ShopSite, an e-commerce software veteran, has released version 7.0 of its ShopSite package, with several new features aimed at improving its ISP market share.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [January 26, 2004]

Founded in 1996 in Orem, Utah, ShopSite, an e-commerce website company, is no newcomer to the business. Version 7.0 of the ShopSite software, released on December 15, 2003, adds a swath of new features, but the basic goal remains serving all customers.

The company was owned by Open Market, Inc., but was bought back by management in 2001. It is now employee-owned, and focused on customers of all sizes. "When we were owned by Open Market, we had a minimum account size, but no longer," says John Young, ShopSite vice president of sales.

He says the company targets end users of all sizes. "Having a Web presence that someone can bookmark and come back to is the next step up from eBay."

"We spun the company back out on our own," says David Hills, ShopSite CEO. "That's allowed us to focus on our core competence, serving the SMB."

Of course, the company does have larger customers, too. "We serve everyone from mom and pop shops to Verio," says Hills.

Hills adds that the company has always been friendly to ISPs. "We've always sold through ISPs," he says.

ISPs of all sizes are finding that after e-mail, the killer app of today's broadband Internet is eBay. ISPs are also interested in becoming webhosting providers because the margins are higher, the customers are more loyal, and tech support issues are (usually) less burdensome. When ISPs sell the business, webhosting customers can make the whole package more attractive to potential buyers.

But ISPs are also wary of the legal issues than can arise with webhosting (see, for example, Webhosting Gets Personal).

Prepackaged software like that offered by ShopSite may alleviate some of the downside of offering webhosting while providing a significant upside. Software that's gone through this many updates has a lot of features, and the company claims that updates are driven by its customers.

"We've been successful because customers tell us what they need and we build it for them," says Young, pointing out that in an employee-owned company, the engineers are also partial owners.

New features include:

Customer Registration: Whereas in the past the software tracked users by using cookies, version 7.0 allows users to log in to change payment and shipping options. This requires a database on the server side. ShopSite uses the open source app SQL Lite. "We don't want to force people to buy a third party database," says Hills. "It's all there when we deliver the software." He adds that the software allows merchants to assign customers to groups, and groups can get rewards or coupons.

Custom Templates: In previous versions of the software, some customization was possible, but now users can control all aspects of their own templates.

Mini Cart: The software now summarizes the contents of the shopping cart on the fly, using JavaScript and a cookie. Other software products generate pages dynamically, but ShopSite avoids doing so because pages generated dynamically are generally not indexed by search engines.

Free Shipping: The software now allows merchants to offer free shipping on orders of more than a specified dollar amount.

Variable Pricing Feature: This is a very flexible option that allows merchants to donate a portion of sales to charity, to change prices on the fly, and to settle an auction from eBay on ShopSite.

With its international install base, ShopSite has for some time been compatible with foreign languages. "You could have a mirror store for other languages and currencies," says Young. "We offer a discount on consecutive licenses for mirrors."

ShopSite is not set up for Asian languages, which use two byte characters instead of one byte characters. "Most of our international customers are in Europe," explains Young. "Others are in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand."

The setup process involves nine steps: storefront (setting up the home page), products (building the product database), pages (placing products on pages—this is fast and automated but some vendors may want to take longer to customize the look and feel of product pages), sales tax (if needed), payment methods (allow credit cards and other payment methods), shipping (set up shipping choices), layout and color theme (for all website pages), publish (generate the website), and troubleshoot (test the website).

This system seems perfect for those just graduating from eBay. ShopSite expects more sophisticated users will design their own templates to get the most out of the system, but the software demo we used is geared towards users without coding experience.

Pricing and availability
The company sells licenses to ISPs in bulk, and ISPs then sell the licenses to end users at a markup.

Pricing is per domain. The company does expect a license for each domain, including mirrors, of an e-commerce website. It has two purchase options, each of costs $6,000 up front and includes free maintenance and support, listing on the ShopSite website, a demo, and a lead generator.

In the bulk purchase option, the ISP gets 10 ShopSite Pro licenses or 20 licenses for the stripped-down version, ShopSite Manager.

In the monthly payment option, the ISP gets $6,000 in credit, and pays the following: $50 per site per month for ShopSite Pro, $25 per site per month for ShopSite Manager, and $5 per site per month for ShopSite Starter (which has minimal functionality but does enable the most basic e-commerce features).

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