In the new Internet economy, the companies that will emerge as leaders are the ones who can capture market share. The importance of gaining Internet market share is evidenced by the fact that more and more advertisements are appearing which feature e-commerce businesses like Yahoo, E-trade, America Online, E-Bay, Amazon.com and others. In addition, companies have recognized that business-to-business e-commerce, also referred to as channel partnering, streamlines business processes. One notable success story is Intel, whose channel partner yielded 1 billion dollars in sales in the first month of operation. For any business looking to grow, e-Commerce represents one of today's single greatest opportunities to target new customers and increase sales. Selling your products or services online is like having a shop that's open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year round. And the best part of that always-open shop is that there's no rent or utilities to pay for, no additional fixtures to buy, you don't even need to staff it (unless things get really busy!) Clearly this is good news because until recently, the only means a business had of selling to customers in regional, national or even international markets was to set up an expensive mail order operation or open additional locations. E-Commerce is an ideal solution as it allows you to reach all potential customers for your product or service while also automating much of the sales process.   Is e-Commerce for you? Whether you stock only one product or thousands, Sunny Oasis Internet has e-Commerce solutions that can help you sell more and simplify your back office operations. Imagine how much time you'd save with automatic credit card processing and shipping calculations, automatically generated invoices, a dynamic catalogue that knows what you have in stock and can tell you when it's time to reorder, plus in-depth sales tracking and reporting. Here are just a few of the benefits of our e-Commerce solutions: Sell products, services, documents, images, even ideas as digital downloads! Instantly advertise specials or offer sales-generating online discounts. Take orders automatically, anytime. Quickly respond to customers without any additional staff. Easily track inventory and sales data. Plus many more! Get a Free White Paper on "E-commerce best practices"

What is osCommerce? osCommerce is the leading Open Source online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License. It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, license fees, or limitations involved.

What is iHTML? There are 4 different editions of the iHTML Merchant which range from simple to more complex as user needs increase. Any edition can be upgraded to a higher level edition with just the difference in price so you are never locked in to a specific feature set. Therefore, you can feel comfortable starting with a lower investment and moving up as needs demand. All editions of the iHTML Merchant require the iHTML application server to be installed on the web server. See http://www.ihtml.com for more information on iHTML. The iHTML Merchant runs on Windows (95, 98, 2000, NT) and UNIX (BSDi, FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris) platforms on Apache, O'Reilly, Netscape, Zeus and Microsoft web servers. MS Access is the default database engine for Windows and Postgres for UNIX, however, any ODBC-compliant database software can be used such as mySQL, Oracle, MS SQL or Sybase.

Some our most recent programming features:

• Promotion Codes - Promotions codes can be created in the admin, to take off a certain percentage of the total order cost, before shipping & taxes.

• Gift Certificates - Gift certificate products can be created. When purchased, a code is emailed out & shown on screen. A user then shops normally, and on the basket page enters this code. The certificate amount is then deducted from the total order amount.

• Tangible/ Intellectual Products - Normal, tangible products require shipping info to be entered. If the product or all products being ordered are marked as non-tangible, then shipping information is not required to be entered.

• Real / Not-Real Products - Real products are products that can be added to a shopping basket. At times, it is useful to add a discontinued product in the product listing, to let people know that it was discontinued, etc. If a product is marked not-real, then it will show in the product listing as all the other products do, but the add to basket button will be missing.

• Faster Response Times - The source files have been fully optimized to make as few database connections as possible.

• User Tracking - Users can be fully tracked as they move through the store. A listing shows each action a user makes, for example, a line might read "User is browsing the Specials category", or "User is adding the Managers Special product to their basket"

• Thumbnail Columns - A variable can be set to specify how many products should appear across each row, on the product thumbnail pages.

• Product Thumbnails - The code that displays the thumbnail page product images & related product images looks for an actual thumbnail image file in a mirror of the product image directory. If no real thumbnail exists, it will display the full sized product image, with smaller dimensions. Thumbails can be set to be automatically created by the server, and placed in the thumbnail directory, when product images are uploaded through the product admininstration interface.

• Product Thumbnails Contrainted by either Width or Height - The original coding only allows filling in of the width based on the given height, and not the other way around.

• Retail Price Strike Through - If the selling price is lower than the retail price, the retail price is shown in red with a strike through, with the sale price below it. If the retail price is lower than the sale price, or nonexistent, then only the selling price is shown on both the thumbnail & show product pages.

• Attractive Basket Page - The basket page has been heavily reworked. The subtotal, shipping, grandtotal, etc, rows are all in the same table as the products. Shipping information has been removed from the basket page, and put on its own page. There is a variable which toggles whether a user will be prompted to enter their shipping info as soon as they press the add to basket button, ie before they even see the basket page, or whether they go directly to their basket but must click on a "click here to update your shipping info link", before being able to checkout.

• American / Canadian / World Customers - The store can be set to allow only American, only Canadian, only Canadian and American, or world wide customers. Original coding only allows US & Canada, or world wide. If it is US only, only the United States country is shown in the country select box. As well, the provice and postal code text disappears.

• Reworked Location Details - The original Merchant code only shows the two letter US state & Canadian provice codes, on the shipping information section of the basket page. Ours has been reworked to show the full US state or Canadian province name. The original coding used a select box for the state & country, on the shipping info page. When you press recalculate, your selected state & country are added as the first & selected entries in the select boxes. Then, a static list of countries & states is included for the rest of the box.

And, like wise, the state/province would be duplicated at the top of its list as well. In our code, we have made the code that populates the drop down select boxes for state & country dynamic, and only one entry will appear for each state or country.
On the detailed billing/shipping info checkout page, the original coding used a large text line, for the two state fields. It was populated with the two character state/province code. This would lead many users to retype the state, using its full name. This would lead to them being redirected to the basket page, with the "location details have changed" message. Our coding shows a drop down select box, instead of the text area. The select box shows the full state/province name. This prevents people from accidently being redirected back to the basket page, making things more complicated for them. A flag can also be set to disable changing of the state, zip, and country on the checkout page, making them explicitly return to the update shipping page to modify this information. Again, this is to prevent accidently redirects to the basket page with location details changed messages.

• Basket Summary & Concatenated Category Names On Product/Category Pages - At the top right of these pages, a message is displayed either indicating the users basket is empty, or the number of products it has with the calculated subtotal. On the left hand side of the category pages, the category name is displayed at upper levels. At the third level, the subcategory name is concatenated with its parents name. Ie, "Casual Dinnerware -- Under $100", is the heading for the "under $100" category.

• Supplier Emails - After an order is approved, an email can be sent to each unique supplier involved with the order, requesting they ship the products to the client.

• Bulk Product Uploads through Tab-Delimited SpreadSheet - Hundreds of products may be imported into the database, by uploading a tab delimited spreadsheet file into an administration interface.

• Category Product Counts - A script on the server periodically counts how many products each category contains, including those in its sub categories. This information is stored in the category table, and can be displayed beside each category in the category listings.

• Extra Fields Can be Toggled Visible/Not Visible - Sometimes you might like to disable an extra field from being displayed to the user, either temporarily, or permanently such that you can store information for your own purposes only. This feature allows disabling the display of each extra field on the show product page.

• Shipping Service Displayed on Basket Table - A drop down select box allows changing of shipping _services_ on the basket table. If Canada Post is being used as the only shipping service, the calculated prices of the services available to the given location will be shown beside the service, in the drop down box.

• Many more custom programming modifications and utilities available upon request.

For more information,  give us a call at 1-800-763-3575 In North America Toll Free Worldwide: 800-7633-5750 or email us at: Sales@SunnyOasis.com