Product Catalog
A BIG key to the success of your online business is the management of the products and services you offer for sale. Real-time inventory updates insure that you are presenting your most current products and services, which can be easily located by potential customers. Horizons Unlimited's E-Commerce System, based on Microsoft SQL Server, allows instant creation of new catalogs through the import/export function from your existing inventory (data source). Custom catalogs, displaying special pricing for "targeted" customer groups can easy be created "at will". Each catalog will contain integrated searching capabilities that make customer location of information fast and simple. An easy-to-use module interface will provide product administrators with the tools to manage their products and services on an hourly or daily basis.

The Catalog E-Commerce System facilitates "Special" programs, promotions, and merchandising by directly integrating with the Customer Targeting System. For example, you may want to create a site-wide discount of 15 percent on all products, or you may want to put only products in certain departments, like sporting goods on sale. The E-Commerce Campaign Manager simplifies this process by allowing you to directly browse your catalog data while setting up promotions. Similarly, the integration of the Business Analytics System Module facilitates detailed reporting on product sales so that you may more accurately evaluate your sales projections and inventory.

The E-Commerce System also offers Microsoft BizTalk Server integration to enable Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based catalog updates and exchange with business partners. This feature enables a seamless method to keep your product and pricing information syncronized whereever your catalog data is displayed. The Product E-Commerce System utilizes an XML-based catalog format.

Features of the Product Catalog Commerce System:

Integrated Multi-catalog Search:
Gives users the most options and the quickest path to find the information they need.

Category Search:
Makes it easy to browse by product category.

Free-text Search:
Gives the greatest flexibility to find products by full or partial name or attribute.

Specification Search:
Lets users continue to refine requests until they find what they need. This search is excellent in the case where users aren't familiar with the product attributes or categories.

Property Search:
Allows users to search on multiple attributes at once. For example: Price < $10 and Color = Red.

Catalog Creation and Management:
Provides the greatest flexibility to your product managers to define and display product information to your customers and partners.

Catalog Designer:
Lets you define your own catalog, including categories and product definitions.

Catalog Editor:
Makes it easy to create and manage catalogs, including importing and exporting data.

Custom Catalogs:
Allows you to create special pricing for products in a catalog as well as to link specific users with specific catalogs or catalog sets.

Catalog Exchange:
Offers built-in support for easy exchange of catalog data using BizTalk Server.
 

The Profile System is designed for flexibility. Whether your data resides in different places across the site or in external systems, it can easily be mapped directly into your profile design. This means you don't have to change existing business processes or data sources in order to build the richest possible profile for your site users. Profiles can be established for any business entity, not just users. For example, you can establish a profile for requisitions, organizations, orders, and addresses. These profiles can then be incorporated as standard formats into user or organization profiles.

Member Management
The Profile System helps you manage critical information about millions of users and groups of users. In addition, it establishes secure authentication of site users to ensure they have access to authorized areas of your site. By utilizing this tool, you may present "Shoppers" (Users) custom content, such as special pricing or products, based on the user's profile established in your system.

Features of the E-Commerce User Profile System:

User Management:
Highly scalable user information management supports millions of users.

Organization Management:
Group related users with like permissions to effectively target groups of customers.

Profile Management:
Build or manage profiles, including design and mapping as well as the creation of a Site Terms used within the profiles, to simplify operations.

Targeting System
Customer knowledge is a BIG e-business advantage with the E-Commerce Targeting System. Enhance your customers' online experience by providing relevant content based on shopping and buying habits; and, utilize targeted merchandising to increase marketing effectiveness.

One-to-one marketing builds customer loyalty, turns shoppers into buyers and one-time visitors into repeat shoppers. The Targeting System enables you to determine the most appropriate content (ads, discounts, up-sells, cross-sells, catalog data, and more) to provide a specific "Shopper" (User) based on a contex "history" of explicit user preferences, extracted through determinate business rules you have defined for your system-driven "Shopper" (User) trend analysis.

Example for Two "Shoppers": Your online business receives visits from two "Shoppers" (Users). The first "Shopper" has never been to your site, the second, is a frequent "Shopper". Based on explicit business rules established by you, your Web Site promotes several items as featured products to the first time visitor including a known popular item such as a sporting book, and an excess inventory product such as a utility knife. With the Targeting System, the same online retail site would present (serve) different featured products to the first time "Shopper" than it would to the "Established Customer" (frequent shopper), based on the "Shopper's" profile history.

Features of the Targeting System:
 

• Content Selection
  Framework Sophisticated and extensible content scoring
  framework for managing complex content selection decisions.
   
• Campaign Manager
  Flexible campaign management, fully-integrated with the
  Targeting
   
• Data Mining and Analytics
  Systems, enables business managers to create,
  analyze and manage personalized and targeted discounts, direct marketing,
  related-sell and advertising campaigns.
   
• Direct Mailer
  Built-in fast and scalable service to enable personalized,
  targeted direct marketing, tracking and reporting.
   
• List Manager
  Easy tool for creating and managing lists of users for
  targeted marketing.
   
• Expressions
  The Expression Builder empowers business managers to easily
  create explicit business rules to target content (ads, information, discounts,
  direct mail) to specific users.
   

The utilization of these Combined features will allow your online businesses to project a personalized user experience as well as meet specific business objectives, such as running regionally focused specials or elimination of excess inventory.

E-Commerce System Business Desk is critical for any business that wants to be responsive to the changing needs of its customers and partners.

Features of the Business Desk:

• Analysis
  Manage business reporting and analysis, including segmentation.
   
• Auctions
  Manage auctions and bidding.
   
• Campaigns
  Manage advertising, discounts, direct marketing, and other campaigns.
   
• Catalogs
  Design, create, and manage product and custom catalogs.
   
• Orders
  Order management including status and shipping, handling, and tax processing.
   
• Users
  Manage information on users and organizations.
   
• Role-based Security
  Enables business users to view and manage only those modules for which they are authorized.
   
• Extensibility
  Easily add in new management Modules for custom or third-party applications.
   

The Horizons Unlimited E-Commerce System empowers your business with both sophisticated decision support and the ability to take real-time action to provide customers and partners with the optimal Web experience. With E-Commerce System, each interaction between your site and customers loads into your Business Analytics System, providing insight into "Your World of Business" enabling optimal Web Presence, a process called "Closing the Loop".