Interland's Online Catalog Suite

Like many modern ISPs, Interland offers a lot more than just webosting. We examine Interland's offering, called the "Online Catalog Suite."

by Sean Michael Kerner of ecommerce-guide.com [March 21, 2005]

Like many modern ISPs, Interland offers a lot more than just Web hosting. As part of ECommerce-Guide.com's ongoing review series of online hosted e-commerce storefronts, we examine Interland's offering, called the "Online Catalog Suite." Just like Interland is more than just another hosting company, the Online Catalog Suite is a lot more than just another online catalog application.

What is Interland Online Catalog Suite?
Interland's Online Catalog Suite is a do it yourself grouping of different services all focussed on building and growing an e-commerce presence. The Suite is currently offered by Interland for $69.95 per month which includes an extensive list of included products. For starters, it includes hosting (no surprise seeing as this is a hosting company after all) with 350 MB of storage and (according to Interland's marketing specs) "unlimited bandwidth." It's not entirely unlimited though if you read the fine print, which puts a 10 GB cap on database server bandwidth. That said, it's still a lot of bandwidth for the average user.

Interland's Online Catalog start page offers an easy way to begin setting up your e-commerce website.

The Catalog Suite also includes Interland's Trellix-based Easy Site Builder online application. On the e-commerce side of things, the offer includes the Interland E-store builder, Miva Merchant, a VeriSign payment gateway, Amazon store connector, eBay auction connector and Paypal integration.

Beyond just providing hosting and robust e-commerce functionality, Interland's Online Catalog Suite goes a step further and actually includes tools to help you market your site. As we all know, if you build it and don't market it, "they" won't come.

Setting Up the Online Catalog
By following the Easy Site Builder instructions and with the help of the ever-present Help key, getting a store set up is a relatively straightforward exercise.

That's not to say there aren't a lot of choices available. The Easy Site Builder application includes some 215 different site designs that are categorized by type (Vertical Navigation, Horizontal Navigation, Basic, General Business, Crafts/Hobbies, Holidays/Special Events, Invitations/Announcements, Travel, Business Webblogs/Blogs). The entire interface is browser based so there is no need to utilize or download any other external programs.

Once you've settled on the basic design it's time to delve into the catalog details, which again is a simple step-by-step menu-driven exercise that is easy, and fast, to complete.

Beyond the catalog is where Interland's offer really excels in a number of business-critical categories. By clicking on the site builder tab called "Site Add Ons" Business Tools, you find a treasure chest of tools to kick an e-commerce site into overdrive. Among these "Add Ons" is a Gift Certificate and Coupon management system which is created and managed with point and click ease.

Forms, an often overlooked but critical part of an e-commerce site, are also easily created with the Business Forms builder. If you're building the site for a "real" storefront, the "Add a Map" feature will help your customers get there.

Upon selection, Interland's Online Catalog Site Builder automatically creates common pages used in most e-commerce Web sites.

An Amazon Item Listing function is also included which doesn't necessarily help you to sell product from your own catalog but it does help you to drive incremental revenue from Amazon's affiliate program, "Amazon Associates." This allows you to display Amazon products and earn an affiliate commission when an item is purchased.

An eBay auction connector is also part of the suite which, again, doesn't directly sell a product from your catalog, but does help drive traffic to any current eBay auction you may have running. With the Amazon and eBay features you can leverage whatever eyeballs your site captures and cross sell, hopefully driving increased sales.

In most cases, sales are driven by some form of marketing. It's not enough to just build a site and hope buyers will magically appear. Interland includes Constant Contact's email marketing program (read the ecommerce-guide.com review of Constant Contact). Constant Contact is an industry leading email list management and promotion program. With it you can manages all aspects of your email marketing endeavours including subscriber sign up, list management, message creation, reporting and tracking.

Search engines are of course a crucial part of marketing a site, both in terms of organic and paid listings. Interland's Online Catalog Suite helps in both regards.

The Search Engine Manager feature is a complete suite of tools to help you optimize your site for search engine indexing as well as submitting and tracking your sites to search engines and a tool for tracking your sites ranking. If that isn't enough, Interland also throws in a $75 credit to use for Google's AdWords system to begin search engine advertising for your new site as well.

However, Interland's Online Catalog suite does not offer a Web-based interface to implement conversion tracking for your Google AdWords campaign. Nor does it have a direct feed submission to Google's Froogle shopping index. Both of those features are ones that Interland's competitor 1&1 Internet (read the ecommerce-guide review of 1&1 here) does offer.

Interland's Online Catalog Suite has an easy-to-use control panel to help you maintain your e-commerce site.

The Online Catalog suite also lacks direct integration with an automatic shipping cost calculator (i.e USPS, FedEx, UPS etc). I consider this a serious oversight.

With the long list of features that Interland includes, it can be a bit overwhelming digging through all the bells and whistles. Though, as previously mentioned, the help function is always there (and always helpful). What makes it a bit annoying, however, is that they've included a few items that I'd consider to be redundant (but I didn't know they were redundant until I spent the time trying to figure them out).

For instance, the Constanct Contact Email Management system handles all aspects of email promotion. Yet, there is also a separate feature called "Announce Your Site" which exists outside of Constant Contact and allows you to email a site announcement, which is something that can be done with the Email Manager as well. There are also two different ways of building a catalog, either the e-store builder or via Miva Merchant. I didn't realize until after calling tech support that they were both essentially doing the same thing, which was a bit confusing at first.

Conclusion
All told, Interland's Online Catalog suite is one of the most robust, fully featured, hosting company-offered e-commerce setups that I have yet seen. In three weeks of testing I was continually amazed by how much Interland has packed into this offer and how easy they've made it to get it all to work.

By packing marketing and site promotion features into the e-commerce suite, Interland has created a package that will help users not only build but also really "sell" their wares.

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