SeCommerce is written in version 3.5 of the .Net framework and at its heart consists of a set of assemblies making up the SeCommerce framework. To add these to your website, the assembly files are simply dropped into the website's bin directory, along with a license file. Alternatively, you can use the SeCommerce Manager program to quickly install the database tables, essential website files and optionally choose from several starter themes and web site templates. A free license is provided for unlimited local development of as many websites as you want.

Functionality within this framework is exposed through methods and through modules (also called user controls). Modules encapsulate functionality such as shopping carts, catalogs, detail pages, contact forms, etc. If you open a module in a text editor you will see plain html, along with tags used to display information accessed through properties of the module (such as a product name, title or description) wherever you place it. This arrangement gives you maximum flexibility to layout a website however you want with the look and feel you give it. Several popular web development programs such as Expression Web, Visual Web Developer and Dreamweaver support drag and drop placement of modules onto a page.

SeCommerce has been in constant development since 1999 and currently consists of approximately half a million lines of code. Besides its speed and feature richness, a great back end administration program makes it easier to setup your website, manage products, fulfill orders, and the 1008 other things that when you need them, are at your fingertips.

Most companies offering e-commerce solutions have a disparate approach that does not fit in with the design, development, and maintenance flow of web developers—often because they are in competition with developers for web site design business, because they are locked into old business models, or sometimes just a lack of competency.

At Silver Earth, we support developers, not just in words, but in action. We have architectured the entire solution to support feature richness, expandability, design flexibility, and an ease of creating and maintaining many websites at a professional level; we typically ask the question—what do you want?

A website is a highly customized presentation, and as such you or your developers need maximum flexibility in creating the methodology, as well as controlling the look and feel of your jewel on the World Wide Web. While the basics of this flexibility are controlling the presentation layout of products and services and its styling, we continue onwards. Some examples:

• A unique way we have developed for administratively organizing products so that they can appear in multiple places and catalogs as part of the organizational structure.
• Display products or variations in price according to certain criteria, such as the type of account a user is logged on with.
• Present different shipping methods and approaches according to where the customer is shipping to. Hide irrelevant details when not appropriate, such as collecting shipping information for a non-shippable product.
• Administer and display supportive information such as frequently asked questions, features list, information common to a group of products, etc.
• Variations in the display of related products.
• Does the customer go to shop cart or stay on a product detail/catalog page after adding an item to the cart.
• The list goes on and on...

We provide over 60 modules which can be dragged and dropped onto a page, for creating shop carts, search boxes, catalogs, detail pages, related products, account signups, order history, dynamically created menus, checkout pages... The HTML and layout within these modules are fully customizable, as well as the type of information that is displayed.

You can place multiple modules on a page, and they will interconnect behind the scenes. Don't see what you want, you can use the API of the SeCommerce engine to create what you want.

Speed

Because of intelligent caching mechanisms, well written code, unique approaches we have internally developed, and an underlying intent to make it so ... Your website remains fast even with all this functionality. It is one of the first things many of our clients mention. Of course there are other factors that come into play such as image optimization and the quality of your hosting, but as long as these are in order, then SeCommerce itself will keep everything moving at a fast clip.

A database stores all the dynamic information connected to your website(s). SeCommerce allows you to use a single database to support multiple websites, thus making it easy to quickly spawn new websites to sell your products and services while keeping each website as its own entity. This greatly eases product administration and order fulfillment.

SeCommerce internally uses a degree of abstraction between the database and how it uses the information stored in it; allowing you to use a different brand of supported database with a flick of a switch. Commonly used information from the database is stored in memory (we have developed are own caching mechanisms) for greatly improved efficiency.

The Manager and Installer Application creates all of your tables and stored procedures (at the click of a button). Alternatively you can manually run a script to do the same thing.

Microsoft Sql Server 2005/2008

Includes the free Sql Express 2005 database. This is the recommended database, because the native drivers for it in the net framework are faster than drivers for other databases (about 30% faster), and includes several advanced features which are transparent to the end user resulting in a more secure and stable experience.

MySql Server version 5+

The community version is a popular free database with a good administrative tool suite.

Swapping Databases in Mid-stream

The same tools used to backup and restore a database using the windows based administration, can also be used to swap data into a new database that is of a different brand. This is because SeCommerce stores database backups in xml format. However it is recommended to start with the type of database you plan to use from the start.

In regards to your website(s), your life is going to get a lot easier, and more productive. From one place you can administer multiple websites in a single database, as well as multiple databases (developers love this feature). Manage products, catalogs, fulfill orders, place in house orders, manage accounts, configure your website, supply chain management and automatically adjust sell prices to changes in your supplier’s price, etc … again all in one place.

A ribbon menu bar helps you to quickly get to the screens and feature sets you need. If you can use Microsoft Word, then you will feel right at home with this program. Help is built directly into many of the forms.

User Roles

The highest level administrators can select from a set of user role policies, or define their own with fine grained detail, and assign these to other users, so that staff members can only view and/or change what is appropriate.

Smart

A pattern implemented throughout the SeCommerce approach is "relational-object-orientation." What this means is that instead of entering the same information over and over again, and possibly making mistakes in the process, you create a set of policies and then select from those where needed from a drop down list.

As an example, instead of entering product quantity discounts for each product, you create a set of policies and assign a policy to a product (or its template). You will see this in business addresses, shipping profiles, discount methods, auto-price markup and price rounding approaches, etc. Not only does this increase productivity, but the whole application is faster and less bandwidth intensive.

Real Time Integration

Changes made in the administration are updated on your website(s) in real time. If multiple users each have an administration program open at the same time—you can see who is logged on, and changes are synchronized.

