Management Features

The order management controls of e-beans are accessed via a secure login page. You can create as many user accounts as necessary in order to give every staff member access to the back end order management site. Then you can set the level of access per user in order to restrict them to specific administration functions.

Not every member of your staff needs (or should) have access to all of the administrative functions of e-beans. Instead, once you've created your user accounts, you can then select the functions that user will have access to. This allows you to segment the administration duties to specific staff members without giving everyone access to everything.

The product management functions are some of the core functions within e-beans. e-beans makes it easy to create new products, modify existing products, set pricing and availability, and more.

Once you've created a SKU and name for each product, you can then categorize the item within the catalog, add descriptions, upload product images, suggest other related products, and more.

You can also specify package sizes and pricing. For instance, you most likely offer coffees in a variety of package sizes (12oz, 1 pound, 5 pounds, etc). e-beans allows you to create as many package sizes as needed (including those for teas, supplies, and other merchandise) and set the pricing for each.

Because e-beans goes beyond your needs for solely retail-based commerce, you can specify specific pricing and availability to your wholesale customers as well. Create as many price lists as needed then assign your wholesale customers to their negotiated list. Then run reports that give you sales totals per wholesale group so that you know which lists generate the most income.

All of the customer and order level detail captured in every e-beans order is stored and made available via the back end administration site.

Sales reports are available in summary and detail form including an export function to integrate with your accounting and other third party systems.

The detailed sales report displays every order within a given date range with access into the specific items ordered and the details of the customer. Summary reports are broken down by type of order (i.e. retail, club, admin, wholesale, etc.) with details on average number of items in order, average order amount, total discounts, total shipping costs, and more. Additional summary reports provide daily and weekly views of your order history allowing you to compare total sales today versus yesterday or last week or last month and more.

The product promotion feature of e-beans allows you to discount specific products in your catalog as specials or sale items over a specific range of days, weeks, or months. You can also control whether the promotion requires the use of a promotion code or whether its available to all of your Website customers.

The order discount function allows you to offer discount incentives to specific customers for entire orders. You control the details of the discount whether it be a percentage off the order total or a flat dollar amount. You can also further entice your customers by offering free shipping as part of the bargain.

e-beans gives you even more control over your promotions by setting up specific requirements such as minimum order amounts, new vs. existing customers, one-time vs. multiple use per customer and more. For example, suppose you wanted to offer a 15% discount to existing customers who place an order of $50 or more between now and the end of the week. You've have the flexibility to really custom tailor your discount incentives in order to build the specific promotions that will motivate your customers without being too open ended.

What's even greater, is that you can create as many discount codes as you like and run reports on your order history to determine the success and performance of each one.

Making sure your customers can find you on the Web is obviously an important part of selling online. For this reason, we've created specific search engine optimization features that allow you to present your products as optimally as possible to search engine crawlers.

You control the page titles and URL file names for each product in your catalog as well as the meta descriptions and keywords. URLs are cleanly formatted addresses that appear as straight html pages to a search engine without a bunch of garbage in the query string.

For example, consider the two page addresses below... the first is optimized for a search engine, the other is simply not helping you at all.

http://www.abccoffeecompany.com/coffees/colombia_supremo.html

http://www.abccoffeecompany.com/shoponline/Product.aspx?CategoryId=COFF&GroupId=OB

Do you know some people or potential partners that can and want to help you sell online? I'm sure you do. The affiliate program in e-beans allows you to create affiliate partnerships with your potential sales partners to help you sell your products.

You create a unique affiliate code for each of your affiliates, they place that code onto their Website, then any sales generated from that affiliate are immediately tracked and credited back to the affiliate account.

In addition, you have specific affiliate reporting to show you how many orders and the total dollar amounts that resulted from affiliate sales over a given period of time. And... your affiliate partner has their own login and password to give them access to a secure area on the front end of your Website so that they too can track the sales generated from their link.

Now that you have the tools to sell and promote your products online, its time to tell all your customers and friends.

e-beans gives you a very simple and intuitive bulk mail utility to broadcast messages, news events, offers and other communications to your customers and subscribers.

Design a custom HTML wrapper for your outbound emails, then custom tailor your message for each mailing. Use Google Analytics to track the performance of your embedded links and drive traffic back to your site.

Its easy to manage your email lists. You can add and remove subscribers, create multiple mailing lists, mass upload a list of email addresses to a designated list, export addresses to Excel, and review the addresses and counts of each list.