The standard ($2500.00) Around Houston E-Commerce package uses a Microsoft Access database to store and display your products and customers, along with a Microsoft programming language called asp. This Access database software is free from Microsoft and will work just fine for shopping cart systems with up to 1500 products and/customers.

When you plan for more than 1500 products and/customers, Access is no
longer a viable database solution.

A more robust database solution called Microsoft SQL Server, is therefore,
required to handle shopping cart databases with more than 1500 products
and/or customers.

It is possible to design and develop your E-Commerce website using Microsoft Access for the first thousand to fifteen hundred products, and upgrade to MS SQL when necessary. If, however, you know now that you will have over 1500 products, it makes more sense to start with MS SQL from the beginning.

We will import any existing product or customer database into your E-commerce shopping cart database.

Your own unique search engine will enable you to search your products by keyword, product name, or number in the product database inside your merchant control panel.

After you have moved your orders from your current customer database to your customer history database, you will have the capability to search, create, and print the following reports:

• Total orders by category
• Total orders by product name
  
• Total orders by product number
• Total orders by customer name
• Total orders by customer number
  

There is NO additional charge to include basic shipping information in your shopping cart. For example, the first item is X amount of dollars for shipping and handling. Each additional item is Y dollars.

If however, you wish to integrate UPS or Federal Express specific weights, zones, and/or shipping types, for example, Ground, Blue, Red, etc. into your shopping cart, additional programming is required, and the charge is $495.00.

Enables your customers to easily customize their orders in a pop-up window that opens up as soon as they add a product to their cart.

For example, if your products are rubber stamps, your customers will be able to indicate exactly what they want to appear on each line on the stamp by simply filling in the blanks in the pop-up.

If your products may be engraved, your customers will be able to select the font, font size, and exact wording simply by filling in the fields in the pop-up.

This is where you have a product category, for example, corded telephone headsets and you also have one or more product sub-categories that are required for the initial products to work, for example, the adaptor necessary to power the corded headset.

If magazines, for example were your main product category, subcategories would be sports magazines, news magazines, and lifestyle magazines. Further subcategories of sports magazines, would be Sports Illustrated, Baseball Digest, and Basketball Weekly.

As seen on most of the major E-commerce websites, for example, Amazon.com:

Enables your shopping cart to bring up the following: People who ordered product A also ordered products C, G, and R.

Your customers will be able to deposit funds in their account and purchase products and/or services at discounted rates with automatic account tracking.

Increase your revenues using the subscription model. Around Houston will create
a database driven subscription site including:

• Content Publishing
• User ID and Password Entry
• E-Commerce Package
• Automatic Recurring Monthly Billing
• Customer Tracking System . . . and much more!
  
  

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