Press Release

Stone Edge Introduces “Subscription Manager” Add-On for the Stone Edge Order Manager

Blue Bell, PA, March 11, 2005 - Stone Edge Technologies, Inc. today announced the immediate availability of the Stone Edge Subscription Manager. The Subscription Manager is an add-on product for the Stone Edge Order Manager, the leading business management program for small-to-medium Web retailers. The Subscription Manager makes it easy for merchants to handle a wide variety of recurring orders, from magazine subscriptions to “product of the month” type clubs, to regular deliveries of dietary supplements or pet food.

The Stone Edge Subscription Manager lets you create "subscriptions" which can then create recurring orders for your customers.  Each subscription's delivery schedule can be configured in a number of ways, including daily, weekly, monthly or annually, or on specific days or dates. 

The Subscription Manager supports numerous types of subscriptions. Some can be for a fixed number of deliveries, such as a training course with 10 lessons that are delivered one per month, with the same 10 lessons shipped on the same schedule regardless of when a customer begins their subscription. Others can be for a set number of deliveries, but with automatic renewals, such as annual magazine subscriptions. Typically in those cases everyone with that subscription would get the same product at the same time, such as the April issue or the CD-of-the-month, regardless of when their subscription began. Others can be for regular deliveries, but with no fixed ending date, such as monthly deliveries of vitamins or pet supplies.

“We tried to anticipate all of the variations that merchants are likely to need,” said Barney Stone, President of Stone Edge Technologies, publishers of the Subscription Manager. “Like our Stone Edge Order Manager, the Subscription Manager is designed to save merchants time and money by streamlining and automating repetitive tasks. It also greatly reduces the chance of costly errors, like shipping the wrong product or forgetting about a vacation hold.”

The items to be shipped can be set to a single product for each delivery (such as a monthly supplement delivery), a product selected at the time when each subscription order is generated (e.g. a wine of the month club - where all subscribers get the same item this month) or pulled from a list of SKUs assigned to the subscription (i.e. music collections - where shipment 1 gets the first CD in the collection, shipment 2 gets the second, etc., regardless of when they are ordered or shipped).

Billing is also highly configurable with the Subscription Manager. Some subscriptions may be charged in advance for the entire subscription, while others may be billed per delivery or for a set number of deliveries, like magazine subscriptions.

The Stone Edge Subscription Manager even makes it easy to deal with common nuisance issues, such as address changes and vacation schedules. It supports alternate billing and shipping addresses for customers during specific time periods, as well as the ability to "hold" a subscription for a period of time.  

The Subscription Manager works together with the Stone Edge Order Manager, which is required for its use. Initial orders are typically imported into the Order Manager from an Internet shopping cart, such as MonsterCommerce, Yahoo!Store or Miva Merchant, or in the case of phone or mail orders, entered manually into the Order Manager. The Subscription Manager automatically detects which orders are for subscriptions, and sets up the appropriate delivery schedules. The Subscription Manager is fully integrated into the Order Manager, and can be accessed from the Order Manager’s Main Menu. Deliveries scheduled by the Subscription Manager appear as new orders in the Order Manager, which is then used to handle inventory tracking, fulfillment, shipping, customer service, etc.

Over 1,000 merchants use the Stone Edge Order Manager to help run their businesses. They utilize shopping carts such as MonsterCommerce, Yahoo!Store, ShopSite, osCommerce and others, and typically handle 10 to 2,000 orders per day. The Order Manager helps them manage their orders, customers, payment processing, inventory, fulfillment, shipping and more. In addition to importing orders from many of the most popular shopping cart systems, as well as sales channels such as Amazon and Shop.com, the Order Manager also supports mail and phone orders, and includes a Point-of-Sale system for merchants who have “brick and mortar” stores.

The Stone Edge Order Manager retails for $1,250, including a year of support and program updates. The Stone Edge Subscription Manager retails for $995.

ABOUT STONE EDGE

Stone Edge Technologies is a privately owned company that specializes in developing affordable e-commerce software products for small business. Barney Stone, a pioneer developer of relational database management software for desktop computers, founded the company in 1983. Stone Edge began shipping its flagship product, the Stone Edge Order Manager, in early 2000. As of the end of 2004, over 1,000 small-to-medium Web merchants had selected the Order Manager to help streamline their businesses.

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