Learn About ShopIgniter

Get social: ShopIgniter is tightly integrated with the social web

ShopIgniter was designed with social media integration in mind. Your store will live in Facebook, your customers can be incentivized to promote your products via Facebook or Twitter, you can use our intent-based search engine to find customers on the social web, and Facebook connect has been integrated across the entire platform.

• After-sale incentification

Our innovative after-sale coupon system lets your customers promote your store through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. You can offer discounts, coupons or even referral programs for your customers to earn free merchandise or credits based on the amount of their referrals or the total sales they generate. Access and use of each coupon can be controlled using easy-to-understand rules to prevent abuse.

• Bring your entire retail experience into Facebook with a fully integrated Facebook application

ShopIgniter allows you to display a fully-functional eCommerce store right inside of Facebook. Your customers and their friends can browse your store, discuss and buy your products.

• Facebook Connect makes it easy to checkout

With Facebook Connect already integrated across our entire platform, you can easily track your customers and access any information they publish in their public profile. You can also build trust within your public store by allowing customers from Facebook to see weighted reviews from their social grid, share information from the site and publish updates to their wall.

Intent-Based Search Engine

Automatically find new customers already looking for your products and brands or services.

Say you sell camping gear... tents, sleeping bags, hiking equipment, etc. You can use the brands, product names or categories as search terms to find people talking about camping and what they need to buy. Using the results of these searches, you can immediately interact with these users, follow them and build out your own network. Then, publish updates, links and coupons directly into networks like Twitter to incentivize your social grid to become your customers.

A true multi-channel platform

Sell to retail, wholesale, VIP and members only using the same platform. Control access to categories, products and special promotions based on your users. Sell socially through Twitter and a full Facebook retail store.

Need to set up specific pricing or inventory for your wholesalers? No problem.

• Control, define and price your products for each channel

ShopIgniter allows you to define channels based on your distinct business rules and differentiate category access, product descriptions, and pricing based on user credentials. If you sell to both retail and wholesale customers, you can easily define a group for your wholesale clients that allows them to view protected categories, see special pricing, access special shipping rules, and get product-specific information pertinent to their use.

Groups

• Classify your users

Users of each channel are classified into groups that you administer and control. There are groups that are already part of the system, including a Facebook group, a registered group and public group. There are no limits to the number of groups you can create, enabling you to structure your online retail policies around your current business rules.

• Group Promotion Rules

With group promotion rules, coming in May, you can set specific rules around users that automatically promote them to higher level groups. This allows you to create a registration system for users, a members-only store or a special VIP club without administration overhead.

We get retail: ShopIgniter can meet the needs of any business

Developed for the retail enterprise, our platform already speaks your language, knows how you work, understands your inventory and gets what you do best. Why spend time to learn a system when there is already one built for you?

• Control your inventory

You sell physical merchandise, it ships from physical locations, it exists — so why do other platforms try to make you define your merchandise with arbitrary rules? ShopIgniter treats your locations like you do, by giving you the ability to manage inventory, shipping and taxes on a per location basis. You can see where your stock is and intelligently handle client orders by taking advantage of your entire supply — not just what you have allocated to your web store.

• Organize seasonal offerings

Retail owners and product managers need to be able to organize seasonal offerings for their customers. We made this remarkably easy with product collections. In addition to store categories, you can create collections like Fall or Winter and then cross-sell products, regardless of their current categorization.

Unlimited Product Options

Most platforms on the market today allow for product options based on a two-dimensional matrix, namely color and size. But we invented an entirely new way to manage options: Option Groups.

Let's say you are selling a shirt. Option groups can be defined, not only for color and size, but also for material, origin, or any other criteria. Those option groups are then applied to a category. All products in that category can then utilize those groups. Using this method, you can sell anything online — even products like diamonds that can have up to 22 different variables.

It doesn't stop there: option groups allow your customers to find products by filtering for specific options, enabling them to drill down to products that they want to buy in seconds.

Complete Design Nirvana

Unlike other systems on the market, ShopIgniter's design templates are completely separate from the core application and use standards compliant languages to render to the browser: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This is not only the fastest way to deliver your data to your customers but also allows you to use any front-end developer.

• Flexible Front-End

Our main focus on ShopIgniter was to make the front-end extremely flexible and without the usual obstructions that designers face. We accomplished this by removing the entire application code from our templates and handled everything in JSON data arrays. This allows any designer with knowledge of jQuery to fundamentally change the entire site design, user interaction, and even develop new features using existing data.

• It's all in style

Theme designers will marvel at the flexibility of our CSS style sheets, allowing them to change the entire look and feel of a ShopIgniter installation without even touching any HTML code or going under the hood.

We speak the languages that designers use every day: HTML, CSS and JAVASCRIPT.

• Unlimited Potential

ShopIgniter allows you to duplicate any template for products, categories and pages of your system for design separation across the entire platform.

One platform for everything eCommerce

Our system is a complete Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that includes everything: software, infrastructure, ftp, database, email, and community support. With set monthly fees, no transaction fees and no limits you are finally free to do what you do best.

• Our principles: speed, security, flexibility.

10x faster than Varien's Magento, 3x-5x faster than other SaaS solutions.

How do you build a fast, secure and flexible system? You start with a fast, secure and flexible framework: CodeIgniter. With an industry proven track record, millions of installations, and a highly active developer community (including our own team) we didn't even consider anything else. In our opinion, CodeIgniter is the leanest and meanest PHP framework out there - and Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of PHP, agrees.

• Yeah, but how fast is it?

Very fast. In internal testing, it was 10x faster than Varien's Magento on a single machine comparison. We even tested it against other SaaS based solutions, and it usually came in 3x-5x faster. Why? Every single action of the platform was scrutinized while it was built to make sure it was as fast and efficient as possible.

RackSpaceCloud: Superior Scalability

The RackSpaceCloud allows us to deliver an industry-leading up time SLA, top-notch 24/7 infrastructure support, superior scalability and the ultimate in platform flexibility. Our team no longer has to worry about the ever-changing land of hosting infrastructure, hardware failures or system level security. We can focus on what we do best, with an intimate knowledge of the RackSpace's architecture and top level access to their technical engineers to deliver the next-generation eCommerce platform for our customers.

Extend and customize until the cows come home

Add unlimited functionality and potential to your system through an open module system extending everything from products to checkout. Build your own or use an existing module to interface with popular shipping, payment, point-of-sale, accounting and inventory control systems.

• Add Any Payment or Shipping Provider

ShopIgniter's module system allows you to build modules for any payment or shipping provider to extend the capabilities of checkout. Easily tie the platform into any API from any system to allow your customers to pay for, and receive merchandise.

• Extend the Core

Modules are no longer just tied to checkout, we allow them anywhere, to do anything. Want to build custom filtering, personalized shopping experiences, specialized product configurations - go for it. You can even develop modules that use our API to dramatically extend ShopIgniter functionality anywhere in the platform.

Make Money with Modules

Develop the module. Install the module. Be the module. Love the module.

Coming Soon: The ShopIgniter Module Store. Our module store will allow third-party developers to build and deploy modules for any ShopIgniter client. To submit a module, you must be a certified ShopIgniter developer. For more information on becoming a certified developer, please submit your module idea along with your contact information to: modules@shopigniter.com.

We are actively building modules for our system that will provide enhanced functionality, additional payment and shipping gateways, ERP and POS synchronization and more. Stay tuned for updates and module releases.