This article will help exlplain why INZU is the best choice for e-commerce and highlight the issues with other alternative e-commerce solutions, it will also explain some of the terminology genereally used in e-commerce software.

INZU & E-commerce

At the heart of INZU is a fully-fledged e-commerce and shopping cart system that will allow you to sell both mail orders and digital download files.

As a potential customer you will no doubt be aware of the various e-commerce packages and systems available on the net. This page will explain these various set-ups and hopefully explain to you why INZU is the best choice for e-commerce.

To begin with, a clear distinction must be made between "Shopping Cart Software" and a "Payment Processor". Shopping cart software is software that is usually installed on your website so that you can add products to your site. Popular examples of this are Magento, Shopify and X-Cart. What you get from these systems is a way for you to manage your shop content i.e. add products, edit images, organise into sections and create offers. What this software will not do is actually take credit card information from your customers and process the payments. This is a common misconception held by most people starting on their e-commerce site. They often think shopping cart software will do everything they need when in fact they will soon find that a Payment Processor is also required.

A Payment Processor is a company that takes your customers' card details, sends the details to the bank and then authorises the transaction. They will tell your site whether the transaction has been authorised or not. Popular choices for Payment Processors are World Pay, Paypal and Paypoint.

So if you were to decide not to use INZU then you would need to have Shopping Cart Software to manage your store and a Payment Processor to handle your payments. The problem with this is that you will also need a CMS to manage the rest of your site that is not e-commerce, e.g. news and events. Should you want to take card payments on your site and not just Paypal payments you will also need a Merchant Bank account. A Merchant account is an account where funds from your transactions are held before being sent to your regular business account. Merchant Accounts are subject to credit ratings and content approval from your bank and will incur you monthly fees and set-up charges.

All this sounds very complicated - that's because it is, and because of the number of companies offering services in each part of the chain, deciding on the best set-up can be a real headache (not to mention the cost of it all).

Using INZU is completely different however - so different that you can forget all the problems that have just been identified above because with INZU you won't need any of it. Like Paypal you won't need a merchant account to take payments; instead payments are processed by INZU and you make a withdrawal to any account when you want to (even a Paypal account). You'll also not need an account with a payment processor; again, like Paypal, INZU takes care of this. And forget the need for shopping cart software - using the INZU API you won't need to install any software on your site. All you have to do is connect your site to your INZU account and all the products you add to INZU will automatically be updated on your site.

So why use INZU and not Paypal?

There are number of reasons for not using Paypal:

• INZU does not encourage your users to sign up to INZU - they can pay by card quickly and easily like any other site
• If you want to sell downloads such as music or video these are all hosted by INZU so you can sell downloads just as easily as any other product
• INZU isn't just about e-commerce - you'll be able to manage your whole site from one place, making running your site much easier
• Clearer transactions fees - we charge one basic rate for mail-orders and one for downloads making it easier for you to understand and plan for
• INZU provides services for mobile e-commerce

And why not not use a payment processor and cart software?

• No Merchant Bank Account required
• No software installation necessary
• No monthly fees to you payment processor or Merchant Bank
• Save weeks in set-up time
• Transaction histories and cart inventory are all in one place along with all your other site content
• No credit checks
• Your site will not have to be PCI compliant
• You won't have to buy SSL certificates
• You won't have to update cart software on your site
• INZU hosts downloads for sale, not your site
• INZU provides services for mobile e-commerce

Managing your INZU store

Adding and managing products is very straightforward and you will quickly be adding new items without any trouble.

This page will guide you through the basics and offer a few insights on how best to use the INZU shopping cart system.

Categories

Before you add a product you must first create a product category. The way you create your categories is entirely up to you - however a good tip is to create the categories on INZU exactly as they will appear on your site. This is because category list is available from the INZU API, meaning your programmer can grab the category list from your account and populate your site's navigation with the category list. So when you add a new category, hey presto, it appears on your site with no extra programming.

Add an item

There are currently three choices when adding an item to a category: Digital File, Mail Order and Music Release. Digital File is the option used to sell any downloadable file that is not music. The Mail Order option is for any real world product that will be sent by post and again is not music.

Music Releases have their own separate category due to their more complex nature as a product. Choosing this option will provide all the extra info and options that are useful to music releases, and not other products such as track listing, format, catalogue number, performing artists etc.

The upload forms

The upload forms are comprised of required/optional information, to make adding an item quick and easy the required fields are kept to a minimum, leaving you the option to add things like tags and long descriptions if you want to.

Mail orders have a few unique fields to control shipping - you can set shipping prices across five different zones; North America, South America, Europe, Rest of World and Local. The local shipping zone is a country you can optionally set in your account preferences to be your accounts local shipping zone. In the same preferences you can add a "Base rate" shipping amount that is added to all orders if you wish it to be.

You will also be able to add the number of items in stock for mail orders as well as adding "variations" which allow one item to have multiple prices, images and descriptions for products such as clothing where various sizes and colours are required.

As already mentioned, the music release upload form has many unique features to allow for multi-format releases.

Editing items

Editing items is very straightforward; just go to the relevant category, click the item on the item list and you will be presented with a screen very similar to the upload form but with the information of the item already filled in.

Editing items aside from correcting input errors can provide some very useful functions; for instance you may wish to change an item's price or shipping or the amount of stock left. All this can be done at any time without affecting the sales history of your item, allowing you the flexibility you need.

The good news is that you won't have to change every item individually - you can instead use the "Groups" system to make changes to multiple products at once, even across all your categories. A real time saver!

Buy links

If you aren't integrating INZU directly into your site (or even if you are) "Buy links" can provide a very easy way of spreading the word about your product through social networks, blogs and e-mails. Each item is given a unique code and Buy Link which can be pasted anywhere on the web.

Changing things around

Your categories can be easily renamed or deleted and you can even move products from one category to another. This means that arranging things just as you want them or trying out a new system of organisation is made very easy.