Jumpstart Your Business With Adobe Business Catalyst

Running a business is tough. With multiple parameters to take care of and multiple variables to control, it takes multiple talents and multi-tasking to run the business smoothly. When it comes to the online presence of your business, there are many solutions out there to help you out.

However, it’s not always rosy; either there are to many standalone solutions or too much maintenance for in-house system resources. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an integrated business management solution in the cloud that doesn’t require an army of developers and system admins? Well, there is one such miracle app and it’s Adobe Business Catalyst. Business Catalyst replaces more than five standalone solutions and after the jump we’ll learn how it can help jumpstart your business.

Overview

Business Catalyst is a hosted web application for building and managing online businesses. The USP of Business Catalyst is its unified platform that combines multiple web apps required to run a business into a single core. The idea behind Business Catalyst is to “Go Live” with your business as quickly as possible.

There’s absolutely no need for any coding knowledge to build a great online business with Business Catalyst, however developers can use HTML and CSS to customize the web pages in any manner they please. It may be a portfolio site, a lead generation site or perhaps an online store; it’s extremely simple to build everything quickly with Business Catalyst.

You can create a free Business Catalyst partner account to check out its features before making up your mind. The sign up form is simple and doesn’t require you to submit credit card information.

Once your free account is created, a unique sub-domain is created. Your partner account in entirety can be controlled from the dashboard available at this domain.

Pricing

Business Catalyst has two levels of pricing, one for direct customers and the other for partners. Direct Customer Pricing Plans are for people who just want to run their own websites and businesses at Business Catalyst. The prices are very reasonable given the exhaustive set of features and reliable up-time.

Now, if you’re a developer and you want create and run websites for your clients on Business Catalyst servers, you will have to go with the partner plans. There’s a free Partner Pricing Plan that does not give you a commission from the monthly payments your customers make. If you avail Partner Pricing Plans with a one time set up fee, you’re granted access to perks like a handsome 20% commission, full access to Business Catalyst partner resources & training programs, unlimited customer support tickets and much more.

Dashboard

We’re presented with a partner terms agreement page immediately after login. Once you agree to the terms, the rather simple looking dashboard, sporting a nice color scheme is unveiled. In addition to the getting started section, the dashboard shows vital stats of your partner account like commission earned, paid and trial sites, the login rates, etc.

Creating a Website

Creating a site offers you a list of choices. I chose to create a Business website instead of Starter websites or Pro options. Once you select the type of website you want, there are four design options in front of you:

• Use an Online Business Template (recommended)
• Start from scratch
• Import your current website
• Replicate one of your existing sites

Replicating the existing site is an option for developers to reuse existing code to save lot of time and energy.

Let’s go ahead with the recommended option of using the Business Catalyst business templates. I was surprised at the variety and collection of professional, colorful and gorgeous templates. Once a template is selected, we are presented with a number of color schemes for the website. We also have an option to choose a home page image from among the displayed bunch. Nice touch BC!

After selecting the theme, colors and image for the site, we are then asked to fill out a short form about the business details. A sub-domain is created for your website and you can always use your own domain URL later from the dashboard. Business Catalyst blew me away with the option to select the data center from where the site will be hosted. This brilliant feature can let your target audience from a particular geographical region access the site without any lag.

Once the site has been created, you can check it out from the URL in the dashboard. The login credentials of the site are emailed to you for further customization and adding content.

Editing a Website

Editing of content on your created websites happens at their respective admin dashboards. The URL, FTP and login details are mailed to the registered email address every time a new website is created. The admin dashboard shows site analytics, system resource usage, etc. in a single glance.

Adding pages to an existing site is a walk in the park with a simple, yet intuitive WYSIWYG editor. Pages can be inserted at the right places using the navigation drop down menu. Business Catalyst has an excellent selection of modules to add to a page and they can be accessed from the side bar to the right.

Blogs, dynamic menus, forums, etc. can also be created with the same ease from under the website menu. One of the most unique features of Business Catalyst is its ability to allow us to create secure, subscription based members only area in just a few steps. Creating a pay wall for your content is a huge pain and it’s unbelievable how easy it is to create one with Business Catalyst.

Opening an Online Store

Integrating an online store begins with creating a catalog from under ecommerce in the menu bar. A template style can be inherited or an entirely new one can be assigned to the catalog you created.

Adding a product page has enough features and fields that can give a dedicated ecommerce solution a run for its money. On top of the standard set of features like product dimensions, inventory control, shipping info, etc., Business Catalyst allows you to mark a product on sale for discounted promotional offers. If the product you’re selling is digital and doesn’t come in a physical format, there’s an option to mark it prominently as well.

BC Keeps the entire content editing experience uniform throughout the app and product descriptions can be updated from the same full featured WYSIWYG editor. You can create affiliate programs, add discount codes, create gift vouchers on the fly.

Payment Gateway Integration is another major feature that’s simplified into a point and click process at Business Catalyst. All you have to do is choose the country, the payment gateway you like from the drop down and relevant transaction IDs from the gateway. That’s it! You can start counting the money as it comes in.

Customer Relationship Management

Business Catalyst has a fabulous “catch all” CRM built right into the web app. Unlike other CRM solutions, hosted or otherwise, Business Catalyst CRM captures customer information from anywhere on the website. Customer information is recorded in the CRM from the Contact Us form, shopping carts, Inquiry forms, forum posts, blog comments, membership access pages and the like. A bird’s eye view of customer’s activity at very sections of the website is always available at your finger tips with Business Catalyst.

Like a traditional CRM, Business Catalyst allows you to create workflows, centrally manage cases, orders etc. without much effort on your part.

Web forms can be created from the Modules section and they act as the primary modes of generating leads and handling cases. Creating a web form is such a great experience. Just point and click on the field name you want to incorporate in the form and voila! the field gets added to the form. Form creation couldn’t get any easier than this!

Email Marketing

There’s no better mode of reaching out to customers efficiently and economically than email marketing. With built in email marketing support, Business Catalyst eliminates the need for another standalone service to send marketing emails. Armed with the huge database of customers in the CRM, you can kick start the email campaign almost immediately. The beauty is, with so much customer data to mine, you can pick and target customers using custom filters.

For example, you can choose to send out promotional mails to everyone in the list or only to people who have purchased in the online store more than once. It’s also possible to filter customers based on the amount they have spent in your online store.

Reporting & Analytics

Without the need for any coding or customizations, Business Catalyst provides excellent reporting and analytics functionality to all the sites. Right from the dashboard you can get a digest of how the online business is performing. With the help of the live feed you can track customer activity on the site precisely.

You can view the exhaustive web traffic analysis of the website from Under Reports. Exact details and sources of traffic can be drilled down using the filters to the right.

In addition to all this, Business Catalyst allows you to pull admin usage reports, customer reports and, in case you have something particular in mind, there’s always custom reports.

Final Thoughts

Business Catalyst is a hotbed of endless possibilities for newbies and developers alike. The Business Catalyst extension for Dreamweaver also empowers developers to customize the HTML and CSS design of the web sites, leveraging the power of the leading desktop based web design solution. Developers can manage all the sites with a single sign on and all the changes made can be tested immediately with live previews.

On top of the monthly commissions, partners can earn more with the lucrative Business Catalyst referral program. As for clients, Business Catalyst is a fit it and forget it solution. With no databases, email or web servers to maintain, all your productive hours can be put into building the business. Your sites will run from snappy servers with great up-time and backed by a credible brand like Adobe; Business Catalyst is a compelling solution that can make your life easy.