Multiactive EcBuilder Pro, Maximiser 5.0 and MaxAddress

Multiactive

e-commerce is the way of the future - perhaps. e-commerce (you note the lower case 'e' - that means it must be to do with computers) is really just the extension of conventional mail order to the Internet. However, that's a misleading 'just' because the nature of the Internet means that, as a marketing medium, it creates a subtly different relationship between buyer and seller. Marshall McCluhan's 'the medium is the message' comes to life here. By doing business on the Internet a whole new set of trading behaviours occur.

For a start, the economists' 'perfect market' gets a little bit closer to reality (remember that for economists any difference between economic theory and reality is down to faults in reality - and you don't come much closer to pretension in a discipline than blaming reality for faults in your theories!). Why? Because the Internet brings buyers closer to the state of perfect knowledge. Want to know if a book is in print? Just look at www.amazon.co.uk, www.bookshop.co.uk, www.thebookplace.com or www.bookshop.blackwell.co.uk. Not only can you browse the booksellers databases, you can read reviews and compare prices before placing your order and waiting for the goods to be delivered. There you have one feature of this new relationship - search, compare and then purchase, all with a few clicks of the mouse button and keystrokes. Buying is made easy - although delivery takes a little while.

But it's not just large-scale enterprises like the big booksellers that can use this medium. The Internet offers a whole new set of communities which you can join, communities defined by their interests and needs, rather than their geographical location. The Internet is as much the home of the specialist niche as it is of the major world players, and unlike other marketplaces, this one offers a more or less level playing field.

And if you can do it with books, why not with any other commodity. It's not just mail order companies that need to watch out. A small sweet shop in England has gone on the web to sell its traditional humbugs and gob-stoppers to a world-wide market. If only one person in every 100,000 in the world wants to buy your goods or services, then the Internet offers a market of around 250 million people in which there are around 2,500 potential customers. The future of the Internet lies as much in niche players as it does with the multi-nationals, everyone can go global!

But there's a catch - there always is. How does a small business without its own IT department or the resources to buy in the services of a specialist agency get into e-commerce? Multiactive offer one solution, ecBuilder Pro, a DIY commerce-enabled website-creation programme which builds into a complete and comprehensive WWW presence enabling companies to market and sell their products and services world-wide, at just a click of the mouse button.

The programme is based on a range of templates so that users with little or no technical expertise can build an online store highlighting up to 2,000 catalogue items, each with its individual page featuring graphics and, if you wish, sound files and video clips, all produced with a professional and consistent look and feel. Wizard-driven screens prompt for entries of contact and company details, marketing messages, product catalogue descriptions and graphics, pricing, order and delivery details. Once the site itself is designed, keyword and search engine submissions is automated for you and the whole thing can be transferred to your Internet Service Provider.

In one section of the order form on the site you design, purchasers can enter their credit card information if this is appropriate. That information is then sent to you by e-mail as an encrypted, compressed, and encoded attachment that is virtually impossible to break. This is automatically decoded once you have opened the order in ecOrderDesk (included with the software) and you can process the transaction as you normally would. A useful handbook on e-commerce is included in the package (as an Adobe Acrobat file), and a fully working trial version (with limited design options) is available from Multiactive on disk ('phone 01628 587 772) or as a download from their website (www.multiactive.co.uk). The full programme costs £299 plus VAT and requires Windows 95/98/NT4.0 or later operating systems, 16mb of RAM and 50mb of hard disk space.

Multiactive have also recently launched the updated version Maximizer, the first contact management software to incorporate an e-commerce facility. Maximizer 5.0 also allows users to create a website with full order processing capability which can be hosted free as part of Multiactive's online community (http://biznet.maximiser.com/) or it can be uploaded to the user's own ISP. Enquiries and orders are automatically logged to the Maximizer 5.0 database for follow-up and tracking.

What makes this such an attractive product for the small business intent on using the World Wide Web as a vehicle for developing its customer base of simply to improve the quality of service to existing customers is that it offers the functionality of the high end software used my major corporations at a price which is affordable for the start-up business. The Internet offers a level playing field in theory, but until now the practicalities of global marketing (because that's what we are talking about here) seemed too daunting. It's one thing to put together a web page to use your free 5mb of space with your ISP, it's another thing to move from a simple advertising page to a fully interactive e-commerce site. That was still only available for the big players.

Maximizer 5.0 combines the accessibility and interactivity of a website with the opportunity to engage in true customer relationship marketing - tracking enquiries to orders, planning contacts and monitoring customer activity. Of course, its not perfect. The contact management interface takes a bit of learning and isn't as intuitive as we have come to expect with software these days, and the web-pages you can build are adequate rather than ground-breaking in design, but then it would be hard to produce a set of generic templates for any business which offers both functionality and breath-taking aesthetics. For £149+VAT for a single user, it will be hard to find a rival product which bundles so much together in one programme. A demonstration version of a website created by Maximizer 5.0 in one hour is available to view at http://biznet.maximizer.com/multiactive.uk and a trial version of the programme is available form the company (01628 587 772 or download from www.multiactive.co.uk). But you can also win a full working copy of the programme for your business by entering the PROGRESS competition on page XX - why not get into e-commerce at not cost at all?

The third in the trilogy of programmes from Multiactive is MaxAddress, a fast, accurate postcode-based addressing system for integral use with Maximizer 5.0. If you are building up a customer address base from telephone enquiries, then simplifying the process by asking for the enquirer's postcode offers two key advantages - its quick (saving customer time) and its accurate (saving customers' irritation at having to spell out every unusual word). What's more, you save time and money as well. Although MaxAddress is designed to be run as an add-on to Maximizer 5.0 it can also be run as a stand-alone application, as its core feature is its ability to run a search on the Postcode Address File (PAF) which contains details of every postcode in use in the UK. By entering the postcode you get the road, town, county and other information relating to it, and in the case of larger organisations their precise address as well; otherwise you have to enter the road number or house name. Address finders based on the PAF are not new and their prices have been falling over time - five years ago you could be talking many hundreds of pounds for such software, but MaxAddress is only £99+VAT, although this only licences the PAF for one year

by Multiactive www.multiactive.co.uk and www.ecbuilder.co.uk

Review from 'Progress' published by NEBS Management, June 1999