Business Catalyst is the all-in-one product that makes life easier and business more profitable. We're replacing 5+ tools that are essential for internet businesses with one - that's why life is easier. No more moving data between a handful of separate solutions. No more remembering 5 log ins for different products. No more wrestling with code and techie stuff. At a basic level Business Catalyst is web hosting for your business website. But to go with that you get website management tools, email marketing, eCommerce and an integrated customer database.
It's very similar actually - some people call Business Catalyst a "next generation" hosting solution because of all the built in goodies that it comes with. You'll have an FTP account to upload web pages, CSS, flash, JavaScript and images. It's also true to say that any non-programming related thing that you can do with a regular web hosting company, you can do with us.
When your clients logs in, they'll be able to immediately access their contact database, their orders, web form submissions, products and catalogues, web pages and email marketing campaigns from one central location. Furthermore, all of those functions are built to work together from the ground up!
Business Catalyst enables web designers to build powerful Online Businesses for their clients. While we provide fool-proof editing options for your clients, these are intended for on-the-fly content editing (eg. editing a web page). In order to customize the overall design, layout and "look" of sites, you will require a basic understanding of HTML and CSS.
We love Dreamweaver too! In fact we love it so much that we built a dedicated extension that allows you to manage your Business Catalyst website directly inside Dreamweaver. The BC Extension works on Mac and PC (MX, 8, CS3 and CS4). Download the extension here.
Absolutely not! Business Catalyst does not limit your creative freedom whatsoever. You have complete control over the HTML / CSS that you put into the system.
Yes indeed it is. Is your website? Because Business Catalyst will respect your HTML code and won't change it, your website's XHTML standards compliance will depend on the HTML code that you or your designer has created. However if you do insert any system modules onto your web pages, the code generated by the system will be compliant.
You can use your own web address, also called a URL or domain name. You can either redelegate your domain and use our DNS servers or you can create an A-Record in your existing DNS service to point your domain to your new site at Business Catalyst - it's up to you. For instructions on this, see our knowledge base article. Please note that f you are a Premium Partner and wish to use our rebranding features you will need to redelegate the domain to us.
Of course! Anything you can run on another HTML page or on your blog will work just fine. Remember that at a base-level Business Catalyst is like any other web hosting platform.
There are a number of ways you can collect payments on your online shop. You can use any of the existing payment gateways already supported, e.g. Authorize.net, Google Checkout, PayPal and many more. Or you can opt to use the "Process Offline" method that captures payment details from customers and you can then process these manually using your existing point-of-sale (POS) system. You can also enable customers to choose to pay by Check and COD.
Yes you get access to FTP to speed up managing your Business Catalyst website. You can even access system templates and layouts via FTP.
You can use the inbuilt workflow framework to choose who you want notified each time a customer inquires and how you want them to be notified, e.g. via email, SMS or both. If you want SMS notifications you simply buy a suitable SMS pack.
Sure you can. When you paste the HTML code for any of your web forms into your web pages, you can completely change the layout and use your own CSS to customize it to look however you like.
Nope! Business Catalyst doesn't take any cut from your client's online sales. However, their payment gateway or bank may charge a fee to process payments.
As many as you want! However any plan with email marketing allows you to send 10,000 email newsletters per month at no cost. If you want to send out more then you'll need to buy additional email newsletter packs.
No, there isn't :)
Sure. We provide extensive APIs that allow you to connect most 3rd party systems to Business Catalyst. For example you'll be able to synchronize your inventory, get a list of recent orders, customers and more.
Our goal was to create a platform that fulfilled the needs of 90% of all business people, so they didn't need to get their nephews and granddaughters to program for them. So the answer is no, you can't run PHP, ASP, .NET or other server-side code. But you can probably replicate the functionality, and then maintain it yourself without a problem.
Of course! We use friendly and customizable URLs throughout and utilize search engine friendly techniques such as 301 Permanent Redirects. We even integrate with Google, Yahoo!, and Bing sitemaps feature, so the system regularly and automatically generates a "sitemap" which the search engines use to ensure your website gets maximum visibility in the search results.
Yes. You can easily add Google Analytics to any BC site and get the rich reporting features that it provdies. Business Catalyst also provides an advanced reporting system builtin that comes with every site which you can use without any extra configuration.
Yes. Business Catalyst has full unicode support. You can create web pages in any languages imaginable. You can even send your newsletters in your language of choice. To create a multi-lingual site you'd simply create a collection of web pages for each language that you wish to support and link to them from a central location on your website.
Not at all. You can have as many catalogs and products as you like.
Business Catalyst has full support for multi-currency online stores. You can setup your online store so that customers from different geographies automatically see the right price and currency so to maximize your conversions.
We support many payment gateways from right around the world. Click here to see a list. If you don't see your payment gateway on this list, then you can post it on our wish list, however we cannot guarantee if/when it may be added to the system.
