Tour / eCommerce

Vae eCommerce is a complete system that includes a shopping cart, real-time payment acceptance, and a powerful backstage interface for fulfilling orders and viewing analytics.

When we set out to create an eCommerce engine, we built on the rest of the Vae platform. So, shopping cart features are implemented through VaeML tags and items are just entries defined in your CMS. You can create whatever category structures you'd like, and associate products with other content in whatever way makes sense for your site.

For example, a site for a record label might contain an online store that sells albums and T-Shirts for each of the label's bands. With Vae, these products could be linked to the artist's entry in the CMS and displayed on the artist's individual webpage.

Because products are just entries in the CMS, our granular permissions model allows you to restrict access among very specific lines. In our example above, you could give each artist's manager access to update the inventory for their products only.

Designers use VaeML to implement shopping cart features on the website frontend. Although we do provide a full online tutorial in our docs, there are no templates to hack. Just insert our VaeML tags into your store design.

This also allows designers flexibility in the checkout flow for your site. You can build login/registration pages, or opt for a simple one-page checkout. Just mix and match the <v:store:add_to_cart>, <v:store:register>, and <v:store:checkout> tags to achieve the perfect checkout flow for your situation.

Other VaeML tags provide cart manipulation, currency conversion, saved address books, discounts, order history, and more. Over 40 other VaeML eCommerce tags are available to help you customize your store.

Additionally, designers can use VaeML to customize the confirmation and shipping details E-Mails that are sent to customers after an order is placed.

Vae provides full-featured Analytics for all stores. Bar graphs show sales by day, week, or month:

Breakdown reports show sales by day, product, and customer:

These reports can be restricted to a certain time period, and grouped by day, week, or month. Amounts show the subtotal, discounts, tax, shipping, and net sale in separate columns for easy accounting.

Additionally, these reports can all be exported to CSV/Excel format. Perfect for organizations that do a lot of bookkeeping.

Vae integrates directly with most online merchant accounts to provide instant real-time credit card acceptance (VISA, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express), AVS (address verification), and fraud screening.

If you do not already have a merchant account, we can help you get one through our partner PowerPay. Accounts are activated quickly and are guaranteed to be compatible with Vae.

If you already have a merchant account or are planning to get one, we probably support it. Currently we support Authorize.Net, Braintree Payment Solutions, Cybersource, LinkPoint, PayPal (Standard, Pro, Direct Payment, and Express Payment), PayFlow Pro, SecurePay, SkipJack, TransFirst, USA ePay, Verifi, and ViaKLIX.

If you work with another merchant bank that offers an API for submitting transactions, we can work with you to have your Vae transactions processed through your merchant bank. Please contact us and we will give you an estimate regarding cost and lead time.

Vae integrates directly with FedEx, UPS, USPS, and Australia Post to provide real-time shipping calculations for your stores.

Simply define the weight of your items in the CMS, and provide some details such as the shipping origin zip code and we will perform the shipping calculations for you behind the scenes. The costs are calculated using the shipping companies' APIs, and will always reflect current pricing.

Pick and choose which services to offer:

Apply your own handling fees and markup to the quotes rates to give your clients wiggle room (or make a little extra profit by marking up shipping):

If your clients are using UPS WorldShip, Vae can automatically export your orders to UPS WorldShip, saving your clients a step.

Vae integrates directly with companies that provide outsourced warehousing and fulfillment services. These services charge a monthly fee to warehouse products and ship them directly to your customers when an order is received. They typically pass on the shipping costs as well as a handling fee per order.

Currently, we fully integrate with the fulfillment operations of Bergen Logistics. We also have beta support for Webgistix, Shipwire, and Fulfillment by Amazon. If you are interested in using any of these services, we will work with you for free to ensure that everything gets up and running properly.

If you handle shipping yourself, we also integrate with UPS WorldShip, Endicia (USPS), and Australia Post's eParcel system so that you don't have to manually key in shipping labels.

Additionally, developers can use the Vae Integration API to integrate with other third party fulfillment solutions. Already, developers have used this to integrate with Microsoft RMS and with dropshipping programs.

Vae includes a powerful discount code engine that allows merchants to create customized discount or coupon codes. Codes are backed by complex rules that determine the exact discount.

Codes can be either a fixed amount discount or a percentage discount and can be restricted to certain date ranges. They can also have a fixed amount of total usage or a maximum number of uses per customer. Codes can also be restricted to orders that meet a minimum number of items or dollar amount.

Coupon codes can be restricted to certain categories of product, exclude certain categories of product, or only kick in if a certain category is purchased.

Most merchants are required to collect some type of sales tax on Internet sales. Vae provides a powerful sales tax collection engine that allows taxes to be assesed for buyers based on country, state, and zip code.

Vae supports an unlimited number of tax rates defined in the system.

Taxes may also be defined based on an item's taxable status. This allows you to sell tax-exempt products in the same store as products that are taxable.

We recognize that for many online businesses, customers can be their biggest asset. So we set out to make it as easy as possible for your clients to keep track of their customers.

Vae features a Customers tab in the backstage that allows your client to see all the information we have about each customer. They can assign tags that can be later used to send targeted E-Mail campaigns.

From each customer's record, you can see a list of all of their orders and link directly to the order details.

Now that you've identified customers using Vae's CRM and Customer Tracking features, it's time to engage them. Vae allows you to send targeted newsletters to certain customers.

You can send a newsletter campaign to customers that meet specific criteria, mixing and matching the following categories:

• Recent spending (specify the dollar amount and timeframe)
• Country
• City
• Tag

So, you could send a targeted campaign to people from Nebraska that have spent more than $1,000 in the last 6 months. Or customers who have joined your store but not yet ordered. Or customers on the VIP list that bought something within the first 2 weeks of the year.

Vae offers full inventory tracking to ensure that only items that are available can be ordered. If there are only 5 Large Red T-Shirts in stock, Vae won't let a customer add more than 5 to their shopping cart.

Vae automatically decrements the stock count when items are sold. If an order is deleted or refunded, the items are automatically added back to stock.

Of course, this tracking can be disabled altogether or on a per-item basis, if that better suits your needs.

Because item data is just regular content in our CMS, the inventory data is fully accessible via our API. Designers can use this to integrate the inventory data with an external source, such as Microsoft RMS or another Point-of-Sale system.

Just like the rest of Vae, Vae's eCommerce system is a is a fully hosted solution. This means that we host both the Vae backstage interface where your clients can view, print, and orders and products, as well as the front-end website where the shopping cart lives.

Because we host the site, we take responsiblity for ensuring that our servers are secure. We keep all of our servers up-to-date with the latest security updates and patches. We provide the SSL certificate used to encrypt credit card data securely.

Additionally, we frequently update our 3rd party integrations to stay up-to-date with the latest UPS, USPS, and FedEx APIs.

We think that this gives Vae a huge leg up over self-hosted software such as osCommerce and Magento. With these applications you will be stuck doing updates into eternity. Is that something you really want to do once you have 20 stores deployed? Of course not.

Unlike many hosted eCommerce providers (such as Yahoo Store and Shopify), Vae does not charge a percentage of your total sales or limit the number of products that you can offer for sale.

We take pride in our eCommerce pricing, because we believe that our pricing structure allows merchants to grow without charging them high upfront prices or suffocating them with high percentage fees.

Each website account comes with 100 included transactions per month. If you need to use more than 100, simply upgrade to unlimited eCommerce for only $99 per website per month.