Nexternal Features: Your Guide to Nexternal Ecommerce Features
Nexternal features an ecommerce software solution that many feel exceeds all others. What they sometimes lack in tools, they make up for in excellent customer service with a focus on your ROI. Every Nexternal customer gets their own personal account rep who will help improve all aspects of the merchant's online store performance, so when it comes to customer care, Nexternal excels beyond expectations. Below is a list of Nexternal features as of the summer of 2010. They are always updating their software, so this list will be changed regularly. Also, these features are available to all Nexternal customers regardless of payment level. Click on Nexternal features underlined below to get a detailed explanation of how they can impact your future Nexternal shopping cart.
Customer & Product Marketing Tools
SEO Tools & Google Sitemap Generator
The Nexternal shopping cart contains a search engine friendly catalog which houses search friendly html files that merchants can host on their web server. These HTML files can rank in search engines driving traffic to your ecommerce store while also providing an optimized user experience for your customers. The SEO features also include a Google Sitemap Generator allowing for Google friendly XML sitemap creation for search engines to index your site easier.
Popular Daily Automated Shopping Feeds: Google, Yahoo!, Shopping.com, ShopZilla, NextTag, & PriceGrabber
Prospective customers search for online stores in many ways, and through the Nexternal shopping cart feed integration, your ecommerce store will automatically syndicate to popular shopping solutions like Google Product Search, Yahoo! Product Submit, and much more!
Bulk Mail Wizard
The Mail Wizard allows merchants to create bulk e-mails and mailing labels. The merchant can select to send a message to either all of its online customers or just a specific segment of them based upon their purchase history. If they choose to send an e-mail, the format can be a plain text message or a rich HTML e-mail. Customers can automatically unsubscribe from the mailing list so that the merchant does not harass customers that no longer wish to be contacted. The mail wizard makes it easy to run promotions, allowing merchants with no coding experience to send e-mails with links that go directly to specific products in the merchant's online store or even a link to the store that automatically activates a coupon.
Email / Tell-A-Friend
Let your customers promote products for you with this popular shopping cart feature. By using the "Tell a Friend" feature on your Nexternal shopping cart, your customers can share your products with their friends and family and help you boost sales.
Affiliate Tracking Tools
Get your products all over the internet by allowing others to sell your products for a small commission. Nexternal's shopping cart software comes equipped with an affiliate module. Affiliates may sign up through this program and once approved, the merchant can track sales that are generated as a result of the affiliate's effort. Merchants can also set different commission levels for different affiliates and track payments to the affiliates. A very common use of this program is to track Return on Investment (ROI) from the pay-per-click search engines such as Overture. Nexternal's software is also compatible with Commission Junction and MyAffiliateProgram.com.
Product Customer Reviews & Ratings
Nexternal's shopping cart comes equipped with a moderated customer review feature that can help merchants increase conversion rate and customer confidence. As more and more shoppers move online, they bring with them a level of distrust for any website that requests their credit card information. If they can see that other customers were satisfied with their online purchase, they will be more willing to buy your products. Also, you can feel confident about how your product is promoted because all reviews are moderated through your admin panal.
Up Sell and Cross Sell Tools
Merchants can setup relationships between various products in their online store and utilize these relationships to facilitate up sales. A merchant might say, "May we recommend accessory X?," on a product detail page for Product Y. This provides customers with more to choose from and a feeling of accomplishment when they find complimentary products.
Content Management Software (CMS)
Merchants can create search engine friendly content pages (articles) using Nexternal's ecommerce software. Content can be managed through a WYSIWYG editor (What You See is What You Get) making it simple for anyone to create and manage pages. These content pages are searchable from within the online store while also SEO friendly so that major search engines can index them.
AddThis Social Bookmarking Tool
Nexternal understands the need to promote your products anywhere and everywhere possible. While the shopping cart is already robust in this arena by making things search engine friendly and syndicating your products to various shopping feeds, this feature is yet another great tool in the online promotion arsenal. The AddThis button is a popular social bookmarking tool that allows any visitor to your site to bookmark a product page across popular sites like Digg, Reddit, Google Bookmarks, and much more. Currently, this button is connected to over 60 social sites online, and with a few clicks your products can gain prominance on each site.
RSS Feeds
RSS Feeds are a part of the storefront side of Nexternal's software. Enabling RSS Feeds makes it very easy for users with RSS Readers to see when you have added new products to your online store. These feeds contain direct links to your products.
Customer Friendly User Experience
Always On Screen Shopping Cart
Nexternal has continued to receive more praise for its "always on screen shopping cart" than any other feature in the system. Online shoppers love the fact that they can always see what is in their cart as well as what the total purchase price without having to load up a separate screen. Customers can edit the quantity of a certain item or remove items from their cart. When coupons and customer discounts are used, these customers can see their discount in the cart, often times enticing them to buy more. The "always on screen shopping cart" is available with every storefront template.