Shipping

Setup accounts to obtain online shipping rates and customize the results, as well as including customized shipping methods based on a variety of methods for calculating rates. Easy fulfillment for small mom-and-pop operations or continue on the spectrum of solutions to integrate with conveyor belt and claim/pick systems for a larger shipping facility.

If you use UPS Worldship, you can integrate this directly into your SeCommerce workflow and print labels either from Worldship or SeCommerce. Want to ditch Worldship and create end-of-day reports and shipping labels with tracking numbers auto assigned, you can!

This is currently in alpha development and will be available in the 2nd quarter of 2009.

The SeCommerce Cash Register is software that is loaded onto a pc with a cash register drawer attached. This will support credit-card-present transactions and all of the standard cash register features.

For speed, the cash register uses the same underlying technology that the admin program uses. It maintains a local in-memory copy of products info, and checks timestamps to obtain only product details that have changed. If you temporarily lose internet connection, then you can continue in off-line mode, and everything automatically synchs when you come back online. During an internet outage you would need an alternative way of authorizing cards such as a phone line, or a zip-zap machine. A crafty possibility is hooking up a cell phone temporarily for backup internet connectivity.

Selling Limited Inventory Items both on the Web and in a Physical Store

For businesses that need to keep accurate synch of inventory in the store with what is on the web, this application is a god-send. Say you have a one-of-a-kind item, and you sell it in the store—a few milliseconds later it disappears from display on the website. If someone added it to their cart, but has not yet checked out, a friendly notice explains that the item is no longer available.

Likewise if an item has sold out on the web, and a customer brings it to the counter, when you barcode scan the item (or manually punch it in), then a notice will appear that this item has already been purchased by a web client.

You Gain All the Advantages of SeCommerce

• Ease of product management.
• Search for items a customer might be interested in.
• Provide an in store Kiosk where customers can browse your products.
• Find out how much inventory you have, or how much inventory you have at each store location.

You Can Manually Add Orders through the Admin Program

SeCommerce administration supports manual entry of orders, such as you would receive in person, by mail, or over the phone. You can also edit existing orders which have not yet shipped.

An easy to use tool used for managing essential information about your websites and creating or keeping up to date your database schema and essential files. For each website you create an account (this is local to your computer) which contains all of the essential information about that website. This information can be backed up as xml and exported or imported into other installations of the tool.

Webmasters

Webmasters love this as a practical management application for storing all their essential information for websites in one place (both SeCommerce and Non-SeCommerce websites). Information can be entered for both the local host and live versions of a website.

Install/Update a Website Wizard

Walks you step by step in installing or updating a website; this includes the database schema, essential files, and optional modules. The wizard also has a section where you can preview sample websites and install a sample website as well.

Essential Files Report and Tools

Gives you a report of all the essential files on your website, and highlights any assemblies for which more recent versions are available. Also reports any missing or corrupt essential files such as your license and web.config file. On the same screen, you can then click buttons to update the assembly files, or to recreate your web.config file.

Your web.config file contains the encrypted connection strings to your database and license reference. The wizard to create this file gives you an option to write over an existing web.config file, or else just modify it for the changes you have made.

Download Latest Versions

Checks for and gives you the option to download more recent versions of the SeCommerce framework assembles. You can also view the latest sample websites and themes, and install them to your local repository.

This tool is installed on a server where it is used via remote desktop. It can also be installed on a local network or development machine to keep all of the local host versions of your SeCommerce websites updated with just a few button clicks. You add each website you want to administer to this tool which stores the name of the website, its physical location, and any options you set up.

Get Latest Framework Version

Checks for latest versions of the SeCommerce framework assemblies and stores them in a local repository.

Keeping Everything Up to Date

You can then check all your websites in one go, or alternatively a single selected website, and update the assemblies if newer versions are available.

Check Websites Are Up and Running

After doing updates, click this button to check that each website is up and running. On an ASP.Net website, assemblies are loaded into memory on first usage. Because it take a couple seconds to do this, clicking this button will avoid that 2 or 3 second initial delay on first usage a customer might see instead.

Monitor Websites

This monitors each of your websites at a pre-determined interval. If a website does not respond after a second attempt, then an email is sent to the webmaster. This is more than sending a ping to the site, as it checks that the site has database access and can process asp.net pages properly. There is an option to restart the website as well.

Keep in mind that because this is loaded on the same server that it is monitoring, this will not detect if the server itself goes down. A separate SeCommerce service is under development for remote monitoring of websites and servers. When this is complete, you can then subscribe to this service (free or a minimal cost depending on the license arrangement). In the interim, most hosting facilities have simple ping based monitoring which will alert you if a server is down.

The website you are now on is no ordinary website, besides leaping tall buildings in a single bound and flying through space at incredible speeds, it finds ways to be in service.

Stay Connected

The various applications for supporting and administering SeCommerce websites can connect here and see if new versions of tools, framework assemblies, and sample websites are available.

Ah, but that is not all…

You can also ask for help, ask questions, or just tell us what you think. Speaking of help you can submit a bug report or feature request either from this website or from within your administrative app. Is there a price to pay, well you have to get a free account; of course we hope you buy lots of licenses and make lots of money.

Licenses

With an account, you can purchase or upgrade a license via the website. Starting Aug 1st, you will be able to get the license back instantly. Manage all your licenses and retrieve previous licenses and license keys purchased. You can opt out of this service if you would rather not allow this information to be accessed from the website and your supa-dupa-strong password.

A Quick and Short Privacy Policy

Your email address remains confidential to Silver Earth.

Did You Know

All the features on this website, such as administratively managing the features list, various kinds of accounts, collecting all the bits and pieces of info for a license purchase, hiding things from you if you are not logged on, … are all standard SeCommerce features.

And then there was

Forums … launching July 2009.