Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Shopping Cart And Crm All-in-one Solution

Posted by Anonymous on 10/31/2006 at 10:50 AM ET 250 Points
I have two Members Only kind of website where customers pay a monthly subscription in order to get access to stock market information. I plan to launch new products next year, not necessarily subscription based, it can be DVDs or books.

Anyway, I'm looking for a solution that would allow me to create order forms, collect payments (a shopping cart that would integrate with Authorize.net), track campaign results, and manage the customers database. Does anyone know an existing company that offers a service like that?

Would it make sense to create my own software to do this? How much would it cost approximately?

My goal is to be able to create and modify order forms for cross selling in an easy way. Beable to track the results and make changes to the copy. And collect all the customers data into a single database.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Harry Hallman on 10/31/2006 at 12:26 PM Accepted
    I am not sure it will do everything you want but look at www.monstercommerce.com. I use several stores on their service and it is inexpensive.

    Harry Hallman
  • Posted by Frank Hurtte on 10/31/2006 at 12:32 PM Accepted
    in a case like yours it is almost never worthwhile to develop your own software solution. Modify, or adapt to an existing software.

    If you develop your own, you will continue to have maintance and modification costs that will be a whole lot more than you are bargaining for.

  • Posted by darcy.moen on 10/31/2006 at 7:55 PM Member
    I know two software packages that works with Authorize.net, 2checkout.com, and Paypal (and other payment gateways). The price can't be beat...it costs ZERO dollars! How can this be?! Well, they are opensource software packages.

    Free? Are they any good? Yes.

    One is www.oscommerce.com and the other is www.virtuemart.net

    I've multiple clients using one or the other of these shopping cart solutions. They are very stable, and reliable.

    Selling the subscription is easy, figuring out how to restrict access to a web site is another matter. That is one I won;t share in this public forum, but it can be done.

    Hope I helped you.

    Darcy Moen
    Customer Loyalty Network
  • Posted by darcy.moen on 11/1/2006 at 8:11 PM Accepted
    Okay, I'll cave in and spill the beans.

    Virtuemart has a neat feature. It plugs into the Joomla content management system.

    Joomla CMS (another opensource project, get it from www.joomla.org) has a registered user feature. Visitors can create user names and passwords, and become registered users of your web site.

    Now, virtue mart is a component you add to the Joomla CMS. Virtue Mart has a setting switch that will add customers who buy with the Virtuemart shopping cart to the registered users list of the web site. In other words, when someone makes a purchase through your web site, they are added as a registered user of the web site.

    Sounds like what you are looking for?

    Now, the trick is to set up the CMS so only paid members (those who bough memberships) can access the subscriber only content. Well, I've done just that for another client. Contact me via my profile and I'll email you a link to the client's site. I'd share the link publically, but it would blow the stats the web site is generating on another marketing campaign we are running. I can spare a few hits from the question asker though.

    Darcy Moen
    Customer Loyalty Network
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