Gift certificate template

Interland Online Marketing Suite presents a sophisticated Web-based interface for building and managing your store. Although the Online Marketing Suite uses PayPal to handle payment processing, PayPal's wax technology lets you accept credit cards even from customers without PayPal accounts: You don't need a separate merchant account. Interland's combination of well-designed site-building capabilities and extensive tools will appeal to companies with straightforward commerce needs, and the company's more advanced plans offer further customization options.

Interland's site templates, designed with variations for a variety of vertical markets, let us set up a professional-looking site quickly and painlessly. Pick the Merchant template and check off which of 15 standard page types you want on your site: Interland's server not only generates the page outlines but fills them with sample text and default graphics—a nice way to help counter writer's block if you haven't already defined all your Web site content. Interland also supplies a large library of good-quality clip art—more than 7,000 images in all.

To edit your site, you use a browser-based tool derived from Trellix, which gives you extensive visual control over page content in a manner we found almost as natural as using a gui-based, drag-and-drop tool like Yahoo! SiteBuilder. Although Interland does not support custom scripting, it includes a large variety of drop-in components that let you add features like a Recommend This Site button, map and directions, custom Web forms, arbitrary html code, and even a very easy-to-use blogging tool that can automatically add rss feeds. We also liked Interland's ability to mark pages private—requiring customers to log in before viewing them—by simply clicking a check box.

Uploading and managing product catalogs was easier than with many other services we tested. And once your site is built, Interland includes several tools to promote it, though we wish the plan's e-mail newsletter promotion feature allowed more than 50 names. The service also comes with integrated WebTrends reporting capabilities.

For businesses that require merchant accounts for accepting customer credit cards directly, Interland offers a Platinum plan ($99.95 a month) that includes the Miva e-commerce engine. The Platinum plan also has a gift certificate manager and Web coupon creator—extra-charge options in the basic plan.

If you sell products that can be purchased with PayPal and don't need custom scripting capabilities, Interland Online Marketing Suite offers you an excellent collection of tools that let you build and maintain a highly polished e-commerce site.

Copyright ?? 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.