Increase Efficiency with New Merchant Tools

Last month, Website Magazine wrote briefly about the latest release of Dydacomp's SiteLINK ecommerce platform, SiteLINK 7. Shortly afterwards, we were able to talk with Dydacomp's Rob Coon, the senior vice president of marketing and business development, to get a better idea of just what SiteLINK 7 can offer today's ecommerce companies.

For the unfamiliar, SiteLINK is an automated business solution that was built for online merchants that take and ship orders. It's built on a Multichannel Order Manager (MOM) platform that powers every ecommerce store using SiteLINK. Ultimately, the goal of SiteLINK is to level the playing field for smaller merchants, and the seventh iteration of the platform is the most adept at accomplishing that goal.

PCI Compliancy and Mobile Optimization
According to Coon, the development of SiteLINK 7 was based on three major themes that the company wanted to integrate. The first was to ensure that the platform's shopping cart was PCI compliant and DSS-certified, which it was able to do from end-to-end with MOM. In order to help meet PCI standards, Dydacomp partnered with buySAFE for third-party guarantees so that SiteLINK users can enable buySAFE certification with a single click.

However, Dydacomp also saw that the winds of change are blowing with regard to the way consumers are using and shopping on the Web. As Coon puts it, mobile shopping is "where commerce is going." And while mobile optimization isn't quite an absolute necessity for ecommerce companies just yet, most people can see that it soon will be, and with SiteLINK 7, users will be able to get a head start.

The platform will help users create a site with mobile functionality that will render on virtually any leading smartphone device. Dydacomp offers users a hosted SiteLINK console that will allow them to manage their traditional Web store and mobile store from the same interface and using the same information. Now, users with the most varied of Web backgrounds can quickly and efficiently operate online mobile stores using the same data as their primary Web properties.

In addition, SiteLINK 7 can render a company's whole site on tablet devices.

More Conversion Options
The third major theme is a familiar one: to increase conversions. SiteLINK 7 was designed for companies to get more traffic and process more orders with the inclusion of new conversion tools. Among these are the ability for businesses to include different colored checkout buttons, include a section for product reviews and a collection of new social conversion options, such as tools for helping users share product pages on social networking sites. As Coon points out,  these tools are what most online consumers are already expecting to see on ecommerce sites.

This major overhaul of the SiteLINK platform required some pretty substantial architectural changes on the part of Dydacomp, including moving to Web-facing servers from data servers to give users more control over the information on their site(s).

Essentially, these improvements to the SiteLINK platform are the unique result of marrying the solution with MOM to repurpose all of a company's data through automated work flow processes. Businesses utilizing version seven of the popular SiteLINK solution will now have greatly increased functionality and more opportunity for customization, as well as automatic PCI compliance and easy-to-use mobile features to prepare their ecommerce stores for on-the-go customers. Moreover, Dydacomp has included a host of handy tools to help businesses increase conversions based on industry analysis and customer feedback.

If you're already a SiteLINK customer, you can get priority upgrade treatment to SiteLINK 7 for under $1000.