Accupointe Now Offering Direct 500

Accupointe, Inc., Monroe, NC, a leading Microsoft VAR, has purchased the Direct 500 program from Computer Solutions, Inc.

Direct 500, with its eStore module, was built on the MS Sage MAS 500 ERP platform to meet the needs of multichannel merchants, manufacturers, and distributors with a single integrated solution.

Among the advantages of an integrated platform are integrated source codes that allow the Call Center and the eStore to provide a unified response to an e-mail blast with integrated source codes and promotions to automatically take the customer to a special offer on the eStore, complete the shopping cart with the promotion, and place the order in MAS 500 with no interaction from the Call Center.

Other marketing features include:

- RFM Scoring
- Mail List Selection
- Catalog Requests
- Fulfillment cost reductions with address cleaning and shipping and handling calculations. Shipping methods have been expanded with features to allow shipments by address types, restrictions by postal codes and countries. Shipping charts can be defined by geographical region and level of service.

Direct 500 also offers an integration to StarShip, allowing customers to have a calculated freight and handling charge directly from the StarShip rate tables.

Other features include:
- Address Normalization by integrating the Call Center and eStore to Melissa Data software, Direct 500 provides address hygiene and verification along with ZIP+4 capabilities.

- Duplicate Name Checking using an algorithm that is unique to Direct 500. The Call Center operator is prompted with the possible duplicates prior to adding a customer that may already be in the database.

- Continuity shipments

- Holiday Calendars to set service levels and geographic regions to allow the Call Center and eStore to calculate delivery dates that can be met by the company around the busy holiday seasons.

Twitter Announces @anywhere

Twitter has announced development of a new set of frameworks, to be called "@anywhere," for adding the Twitter experience anywhere on the web, allowing any Website to recreate Twitter's open interactions and providing what it calls "a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com."

Not only is Twitter's open technology platform well known, but Twitter APIs are already widely implemented. With @anywhere, however, rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript to add the Twitter-like functions to their site.

Initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

Says Twitterblog: "Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning..... With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting."

Continental Uses Silverlight for Call Center App with Web-Based Tech

When it came time to update its call center reservations system, Continental Airlines and its partner Infusion Development chose the Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in to build the new reservations solution as a rich Internet application.

The new system provides improved functionality and workflow for call center agents, which enables them to deliver better customer service and increase customer satisfaction. With the new solution, Continental saves money by consolidating servers and databases that currently sit in call centers around the world. By choosing Silverlight, the company also has reduced development and deployment time, simplified application management, and made it easy to integrate the new system with Continental’s existing Web services.

Click HERE for details.

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web and for mobile devices. Visual Studio and Expression Blend fully support Silverlight for application development.

Amazon Webstore Targets Midmarket Retailers

From Eric Engleman's Amazon Blog on TechFlash: Last April we reported on a secret Amazon.com project code-named Vitamin C, which was working on new ecommerce services for retailers. The idea was to take Amazon's WebStore business, which gives smaller retailers simple tools to set up online stores, and add more customizable features — along the lines of what Amazon does for large enterprise customers like Target and Marks & Spencer.

Now Amazon is unveiling the new toolset — introducing a revamped Amazon WebStore with "new capabilities and a self-service toolset that improve flexibility and control over site design, branding, and catalog offering." Amazon — which has lost some big enterprise customers in recent years, and is about to lose Target — may be shifting the focus of its ecommerce platform business to more modest-sized retailers.

The new Amazon WebStore, for now, is available in beta version by invitation only to retailers who request to be included. According to Amazon, the new features include:

- Enhanced setup wizard makes it quick and easy to launch your online business.
- New design tools and widgets provide increased flexibility and control of site design and merchandizing.
- Improved catalog and inventory control for easier merchandizing without IT support.
- Unified interface to easily track and manage offers, inventory, and orders across channels.
- New pricing that scales with your business.

Amazon faces some competition from other ecommerce platform companies that are targeting small and mid-sized retailers, including ProStores (owned by eBay), MarketLive, Volusion, and others.

But Amazon likely sees this segment as a growth opportunity, as its large enterprise business loses some steam. Target, which has used Amazon to run its ecommerce site since 2001, recently said it will take back the reins of ecommerce operations next year. In recent years, Amazon has also lost Toys "R" Us and the Borders book chain as enterprise customers.

Interesting side note: I'm told the retailer "BH" pictured on the bottom right of the new Amazon WebStore invitation page stands for "Beacon Hill," the Seattle neighborhood where Amazon's current headquarters is located. Apparently "BH" is a fake retailer that Amazon uses to demo new features

Cadre Technologies Issues Event-Management System for WMS

As reported in SupplyChain Brain, Cadre Technologies, a provider of supply-chain management software for the fulfillment, logistics and manufacturing industries, has developed the Cadre Event Management System (CEMS), an event-driven engine which permits users to make site-specific modifications as part of version 3.6 of the Cadence warehouse-management system (WMS).

CEMS was implemented as a standard Cadence user interface to create, manage, deploy and monitor configured events within the Cadence WMS. Users can extend standard functions within the application based on specific client or customer requirements, and can create standard Microsoft SQL Service database triggers to launch desired events, such as advance ship notices when trucks departs the dock. They can broadcast to customer-configured “listeners” to interpret system events and act upon them. And they can configure listeners using standard Microsoft SQL statements to one or multiple actions for each event, based on the complexity of the client or customer request.

MNP Expands Web Services

MNP, Salisbury, England, has expanded their Web Services solution, "OMSConnect," used for sending and receiving data between a Website and the company's OrderActive Order Management System.

With "WebSync," data can automatically be pushed to a Website to provide regular updates on changes of data in the Order Management System. WebSync produces a product file every time a modification occurs to a product in OrderActive. These files are then submitted as a batched XML file to the Web Service, rather than being processed separately as each one is submitted.

More New Merchants to Start Accepting PayPal

According to the Wall Street Journal, the pipeline of new merchants that will soon accept online payments through eBay Inc.'s PayPal unit is "strong," PayPal President Scott Thompson said.

Thompson declined to specify how many new merchants are about to support eBay's payment system, saying it could take up to two years in some cases for retailers to integrate PayPal into their Web sites.

Speaking during an appearance at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco, Thompson said the lag was largely due to the challenges posed by linking PayPal's system with "frail" merchant sites built with legacy software.

The company is "very pleased" with the world-wide merchant pipeline, he said, adding the size of the pipeline varies based the markets in which PayPal operates. He noted the service would be available in an unspecified number of new countries this year.

Non-eBay merchant services accounted for 57% of PayPal's $21.4 billion in total net payment volume in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from 50% in the year ago period, says the Wall Street Journal.