Technical Innovations » E-commerce Technologies

Photo: Ellen Lewis Papugai Develops World Class E-commerce Technologies Papugai's E-commerce platform starts with its celebrated product, SmartCommerce.NET™. Standard features include:   • Multiple recipient ordering   • Arrival date shipping module   • Real-time shipping cost analyzer   • Content management tools   • Advanced search functionality   • Suite of administrative tools   • including management of products,   • accounts, orders, statistics,   • reports, and more Optional features include:   • Item-level autoship   • Subscription items   • Batch processing of orders   • Gift card integration   • Gift wrapping features   • Gift reminder feature   • Wish list feature   • Wholesale account management   • Wholesale auto class earning   • Specials/promo code tools   • Newsletter/articles management Papugai's SmartCommerce.NET™ shopping cart technology features unlimited-recipient ordering. By "expanding" a product line item, one can assign as many different recipients as there are items. Customer-specified, arrival-date shipping is another standard feature of this power e-commerce software. (See SmartShip.NET™ on the next page.) An optional, but common, feature of SmartCommerce.NET™ is our powerful auto-ship functionality that allows the user to specify a different shipping frequency for every item in the shopping cart if desired. All Papugai e-commerce websites are secured using Verisign 128 bit SSL security with Server Gated Cryptography (SGC) technology.

A Surprisingly Simple Beginning When Papugai developed its very first e-commerce website, we were a team of busy creatives (mostly), working long hours, and shopping online every single day. We had some very consistent opinions and attitudes around the about online stores, and the members of our team seemed always annoyed with these sites for the same reasons: Lack of unique ideas and creative solutions. (So many websites looked and behaved eerily similar.) Inconsistent brand treatments and messaging Many assumptive application behaviors that completely missed large demographic groups. Little or no Macintosh support Horrible, clunky shopping cart designs and behaviors Impossible to understand shipping options (and no arrival-date shipping) No multiple-recipient solutions (or very poor ones) And the most surprising thing was that even well branded companies seemed to be settling for horrible web design, little or no brand representation, poor and confusing usability, and very limited functionality. But why? Why were these sites so horrible? Many, after all, were owned by very large companies with presumably decent budgets. After several months of deep research within the e-commerce market, including countless discussions with consumers, businesses, development firms and software engineers, we finally figured it out: These website projects deliberately and ignorantly excluded top-level creatives from the planning and design processes. It was that simple, and it all made sense. Thinking back to 1997-2001, many of you probably recall hearing some executive say, "For the website? Call the IT guy." Then the IT guys would call his buddy, the software engineer, and the next thing you know, some "dev" firm got the website contract. And "devs" all thought that creatives were the heavily-tattooed lot with green hair and 40 facial piercings, who sat in the back room and drew logos all day, so the term "creative direction" stayed in the print and ad world for a few extra years. What a colossal separation there was between creatives and techs during that period in time. How that came to be is a complete mystery, but Papugai was one of the very first firms in the US to fully embrace the challenge of creating powerful synergy between these two very dissimilar groups. By knowing exactly what not to be, success was the only other option. ========================================================= Papugai's SmartCommerce.NET™ shopping cart technology. 333