AbleCommerce

This is a continuation of my previous blog, Introduction to AbleCommerce Gold, and in this post I will explore one of the features of AbleCommerce Gold platform: the Merchant Dashboard. AbleCommerce Gold provides a rich feature set for the online merchant via the merchant administration portal. Using this interface, an e-commerce merchant can perform administrative functions to manage orders; process payments; maintain shipping providers; manage customers; and maintain an organized product catalog.

One of the useful features of AbleCommerce Gold is its Merchant Dashboard. The Merchant Dashboard is used to help you with the day-to-day management functions of AbleCommerce administration. One can access the Merchant Dashboard directly by typing in the administration uniform resource locator (http://www.yourcompanyname/Admin) or by navigating from the Admin link  on  the upper right hand corner of any store page (see Figure 1.0 below) using an administrative credential. A regular user will not see this additional link or button.

Figure 1.0 – Administration link

What is the Merchant Dashboard?

Once you are in the Administration site your default view will be set to the Merchant Dashboard as shown in the below figure.

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Figure 2.0 – Merchant Dashboard

AbleCommerce Gold Merchant Dashboard gives you a quick summary of what's going on in your store by organizing your management tasks into an easy-to-use interface. AbleCommerce Gold Merchant Dashboard is broken into the following areas:

1.       Activity Panel – View tasks related to :

• Daily Task Tab –default view of the Merchant Dashboard.
• Navigate Tab – displays additional administrative functions such as managing orders, users, catalog, inventory, website and marketing.
• Configure Tab – displays administrative options for managing your store and configuring your website settings.
• Reports Tab – displays available canned reports menu.
• Help Tab – displays system information and how to attain product and technical support.

2.       Recent Orders Panel – Shows 5 most recent orders and order status.

3.       Order Summary Panel – Shows the summary of all orders within the last 120 days.

4.       Action Items Panel – System warnings that advise you of action items you should take a look at for example error logs or store settings that are not completed.

5.       Software News Feed Panel – Displays news announcements from AbleCommerce that relates to new product features and patches released for upgrades or reported issues.

6.       Quick access icons in the header, so you can easily access the most common management pages.

Conclusion

Using the AbleCommerce Gold Merchant Dashboard feature helps the online merchant by providing a secure view of the store’s daily common administrative features to help manage alerts, orders, process payments, shipping, customer’s and maintain product inventory.  In my next post, I will discuss the features of AbleCommerce Gold’s catalog and content management system.

AbleCommerce - who, where and when?

In spite of being heard of by relatively few users, AbleCommerce is in fact one of the pioneers of the ecommerce, born in USA 20 years ago at the dawn of the online shopping era. It was one of the first carts to meet the demands of merchants and compete with giants like IBM and Microsoft.

Nowadays, AbleCommerce offers an all-round solution for online business- an ASP.NET based shopping cart plus hosting for easy and quick start paid monthly, or a licensed shopping cart to own it forever and host by your own choice.

Magento - the magestic solution

No doubt, you’ve already heard of this celebrity shopping cart. Possessing the largest market share and powering a staggering number of sites, it is the leader on the ecommerce arena. Being totally open source and completely free to download and use, Magento is also extremely feature rich and allows you to do virtually anything with your store, setting no limit to the customization opportunities. Written on PHP, it has won the affection of thousands of talented developers who keep contributing to their favourite shopping cart, creating numerous extensions and themes.

There are a few things you should know about this cart before you rush to download and set it up. First of all, Magento is aimed at mid size and large businesses. For smaller stores or startups, it would be an overkill, due to the multitude of options and options of options where you can easily get lost. Also, it features a steep learning curve, so this is not recommended for newbies or merchants not willing to invest into a developer’s services. Finally, troubleshooting is possible only via the community forums, as the “traditional“ technical support is available only for Magento Enterprise Edition.

Now, time to find out other details about the carts in question so that you could finally make your selection in this AbleCommerce vs Magento battle.

Appearance

AbleCommerce offers over 20 themes that are easy to customize with no HTML knowledge. Yes, the number is far from being impressive, but the simplicity of customization and brandind your store looks can be some kind of an excuse for the limited number of themes. You can also select the layout from several default ones or create your own one via a convenient editor.

With Magento, it is a totally different story. It has a multitude of free and premium themes available at various marketplaces to fit to your store image. However, unless you are a seasoned pro, it is a complex task to install a new theme or even customize it. There is a risk of breaking the store functionality.

Pricing

AbleCommerce hosted version starts at $99 a month, so you get a ready to go online cart, hosting and security taken care of. No transaction fees are included. As to the support, you get it for free only the first 30 days after the purchase. On the other hand, the lifetime license for the self hosted version of AbleCommerce costs $1295 and includes free updates for 12 months.

Magento, on the contrary, is free to use. But in fact, starting the store on Magento means serious spendings at the start when professional help is needed to get the shop up and running, so be ready to invest. Afterwords, you may also need to buy the additional extensions, but that is individual.

Functionality

AbleCommerce presents most of the basic features the online store can need from the start. A very important one is PCI certification out of the box, as AbleCommerce is on the list of validated carts, meaning your customers will be able to purchase safely from you. It is also well equipped for mobile commerce, so you wont need extra apps or paid access to get this feature. A rare and useful function of AbleCommerce is the ability to subscribe for goods used regularly, which is a great way to retain customers.

The overall user friendliness and simplicity in operating the store add up to the functionality, making AbleCommerce a viable choice. It also offers a convenient system of ugrades available for a small fee to always keep pace with the latest developments. However, the mechanism of upgrading customized stores has not yet been worked out.

Magento is much richer in terms of functionality out of the box, as well as flexibility for further customizations. It features complex analytics, robust reporting, wide SEO capabilities etc. Other than that, Magento lets you live virtually any marketing or functionality dream. If the desired feature is not present out of the box, you can find it among the multitude of extensions, the number of which is impressive, or have the code tweaked.