

Evaluating BizPlaces

As I evaluated StoreFront BizPlaces I found a number of features are quite well implemented -- product options, product data fields, discounts, promotions, inventory control, a nice built-in webpage editor, QuickBooks integration, and an excellent help system. The variety of features as well as third-party add-ins is quite impressive.

On the other hand, certain features seem tacked on but not well thought through -- such as the affiliate program and customer interface. The ability to do carrier-based shipping with UPS, USPS, and Canada Post is a big plus, but the lack of weight and zone-based shipping largely limits the product's usability to North American merchants and customers. Without using QuickBooks, merchants are left with no functional order management system whatsoever. And the ordering system sequence leaves something to be desired. The fact that many search engines don't index ASP pages is a marketing minus. I also missed an easy way to sell e-books and other digital downloads.

Pricing seems competitive. For merchants needing a full-functioned system that they can set up themselves, StoreFront BizPlaces is a strong contender.

Evaluating StoreFront AE

StoreFront SE, Pro, and especially AE provide a strong basic platform for developers seeking to work in a Windows server ASP environment. While I didn't directly evaluate StoreFront AE, the feature-set I see displayed in the BizPlaces application is impressive.

The best commentary on StoreFront AE's weaknesses is found in the variety of third-party software solutions, some of which are necessary to repair weaknesses. On the other hand, this breadth of third-party solutions which extend functionality (such as found with Miva Merchant) strengthens AE's ability to serve as an extremely flexible development system that can meet most merchants' needs.

StoreFront's growing prominence in the marketplace is clear evidence that it deserves a close look from merchants seeking feature-rich, e-commerce applications.