Insite Software Inc. released new e-commerce software today designed to help its core customers—midsize to large manufacturers and distributors—handle complex transactions and scale up online to handle increasing sales.
A typical customer, Geriatric Medical & Surgical Supply Inc., distributes products ranging from symbiotic chewable tablets and wound care dressings to blood glucose monitoring systems and mattress replacement systems to health care facilities that care for elderly residents. Geriatric Medical has already found that customers who order online spend an average of 25% more per order compared with when they buy offline; they also purchase 60% more product lines per order online than offline, the company says.
Going forward, the distributor needed a more flexible and scalable e-commerce software platform to maintain its ability to present and sell high volumes of diversified products, Geriatric Medical CEO Jeffrey Siegal says. “In today’s highly competitive marketplace, it is vital for us to stay one step ahead of the competition by having the infrastructure in place to enable our customers to quickly access detailed information on our latest product offerings,” he says. “InsiteCommerce 4 is engineered for growth, built with the technology in place enabling us to upgrade quickly to facilitate faster speed to market and better serve our customers.”
Insite Software has close to 200 clients, including distributors American Paper & Twine Co., Consumers Interstate Corp. and Borders States Electric, and manufacturers Thule Inc., Great Northern Corp. and Jet Edge Inc.
Tony Abena, CEO of Insite, says the newest version of InsiteCommerce was designed as both an “out-of-the-box” e-commerce application that can be deployed without customization work, and an e-commerce platform that companies with extensive I.T. resources can customize to meet highly specialized ways of selling products online and interacting with customers. For example, InsiteCommerce4 is designed with RESTful web services, a technology used to build customized applications, or widgets, that can add features and functionality like product configurators that integrate with a content management system. (RESTful stands for representational state transfer, a technology architecture designed for building web services applications.)
“InsiteCommerce 4.0 is Insite’s response to increasing market demand for easier upgradability and more componentization,” says Andy Hoar, principal analyst following e-business at Forrester Research Inc. “It’s also a step along the path to a more SaaS-based future.” Insite Commerce is available as either cloud-based or on-premise software, although it is not offered as multi-tenant SaaS, or software-as-a-service technology that multiple clients can access through a web browser.
InsiteCommerce4 is built with Microsoft Corp.’s .Net technology and incorporates responsive design, which lets web content render properly on any desktop or mobile device.
Among the more than 20 functional software modules available with InsiteCommerce4 are QuickOrder applications for re-ordering commonly purchased products; request-for-quote applications that let customers and sales reps exchange information on pricing; and punch-out applications for connecting a company’s e-commerce site with customers’ procurement software.
Insite did not immediate return a request for information about the cost to deploy InsiteCommerce4.
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