Stone Edge Technologies announced the immediate availability of the Stone Edge Subscription Manager.
The Subscription Manager is an add-on for the Stone Edge Order Manager which makes it easy for merchants to handle a wide variety of continuity orders, from magazine subscriptions to “product of the month” clubs to regular deliveries of dietary supplements or pet food.
The Stone Edge Subscription Manager lets you create “subscriptions” that create recurring orders for your customers. Each subscription’s delivery schedule can be configured in a number of ways, including daily, weekly, monthly, annually or on specific days or dates.
The Subscription Manager supports numerous types of continuity (recurring or standing) orders. Some can be for a fixed number of deliveries, such as a training course with 10 lessons, delivered one per month, with the same 10 lessons shipped on the same schedule regardless of when a customer begins their subscription. Others can be for a set number of deliveries, but with automatic renewals, like annual magazine subscriptions. Typically in those cases everyone with that subscription would get the same product at the same time, such as the April issue of a magazine or the CD-of-the-month, regardless of when their subscription began. Others can be for regular deliveries, with no fixed ending date, such as monthly deliveries of vitamins or pet supplies.
“We tried to anticipate all the variations that merchants are likely to need,” said Barney Stone, President of Stone Edge Technologies, publishers of the Subscription Manager. “Like our Stone Edge Order Manager, the Subscription Manager is designed to save merchants time and money by streamlining and automating repetitive tasks. It also greatly reduces the chance of costly errors, like shipping the wrong product or forgetting a vacation hold.”
The items to be shipped can be set to a single product for each delivery (such as a monthly supplement delivery), a product selected at the time each subscription order is generated (e.g. a wine of the month club – where all subscribers get the same item this month) or pulled from a list of SKUs assigned to the subscription (i.e. music collections – where shipment 1 gets the first CD in the collection, shipment 2 gets the second, etc., regardless of when they are ordered or shipped).
Billing is also highly configurable with the Subscription Manager. Some subscriptions may be charged in advance for the entire subscription, while others may be billed per delivery or for a set number of deliveries, like magazine subscriptions.
The Stone Edge Subscription Manager even makes it easy to deal with common nuisance issues, such as address changes and vacation schedules. It supports alternate billing and shipping addresses during specific time periods, and the ability to “hold” a subscription for a period of time.
The Subscription Manager works together with the Stone Edge Order Manager, which is required for its use. Initial orders are typically imported into the Order Manager from an Internet shopping cart, such as MonsterCommerce, Yahoo!Store or Miva Merchant, or in the case of phone or mail orders, entered manually into the Order Manager. The Subscription Manager automatically detects which orders are for subscriptions, and sets up the appropriate delivery schedules. The Subscription Manager is fully integrated into the Order Manager, and can be accessed from the Order Manager’s Main Menu. Continuity orders created by the Subscription Manager appear as new orders in the Order Manager, which is then used to handle inventory tracking, fulfillment, shipping, customer service, etc.
Over 1,000 merchants use the Stone Edge Order Manager to help run their businesses. They utilize shopping carts such as MonsterCommerce, Yahoo!Store, ShopSite and others, and typically handle 10 to 2,000 orders per day. The Order Manager helps manage their orders, customers, payment processing, inventory, fulfillment, shipping and more. In addition to importing orders from popular shopping cart systems and sales channels including Amazon and Shop.com, the Order Manager also supports mail and phone orders, and includes a Point-of-Sale system for merchants with “brick and mortar” stores.
The Stone Edge Subscription Manager retails for $995. The Stone Edge Order Manager retails for $1,250. Both prices include a year of support and updates.
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