Retailers who want to be etailers (seemingly all of them these days) will find the initial expense of 4D Business Kit could be offset by ongoing savings on site rental and database maintenance.

For most small businesses, the first dip into the waters of ecommerce is a contract with an ISP offering web space and a ready-built business store from as little as £10 a month. At these attention-grabbing low rates you are usually restricted to selling a small number of products from a one-size-fits-all set of pages, very often with a wait of several days for even minor updates to be implemented. You'll soon find yourself signing up for a £50 deal with an unrestricted number of product lines, automated secure payment handling and instant access to your store.

A more sophisticated approach is to host your own estore from your own server. This has hitherto been an expensive and complicated alternative, but 4D Business Kit (4DBK) simplifies the process and drastically cuts the costs. It provides the software equivalent of those hardware multifunction devices that can scan, print and fax. It's a program which builds estores using automated wizards, turns your PC into an HTTP server (all you need is an always-on Internet connection with a fixed IP address) and provides a back-end database on your server so that the data on your website always reflects the true stock situation and adjusts itself as orders are taken and despatched.

Installing 4DBK is straightforward but before you can use it fully you have to register online and enter a serial number. Registration includes a licence to run two estores from one server, and while one store will usually be all that's required by the small and medium-sized businesses, the ability to run multiple stores makes the product attractive to third parties that want to set up hosting services for other businesses. A licence for five additional stores costs £375 ex VAT.

The easiest way of creating a store is with one of the predesigned templates. There are 12 of these, including car sales, pizza delivery and a wine store. Sample data is provided for each so you can get a feel for how the program works, and literally within minutes you'll have a store up and running on your PC. Very few businesses will fall into the 12 predesigned categories, but this is irrelevant because none of the stores can operate in the real world until they have been heavily customised and the sample data replaced with real products. This can be done manually or by importing an existing stock file from Excel or any program capable of generating csv files. The templates are a starting point for site development - there's nothing to stop you choosing the wine shop layout and adapting it to suit the needs of any other business.

Although it is possible to customise a store using only the tools built into 4DBK, this is not a job for inexperienced users and should be entrusted to somebody with a knowledge of website design, especially as there is no standard Windows online help system. Instead, there are five Acrobat manuals containing over 800 pages stuffed with information. For maximum flexibility in design and layout, stores can be created using an ordinary HTML editor, adding tags to any page when you want to implement features driven by 4DBK - and this is when the Acrobat manuals come into their own. There is even a plug-in enabling you to add tags to sites designed with Dreamweaver.

The finished stores are very professional and bristling with features. Secure payments are handled through 128bit SSL payment gateways. Realtime order tracking is available to both merchant and customer, and sites can operate in multiple currencies and languages, using multiple tax rates and with shipping calculations based on weight, quantity or price.

Once a store is up and running it can be administered from any PC with a web browser, which makes it suitable for remote hosting. Advanced reporting facilities include the ability to track the preferences of customers and offer them personal promotions based on their previous purchases - so watch out Amazon!

Contact: 4D UK 01625 536 178
www.4duk.com

System Requirements: