ShopSite Benefits for ISPs and Portals

ShopSite is designed for companies who want to offer industry-leading commerce services to their small business customers through a hosting operation. ShopSite offers these companies a tool to generate revenue streams through hosting fees, transactions, and value-added services. Companies that use ShopSite have tight, long-lasting, profitable relationships with their customers.

ShopSite Features for Portals, Vortals and ISPs:

  • Easy merchant provisioning -- After installing ShopSite, you need only create a new account for each new merchant.
  • Easy merchant upgrades -- Moving a merchant from one service level to another is as simple as changing the merchant's account key.
  • Scalability -- Hosts can add hundreds of merchant accounts on a single server.
  • Efficiency -- ShopSite requires few server resources, making it easy to maintain hundreds of stores on a single server. (We aren't blowing smoke here; we have partners running hundreds of stores on a single server.)
  • Static pages -- Static pages are not only good for your customers, but they are good for you. Serving static pages requires many fewer CPU cycles than serving dynamic pages. Your customers are happy because their pages are indexable by search engines, and you save on resource allocation.
  • Ease-of-administration -- ShopSite is simple to administer. ShopSite CSPs running hundreds of stores haven't hired any additional system administrators because of ShopSite.
  • Easy-to-support -- ShopSite has been around since the beginnings of Internet commerce. Hundreds of partners and thousands of merchants are currently running ShopSite. You can rely on ShopSite to be a stable, tested solution.
  • Mall-wide Product Indexing: With a little CGI programming, a Portal or ISP can now index all products in all their hosted ShopSite stores. ShopSite can be instructed to produce an XML dump of all products in a store whenever the merchant publishes. A portal could then have a process pick up the file and index it for a global product search. Customers can easily search all stores, and merchants' products get more exposure.
  • Automatic merchant provisioning: Hosts may set up web-based merchant provisioning. This allows merchants to automatically set up a ShopSite account through your website. You can use this feature to create a Try-Before-You-Buy program.
  • Customizable Merchant Interface: Many aspects of the ShopSite interface can be customized by the hosting company. These include everything from displaying your logo on ShopSite pages to setting the target URL for certain buttons to point to your resources. Click here for a complete list of customization options.

ShopSite System Requirements

ShopSite supports servers that run on the follow operating systems:

  • Linux
  • Solaris Sparc
  • Windows 2000 Server
  • FreeBSD

System requirements to run ShopSite Shopping Cart Software