Astraware Sales and Services

Astraware have over several years created effective systems and devoted resources to making sure that our customers are able to get the best experience when browsing before purchasing, getting their registration codes, and also for after sales service, including handling updates and registration resends quickly!

The key components to our sales and services are our eCommerce system, our registration handling system, and our customer support. These allow us to create and maintain not only our own web-site and sales channel for Astraware products, but also additional sites providing sales for products from other companies.

The Astraware eCommerce System

Drawing on team members' experience in web design and managing ecommerce sites, we created our first shop to process our own sales during 2001, which first went live in December 2001.

Since then many refinements have happened, meaning that we are able to now create and maintain content sites, including that for Astraware's own software. Here are some of the main features that make our shop effective for us, itself bringing in the majority of Astraware's income.

• Easy-to-use Basket system.
• Clear purchase process.
• Secure sales taken and processed directly from Astraware, rather than passing the customer along to a third party credit card handling company.
• Customer details pages automatically ask for the correct necessary additional information - i.e. HotSync ID for Palm purchases, Owner ID for Windows Mobile purchases, with links to help novice customers who are unsure how to find these.
• Smart "Up-Sell" feature encourages further appropriate purchases based on the customer's basket contents
• Additional "Featured" products for extra promotion of products.
• Promotional Code system gives discounts on specific lists of products for a particular time.
• Product variants can be created with lower prices for use with promotions or web sites.
• "Add Basket" URLs available to give out for use in emails to add products directly to a new basket.
• Full integration with the Astraware web-site for easy purchase recommendations from within product pages.
• Shop is extensible to allow purchase facilities for other sites.
• Shop is "skinnable" to make a different look to shop pages.
• Linking to Registration system(s) to provide real-time registrations both on the receipt pages as well as sending by email.

Astraware Registration Handling

Making great products and selling them is just part of what we do to make an effective process! We also have to perform additional tasks in order to make everything as smooth as possible for each customer, automating wherever possible to improve speed so that the user gets their product in real-time, while allowing us to ensure that problems are found and fixed with the minimum of fuss! This becomes an extremely complex matter when sales can be happening with over a dozen external vendor sites, each of which uses a sublty different system.

Key features of our registration handling system are:

• Acceptance of many formats of incoming email registrations from third party vendors
• Processing of individual emails and daily summary batches from vendors
• Internal linking with Astraware-managed shops to allow slicker performance.
• Codes generated immediately and sent by email
• System detects likely problem registrations (i.e. no username etc) and flags immediately for human intervention.
• Modular system that allows for plug-in registration systems and email templates to be used for easy accomodation of new products and developers.

Astraware Customer Service

One feature of Astraware that we are particularly proud of is the quality of our customer support. We believe this is absolutely essential for creating sales by word-of-mouth, and keeping our customers loyal and happy. While many companies are content to keep their support minimal and give their customers a poor level of service that many have come to expect, Astraware strives to far exceed the usual expectation of customer service - and we have been able to consistently manage this, having received testimonials from hundreds of delighted customers.

• Full time customer service assistants provide support response targeted within 24 hours during the week and within 48 hours at the weekend.
• Online support system and fully searchable knowledge base allows us to answer many queries automatically.
• Human Support available via Email, Phone, Mail, via our bulletin board, and even by ICQ.
• Highly developed internal registration/customer tracking system, allowing our support team to locate and update registrations and customer details.
• Fast and efficient first-line customer support, extremely polite, friendly and patient.
• Escalation to effective and competent technical second-line support when necessary.

Astraware Branded / Managed Sites

Because our site and shop system is modular, and uses cascading style sheets to apply a look and feel, it is possible for us to easily create additional sites and channels.