May 02 2008
No sales, no charge ecommerce software.
Transact is Shopcreator’s new entry level ecommerce product that’s advertised on a no sales, no charge basis.
Ecommerce business Shopcreator was one of the first hosted applications we remember seeing in the UK when it was launched back in 1998. After staying fiercely independent for ten years Shopcreator was sold to Selfserve in November 2007 and one of the first new offerings is Transact, an entry level product with an alternative pricing model.
The Transact ecommerce package is based on revenue share. There are no licence fees or set-up costs. Fees are charge on the monthly store turnover and range from 2 to 5.5 percent. Shopcreator have reiterated this by branding the Transact package with the tag-line “No Sales, No Charge!”.
The Self-Service product range is aimed at small to medium size enterprise businesses including new start-ups, small high street shops, market traders and companies who currently utilise eBay to sell their products.
A Transact store can be set-up in minutes directly from Shopcreator’s website. Having completed a form a new store is created and details are provided for access to the content management system (CMS), which powers Shopcreator stores. Having logged in to the CMS it is simple to customise the look and feel of the site, upload product information, setup shipping rules, add a payment provider and start trading online, all of which can be completed within a day.
The Transact package is packed with functionality including multiple product images, an automatic image resizer, customer product reviews, top seller lists and Google Analytics. In addition, Transact is integrated with most of the major payment service providers including PayPal. Simply adding PayPal details to Transact’s CMS enables the site to start taking payments in seconds.
While Transact isn’t the sort of software you’d build your entire company on, it would be useful for ad hoc one-off microsites to test the water, and it’ll be interesting to see if anyone takes it up.