Currency Converter
The Internet allows customers from all over the world the chance to visit your store, so why limit them with only one currency option? The Currency Converter tool lets customers choose which currency they are familiar with and let's them view their cart costs in that currency. This remains available to them throughout their purchase while accurately converting back to your preferred currency when the purchase goes through.
Branded Online Store
Consistent branding is important in making online shoppers feel comfortable. Nexternal designers work hard for you and will customize and brand the shopping cart design to seamlessly integrate with your website.
Direct Checkout
This streamlined checkout is the fastest possible checkout for a single product order. It allows an efficient checkout process without sacrificing functionality.
Express Checkout
When it comes to Nexternal features, the storefront software was designed with two concepts in mind: 1) Make it as easy as possible for customers to find what they are looking for 2) Make it as easy as possible for customers to checkout. With Nexternal's "Smart Navigation" technology, it is impossible for someone to get lost in the checkout process. Returning customers can login and checkout with just a couple of clicks of the mouse.
In Stock Emails
Customers may want a product of yours that is no longer in stock. To ensure that they don't look somewhere else for your product, the Nexternal shopping cart offers in stock notification that the customer can opt into. The notification occurs automatically via email when the merchant adds inventory to the system.
Keyword Search & Browse
Every ecommerce site needs searching capability. Nexternal's shopping cart software provides both a keyword and advanced search. The keyword search will query every element of a product looking for a specific word and return all relevant matches. The advanced search allows the customer to get more specific and search for products based on multiple criteria such a product name and price.
Product Sorting Tools
The best way to get a sale is to give your customers all the necessary tools to find your products fast. One of these tools is the "Sort By" feature which merchants can choose to utilize. Customers can sort products by price, popularity, rating, SKU, or any other custom field that the merchant defines.
Bread Crumb Navigation
Breadcrumb navigation is a great tool for any customer browsing your online store and something people love as part of their Nexternal features. As a customer browses through your online store, navigation will appear showing the path they took to get to their current page. This shows them the path they took so that they can easily return to a previous page or product. The Nexternal storefront comes equipped with this powerful feature, allowing customers the ability to find products fast.
Coupons
One of the most sought after shopping cart features is something as simple as coupons. Coupons are a great way to attract new customers, encourage return customers, and upsell current customers. Merchants can setup percentage off coupons, flat rate coupons, and free shipping coupons. Coupons can be set for a specific number of uses or can expire after a certain date.
Electronic Gift Certificates
Gift certificates are a booming business offline, but they also make an impact online. For many, finding the perfect gift isn't as easy as they would hope. Because of this, gift certificates are available as a great solution. Customers who receive a gift certificate do not have to spend it all in one order. Instead, the Nexternal shopping cart solution will track the balance of gift certificates allowing customers to use it more than once. These gift certificates are distributed electronically and can be tracked in the Order Management System.
Flexcache Gift Cards
Customers of merchants using Nexternal's ecommerce platform can redeem Paymentech Flexcache Gift Cards through the shopping cart software. These gift cards act much like the ones you can buy at Macys or Home Depot. These gift cards work great for merchants that have both a brick and mortar and online presence.
Multiple Discounting Techniques
Customer Specific Discounts, Order Volume Discounts, Product Volume Based Discounts, Category Based Discounts, & Order Specific Discounts.
Direct Linking to Products & Categories
Nexternal realizes that many companies have already created product and category pages on their web site. A Nexternal hosted online store is meant to act as an extension of the merchant's existing site and does offer the capability to create direct links to products or categories in the online store from those already existing pages. These links are automatically generated in the Nexternal product management section. This feature is great for those companies that wish to feature certain products on their homepage and link directly to them in the online store.
Customer Order Comments
When customers make an order, they may want to communicate special needs to the store owner. As they complete their order, customers will be provided with a text box to inser any important comments or feedback for the merchant.
Gift Messaging
For merchants who are in the gift giving industry, this feature can be used. This gives customers the ability to write any gift message for the recipient of your products. This is an optional feature that can be turned off by merchants that do not need it.
Gift Wrapping
This shopping cart feature is an option for merchants. It gives customers the choice to request gift wrappign for their product order.
Live Chat
Nexternal has partnered with Live Person to offer live chat capability. The live chat program is sold separately through Live Person, but can be easily added to a merchant's online store. This allows merchants to provide superior customer service and close more sales.
Multiple Payment Options
By providing customers with multiple payment options, they can rest assured that their purchase is made through a source they trust. Merchants can choose which payment options to provide some of which include PayPal, COD, invoices, and more.
Integrated Help Desk
Merchants are able to use an integrated help desk to better serve their customers. Customers may submit a question about a specific product and also examine questions that other customers have asked. The questions are managed by the merchant through the order management system.
