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Prostores Website Builder -Review Rating: 4.5 
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§ Choice of over 180 customizable templates
§ Seamless integration with your offline customer and products management software
§ Powerful tools to manage inventory, orders and shipping.
§ Variety of marketing and promotional tools
§ Constant effort to come up with new features to make life easier for merchants
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§ Powerful Designing Tools which allow user to experiment could actually prove to be a little daunting to small store owners or beginners.
§ There is an inherent complexity in its store management features
User Friendliness
Rating: 4.5
Prostores has made a conscious effort to make the task of building an online web store as simple as possible by breaking it down into easily understood and easily manageable series of steps. The first step would be to identify which of the four products that Prostores offers would be ideal for the customer. From Prostores Express, for selling about 10 items right up to Prostores Enterprise for selling up to 100,000 items, there is a package for everyone. If you would like to upgrade to another package as your business grows, it is possible to do so without having to make any major changes - in fact it is all just a click away.
Having identified which plan suits you best, you can sign up for an account in just four steps during which you will also choose a store name and a domain name. You will then be taken to a Getting Started Checklist screen, which walks the customer through every step so setting up the store becomes real easy. And there is help available on every page in case you still have any questions. The neat user interface of Prostores makes the whole process a breeze.
Once you have set up your store with all the essential details and populated them with the initial set of products, you can head to the Store Administration Page where you will find all the tools you will need to design, manage and market your store.
Designing Tools
Rating: 4
In the Store Design section, one can make changes in the logo, the basic theme and then even in details like the home page layout and product page layouts. With over 180 customizable templates, you can work on getting the right professional look for your site. A major feature of the Prostores Designing tool is that you can design and save various versions of your web store. Once you think you have a few designs ready, you can compare them to see which is the most appealing.
Prostores also allows you to integrate third party site designers thereby allowing you greater flexibility to enhance the look of the site and build additional functionality. Since Prostores offers such powerful designing tools, it may take a little time to get a good grasp of all the features. It also has a very easy to use page template manager that allows us build webpage in quick time. Overall the designing tools are comprehensive enough even to meet the requirements of business with large product catalogue.
Editing Tools
Rating: 4
Along with the general design and look of the site, you can also make changes in other important details like the fonts – color, size and family. You could go with the default settings for the fonts in the theme that you have chosen or you could make changes in any or all of the following: font families, colors or sizes for the Heading, Subheading and Paragraph. Further, you can choose which pages you would like to be included in the store and enter custom text for those pages. Take a look at all the optional pages available and then see the instructions on how you could enable additional pages for your site. Prostores also recommends that you use all of the built-in information pages and also consider creating more content pages, like reviews and buying guides. These articles are not just great ways to retain customer attention but also ways of creating fresh content which always helps your store in search engine rankings. Overall the editing tools are up to the expected standards and are capable of meeting most requirements.
Promotional Tools
Rating: 4.5
Prostores has lot of readily available marketing and promotions tools, which will help attract new customers, ensure more repeat business and also increase the size of an average order.
Some of the main features and services provided to merchants include:
§ You can list the products from your Prostores web store on eBay
§ Prostores provides built-in tools for submitting your product catalog to major comparison-shopping sites like shopping.com, yahoo.com, etc.
§ You can use the Feature Product or Related product option to increase customer interest.
§ You have a variety of promotional options that you can set up at the click of a button like product sales or storewide sales, quantity discounts, or discounts based on size order, payment method, etc.
§ The reporting feature later allows you to track and analyze the success of these promotions.
§ The sitemap generation tool will automatically generate and store a sitemap file, which web crawlers from any search engine can use to index your web store.
§ Prostores does some basic optimization for search engines but offers plenty of tips in driving more web traffic to your store.
E-Commerce Tools
Rating: 4.5
Prostores makes it very easy for you to customize your online catalog by developing your own categories and product descriptions. Further you could choose from the many options for payment that cab integrated into the store – these are payment via major credit cards, check/money order or Pay Pal. All payments are processed through a safe and secure SSL enabled gateway. You can then select your shipping options – among those listed are USPS, UPS, FedEx, UPS Worldship, and Pay Pal USPS and specify your sales tax. Another Prostores features is that you can upload, share and manage your product and customer lists from QuickBooks into your Prostores web store as well as transfer order and sales lists back to QuickBooks. This is a great advantage but takes time and lot of manual synchronizations.
Once a customer has placed an order, both the customer and the web storeowner would be receiving notification emails. Enterprise Prostores allows automatic notification to suppliers of confirmed orders by e-mail, EDI or fax. There are tools for managing and updating orders, customers and shipping details.
Other Features
Rating: 4.5
Prostores allows you to extend the functionality of your store by offering an amazing variety of compatible add-on tools. These are essentially marketing and store management tools.
These add on tools go a long way in providing additional functions that are often needed for business websites. Prostores attempts to fulfill nearly all your requirements related to running an online business and has tied of number of reputed solution providers for the same.
In addition to all the powerful products that Prostores offers, it also offers setup, design and marketing services for those who would much rather like for a professional to take care of all the details.
Support
Rating: 4.5
Prostores has one of the most comprehensive documentation and well setup support system in place. At any point of time, a User Guide is available for quick reference. A Support button on the Administration page will guide you through various topics on which you may need help. Through the Store Administration page, there will be information icons, which at the click of a button will give you the specific information that you need.
Prostores also has a learning center with a large number of tutorials, articles as well as FAQs, on using Prostores as also on generally managing and growing your web store. Most importantly, all Prostores web storeowners will be able to access online help and will be given priority email support. In addition, if you have a Prostores Business Plan or above, then you will have also have access to 24/7 technical support, on a toll free phone number.
Technical Details
Rating: 4
Prostores offers a choice between using hosted storefront domain or a personalized domain name for the web store. You are allowed to host a large number of products with space ranging from 5 GB right up to 20GB and the respective data transfer is 50GB to 400GB, allowing for a sizeable traffic to visit your web store. 50 to 200 email boxes can be made available depending on which plan you choose. There can be multiple admin users with special groups like suppliers and employees to be allowed password protected access rights. Most importantly, all customers are provided the facility to carry out secure transactions through SSL security.
Overall Value
Rating: 4.5
Prostores almost has a perfect combination of tools and features. It has the flexibility to start you off as small as you want and the robustness and scalability to grow as big as you want to grow. All this combined with tremendous ease of use and a fantastic support center makes Prostores one of the most highly ranked ecommerce application at present. The only drawback, if you could call it so, is the large number and variety of tools (and add-on tools!) available that it could take you a while to actually get to know all of them and use them well!
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