Kentico Wraps Up eCommerce and Content Management

Kentico has released a new version of it's web content management system. This new 3.1 version combines the power of e-commerce directly with content management. Something very few CMS vendors consider doing... or do they? Kentico CMS has been around since late 2004 and is based on the Microsoft stack. They have steadily released updates to their product a couple of times a year including ensuring that they are always on top of the latest versions of Microsoft's technologies. This is a full featured CMS which includes social media capabilities. The addition of e-commerce functionality may take them a step further than many other web content management systems. But there are a number of other CMS solutions out there that do have e-commerce add-ons to their CMS. The question may simply become how integrated are these other solutions and does the product fit with your existing technologies.

Kentico E-Commerce

Kentico has decided that it's customers want an all-in-one solution that combines the power of it's content management system with the ability to sell their products and services. Their solution provides a full-featured e-commerce solution that can be setup via a browser-based user interface.

Kentico has created a number of web parts that provide the e-commerce functionality. Customers can easily drag and drop these web parts into their website. Examples of web parts include: * Shopping cart * My account * Wish list * Product list * Similar products Along with custom web parts for products lists and shopping cart functionality, customers can provide payment options that include PayPal, authorize.Net and customer credit in addition to any customer payment systems they may have.

In addition to a number of out of the box web parts for e-commerce functionality, Kentico also enables organizations to implement custom providers for things like shipping, tax calculation, invoice generation and the ability to connect to existing product databases. You can purchase the e-commerce component as part of Kentico CMS Enterprise Edition -- starting at US$ 1499 or as Kentico CMS E-commerce Edition -- starting at US$ 749. You can view the full set of features of all Kentico solutions to compare what you are getting for the price. The E-commerce solution is built on the top of Kentico CMS and you can download a free trial of the E-commerce solution as a part of Kentico CMS download. The price seems right, the functionality extensive -- this may be a product that many small to medium sized businesses could easily implement and support to get their e-commerce site up and running quickly.