Product Image Gallery
Merchants can upload multiple images for one product creating an image gallery. This helps merchants better merchandise their products and provides the consumer with increased confidence when purchasing online.
Order Processing & Shipments
Batch Order Processing
Batch order processing allows merchants to process many orders at one time. Merchants can process all unprocessed payments in one easy step as well as mark outstanding orders as "Shipped." This feature can save the merchant a significant amount of time each day.
Order Tracking Software Integration
From the Order Management System, clients can export all of their order transaction data to one of four formats: QuickBooks® , MYOB, Microsoft Access, and Microsoft Excel. This allows merchants to track their orders and accounting with these popular account tracking software solutions.
One Click Payment Gateways
Merchants that utilize payment gateways can take advantage of one click credit card processing. Directly from a web browser, the merchant can click on a button next to an order number that will authorize and post a credit card payment. Nexternal's software is compatible with Paypal's Payflow Pro, Authorize.net, and Paymentech.
Drop Shipping
Drop shipping is a very popular way to get your products out to customers with ease. Through drop shipping, you can assign a variety of warehouses across the country with the responsibilities of storing and shipping your products. The Nexternal shopping cart's drop ship module makes this extremely easy by integrating your drop ship companies with your online store. Use this tool to assign tracking number, shipping preferences, and more. Also, this tool makes it easy for your customers to track their orders.
Split Shipments
Merchants can split line items into multiple shipments when creating labels via UPS, FedEx, DHL, and USPS for one order. This feature allows merchants to ship line items that are in stock, while shipping backordered/preordered line items at a later date.
Packing Slip Creation
When shipping products, it can be very time consuming to just fill out a packing slip. Sometimes, merchants use third party software to do this, but even then they lack the ability to brand each packing slip with a store's name. Nexternal's Order Management System can dynamically create merchant branded packing slips. These packing slips display the contents of the package and any special comments that the merchant wishes to send to the customer. Some merchants also choose to use the packing slip as a pick list when fulfilling orders.
Invoice Creation
Nexternal's Order Management System can dynamically create merchant branded invoices. These invoices display the order line items with corresponding prices.
Automated Email Shipping Confirmation
Customer loyalty is something that online merchants must earn and sometimes does not come easily. Luckily, the Nexternal shopping cart comes equipped with many tools to help you earn that customer gratitude quickly. This simple feature can go a long way with the customer. The moment a product is marked "shipped" in your shopping cart, the customer will get an email notifying them that the shipment has occured. Tracking information can also be included in this email.
Shipment Tracking
While it's typical for customers to get a tracking number, it's not as often that the merchant also gets the tracking information. This integrated shipment tracking allows merchants to view where a package is in transit in the off chance that a customer calls or emails looking for that information.
Capture Offline Orders: Phone, Mail, or Fax
Why use a legacy system to manage your orders and an online shopping cart to manage others? Through Nexternal, you can manage both online and offline orders all through one easy to use shopping cart solution.
Create Bulk Orders For Specific Customer Types
Some merchants have a need to create the same order, for all of the customers of a specific type. Such examples include a winery that has a wine club with quarterly shipments or a vitamin store with customers purchasing the same product repeatedly. These merchants can use Nexternal's software to create such orders so that the can be conveniently processed through the Nexternal Order Management System.
Order Notification Emails
When customers place an order, it's expected that they'll receive an order notification email, but how often do the merchants? Through Nexternal's ecommerce shopping cart solution, merchants can choose to receive an email order notification everytime an order is placed.
Customer Selects Preferred Delivery Date
If you are in the gift giving industry, then this is a feature worth noting. By allowing customers to choose their preferred delivery date, you provide customers with both an ease of checkout and the peace of mind that their product will not show up too late or too early. Nexternal's Order Management System makes it easy for merchants to see which order should go out that day.
Single Click Re-order (Order Duplication)
This function allows users to duplicate their order with a single click. If they got a product from you in the past and want to get it again, they can use this tool with ease to quickly re-order the product and checkout quickly.
Customers can Calculate Shipping & Tax Without Registerning
The online store allows customers to determine shipping and sales tax before registering any information on the web site. This feature makes customers feel comfortable so that they are more likely to continue and place their order.
Display Expected Delivery Date
As a user is checking out, they may want to choose a shipping method that gets your product to them the fastest. Other times, they may just want the cheapest method. By displaying the expected delivery date for each shipping method, customers are given the choice and feel more in control of the ordering process.
Multiple Ship To Locations
If you're in the industry of gift giving, or hope to be one day, then this is a great feature to have. This feature allows customers to choose multiple "ship to" locations for a single order. In other words, if they order various gift baskets from your store, they can choose various locations for each to be sent.
