EPiServer Weaves Engagement, e-Commerce, Web CMS and Social Community

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Jun 18, 2010

More news from the land of Web Engagement Management, where EPiServer (news, site) has been creating some WEM magic. As initially promised in late 2009, they released an e-Commerce product that includes product catalog management, multi-language stores, customer management, reporting and a slew of other features — all in the name of better online engagement with customers.

Weaving in e-Commerce, CMS and Community

The EPiServer Commerce module based on Mediachase's .NET e-Commerce Framework (ECF) works with the latest release of EPiServer CMS version 6.0 and is available as a package downloadable from the EPiServer World community. Due to the integrations, all content management, community building or customer management activities can be done in one unified UI.

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Overall EPiServer Commerce and CMS Architecture

The release is rather large and complex, so let's take a look at some of the functionalities:

Multi-site, Multi-lingual Experience

Given EPiServer's multi-lingual Web CMS capabilities, it doesn't come as a surprise that online stores can be localized to cater to specific audiences. That also applies to site content and features that are customizable for multiple audiences.

This is important if you think about how diverse not only the cultures are, but the payments, taxes, shipping as well. The ability to configure payment and tax options for each country comes in handy.

The admin interface works in available in six languages – English, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and Dutch – with more languages to come later.

Catalog Management and Reporting

Catalog management capabilities include catalog uploads, support for SEO, product bundles and packages, inventory tracking and support for product variations with different SKUs. All catalog items are just another content type managed in the CMS, and catalog nodes can be used to produce site's navigation.

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EPiServer Commerce Catalog Management

Asset management is robust enough, so that users can upload a variety of binaries from PDFs, user guides to videos, MP3s.

Using the built-in dashboard users can get a quick access to net sales and profits, top sellers, in/out of stock, number of orders and other customizable reports.

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EPiServer Commerce Reporting

Customer Management

In this area, there are e-mail notifications available, as well as the ability to define customer roles, groups, and organizations.

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EPiServer Commerce Customer Management

Marketing Promotions

Using marketing modules from EPiServer Marketing Arena, online retailers can craft and deploy more relevant campaigns. But this goes nowhere if you don't have the tools to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, capture lead generation data and improve sales goals. And these features are also available.