Yes. With Business Catalyst eCommerce functionality you can sell both physical and electronic products. In the case of electronic products, the system will automatically provide customers who have made a successful payment for their purchase with a link to download the products. You can limit how many times an electronic product is downloaded after purchase.
The Business Catalyst Administration area is translated and available in the following langauges: English, French, German, Spanish and Swedish. Currently there are no further plans to add other language support for the Administration area. However this doesn't affect your actual site. You can create your website in any language that you like. Business Catalyst supports unicode which means you can have your website in English or Japanese or Hebrew - virtually in any language!
There are a number of ways you can use the Business Catalyst product.
System Reliability is non-issue because all of our Data Centers are located in Tier 4 Data Centre facilities. This means that all of the facilities that house our servers have:
All of our Data Center facilities are connected to the net via Tier 1 networks, or have peering arrangements with Tier 1 networks. This means that our servers are essentially hooked in to the "backbone" of the internet, which generally results in higher network speeds and lower latency from your customer's browser to our servers. And on top of all that we provide a 99.98% uptime service level agrement.
Business Catalyst operates data centers in 3 different continents to ensure our customers get optimum response times from their websites. Our data centers are located in:
This is a user added to a site & they would have access to the administration area of a site.
This is an email account setup in a site. This is email only & does not give the user administration access to the site but has full email capabilities such as POP, IMAP and webmail.
There is no setup charge for any of Business Catalyst plans. Your client simply chooses the plan that best suits their business and then pays for it on a monthly basis. Note: If you are a Premium Partner using our Consolidated Billing feature, you are able to charge clients a set up fee on top of their on-going monthly bill.
All-in-One plans are inclusive of all the Business Catalyst functionality. This includes web hosting and content management, eCommerce, email marketing, integrated customer database, reporting and analystics and more. The Lead-in plans are subsets of the overall platform. For those business owners just starting up their online businesses, the lead-in plans provide a fantastic point of entry with the comfort of being able to upgrade to the full solution at any time in the future.
No you cannot combine two lead-in products together. You will need to upgrade to one of the All-in-One plans.
Yes they can easily change between plans. Any fees paid in advance will be applied to the new pricing on a pro-rata basis.
Your use of Business Catalyst's products is governed by our End-User Agreement.
There is no cost for trial sites. As a Free, Standard or Premium Partner, you may create as many trial sites as you need. It can often be effective to create trial sites when presenting the Adobe Business Catalyst solution to new prospects. You only pay when you decide to upgrade to a Live Site.
We accept payment by credit card only (Visa, Mastercard & American Express).
It's entirely up to you how billing should work. Some partners do not want the hassle of billing. In those cases, when you upgrade the site you can choose for Adobe Business Catalyst to have the billing relationship with your customer. In this scenario your customer will be aware of us since they will receive invoices with our branding on it, charged at the scheduled rate. You will need to secure the customer’s credit card details prior to upgrading their site from a trial site to a paid site.
Alternatively, you can have the billing relationship with your customer. When you choose this option we will bill you at the scheduled rate for each site and you are solely responsible for any billing and collection of payments between you and your customer. We provide our Premium partners with some great tools to help them manage their billing with their customers.
In either scenario, commission (if applicable to you), calculated on the scheduled rate, will accrue in your Partner Portal.
Yes, as long as all invoices are up-to-date with payments, you have full control of cancelling a site & no further billing will occur.
No, we do not refund payments for sites which are cancelled, regardless of billing being set to monthly or yearly.
If you bill the customer direct, yes you can. It's highly recommended that if you markup our pricing, you provide value added services on top of our platform hosting.
You can add additional users & email accounts, disk space, SMS & excess newsletters. All are required to be paid upfront monthly on recurring credit card billing, except disk space which is billed annually, and bandwidth, which is billed at the beginning of every month for the excess used the previous month.
No, we do not have a payment plan option available for this.
No, we are not able to refund a Partner signup fee once it has been processed & your free Partner site & Partner Portal has been implemented.
Standard & Premium Partners have access to the BC Knowledge base, Community Forums and helpful Training Videos
They can submit support tickets via the Support tab of their Partner Portal, while their clients can submit requests through the Support Central area of their Admin Console.
Free Partners have access to the BC Knowledge base, Community Forums and helpful Training Videos.
Free Partners and their clients are unable to submit Support tickets. Please upgrade to a paid Partner account in order to receive direct Support.
We do not provide telephone support, however in lieu of this we provide live training (with the ability to see the trainer's screen) during our regular Q&A Sessions. Click see a list of upcoming Q&A sessions.
You can bring your queries to these sessions, and we can work with you live in the Webinar to resolve the issue for you. Make sure you book in quickly though, as there is a limit of 6 attendees per session.
HTML and CSS issues are outside the scope of our Support, and unfortunately we will not be able to help you with this issue, however you may like to post these on our community forums, where a member of our helpful community may be able to assist!
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