Integrated UPS Online Tools
Nexternal Features Include: Shipping (Label Creation), Real-time Rates and Service Selection, Real-time Tracking, Address Validation
FedEx Ship Manager Direct
Shipping (Label Creation), Real-time Rates, Real-time Tracking
DHL ShipIT Integration
Nexternal Features Include: DHL Shipping Labels, Real-time DHL Rates, Real-time DHL Tracking
Integrated USPS Web Tools
Nexternal Features Include: USPS Shipping Labels, Real-time USPS Rates, Real-time USPS Tracking
Flexible Shipping Cost Calculators
Nexternal Features Include: 10 Different Shipping Cost Calculators, Up to 50 Merchant Defined Zones, 3 Dimensional Rate Calculation,
Setup Multiple Ship From Locations
Easy to Use Product Management
Product Kitting
Nexternal's ecommerce software gives merchants the ability to setup product kits (products that are comprised of more than one SKU). Inventory is decremented for the child SKUs accordingly when a kit is ordered.
Copy Product
This feature allows merchants to copy attributes from one product and paste them to another, making it easier to update new products.
Unlimited Attributes
Consumer goods can often be complex. A product may come in different sizes, shapes, or colors. Because of this, Nexternal allows merchants to create products with an unlimited number of attributes. Better yet each attribute (such as color) can have an unlimited number of options (such as green, blue, red, etc). The software will create all combinations and allow the merchant to define a SKU for each combination.
Write-In-Attributes
If you sell custom products, then this tool is a great shopping cart feature. Customers can choose the "write in products" mode to add their name to a t-shirt for example.
Custom Fields
A merchant can create up to 6 custom fields for their product line. A clothing retailer might use such a field to designate "Brand" while a winery might use it for "Vintage."
Quick Editing Screen
For clients that want to change certain elements of their product line (such as price) quickly, Nexternal provides a quick edit view that looks and functions much like a spread sheet.
WYSIWYG Editor
Merchants can use a WYSIWYG Editor to create rich text in product descriptions and other areas of the application. This is very useful for merchants that are not experts with HTML.
Pricing and Pictures per SKU
Taxable/Non Taxable Products
Infinite Categorization
Assign Products to Multiple Categories
View Sales Per Product
Volume Based Pricing
Product History
Upload Product Images and Thumbnails
Robust Reporting
Dashboard
The dashboard (available to administrators and editors) is a powerful tool that is designed to help you visually understand your online sales. You can setup a revenue goal and gauge it vs. your store's actual performance, see which states generate the most revenue, view top selling products, top customers, top search terms and much more.
Order Report
Profit Report
States Report
This report shows line items and totals by ship to state. This data is particularly useful in such industries where merchants can only ship limited quantities of products to certain states.
Printer-Friendly Reporting
Product Report
Displays: product status, price, inventory, cost of goods sold. It allows product managers to get a quick snap shot of their product line.
Customer Reports
Vendor Reports
Affiliate Commission Report
Affiliate Category Report
User Report
Nexternal's software can be used internally to capture phone, fax, and mail orders. The user report displays order totals by employee or user.
Sales Tax Report
Google Analytics Integration
Reliable & Secure
PCI Compliant
Nexternal's ecommerce software complies with the Payment Card Industry (PCI)Data Security Standard. PCI is an agreed upon standard by all of the major credit card companies.
McAfee Secure
McAfee Security is one of the most popular ecommerce tools online. This ensures that your shopping cart remains free of theft and hacking and is a name brand consumers trust.
Visibility Rules
Merchants can setup different levels of access for different employees thus allowing just specified employees to see certain data and modify it.
Secure Internet Data Center
Nexternal hosts its software at a state-of-the-art Internet Data Center. Access to the Internet Center is limited to just a select group of company employees.
XML Tools for 3rd Party Application Integration
Order QueryOrder Update
Customer Query
Inventory Update
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Tools
Record Correspondence Activities
Merchants can track correspondence with customers including emails, phone calls, etc.
Schedule Follow-ups
Users may be assigned to customers and may specify follow-up dates. Within the system there is a Today button. Clicking the Today button will execute a search that displays a list of all customers that have a follow-up date of today that are also assigned to the logged in user. This makes is very easy for your company's staff to follow-up with customers for both sales and customer service.
Data Import/Export Tools
QuickBooks/Order Data ExportProduct Import/Export and Update
Customer Data Import and Export
Inventory Import by SKU
Coupon Import/Export
Business to Business (B2B) Module
Password Protected EntryCreate Customer Types
Product Pricing by Customer Type
Product Allocations by Customer Type
Capture Purchase Order Numbers
Exempt Sales Tax
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- The leading ecommerce solution for wine sellers
- Always on-screen shopping cart
- Direct checkout
- You pay based on what you sell
- Not intended for small ecommerce sites
