Business Desk Features at a Glance

The following table contains an overview of each Commerce Server Business Desk feature.

Business Desk feature Tasks you can perform
Analysis
  • Analyze site effectiveness by running Commerce Server reports or by creating your own custom reports.
  • Identify which products are selling by running Commerce Server reports. Use the list of products to create discount campaigns.
  • Identify specific groups of users by running a report, and then export the results to a list. Use the list in a direct mail campaign, or to update the properties of the users, so you can target merchandise or content to them.
  • Review collected data to identify emerging trends and new user segments, and to view the properties of the segments.
  • Use Prediction models to create affinity lists: lists of users who might buy a specific product. Export the lists to the List Manager module, and then send direct mail to the set of users who might buy the product.
Campaigns
  • Apply discounts to products.
  • Personalize the buying experience with targeted merchandising.
  • Deliver the optimal content for a given user in a given context.
  • Create, analyze, and manage personalized and targeted discounts, and direct marketing and advertising campaigns.
  • Target ads or discounts to users in a specific profile. For example, you can target ads to female users who visit your site three times a week and have purchased three or more products.
  • Create and schedule campaigns for customers who compete within the same industry, so that the competing ads are never shown on the same page.
  • Charge your advertising customers based on the number of ad requests or clicks they want their ads to receive.
  • Charge your advertising customers based on the page on which they want their ad to appear.
Catalogs
  • Create and update catalogs of products to sell.
  • Create multilingual catalogs.
  • Create multicurrency catalogs.
  • Build virtual catalogs with special pricing and/or special groups of products for specific users.
  • Import catalogs of products from other data sources in Extensible Markup Language (XML) or comma-separated values (CSV) format.
  • Export catalogs in XML or CSV format.
  • Export changes to a catalog since a certain date.
  • Add search capabilities, such as the following, to make it easy for users to find what they need on your Web site:
    • Category search. Browse by product category.
    • Free-text search. Find products by full or partial name or property.
    • Property search. Find products based on a property value, such as Price < $10.
    • Specification search. Refine the search request until the product is found.
  • Exchange catalog data with vendors by using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 or later.
Orders
  • Add multilingual shipping methods.
  • Add tax rates for specific countries/regions and states/provinces.
  • Search your Commerce Server orders database for existing order information.
  • Delete saved baskets that are no longer in use.
Profiles
  • Manage millions of users and organizations.
  • Build profiles for any business-related entity, such as users and organizations.
  • Determine what information to collect about users visiting your site.
  • Determine which catalog sets to display to specific users.
  • Analyze profile information to determine who is visiting your site.
  • Create target expressions to match content to users.
  • Create advertising, discount, and direct mail campaigns to target specific user groups.
Security
  • Grant permissions to Windows account users to perform specific tasks in Business Desk.
  • Grant permissions to Windows account users to access specific Business Desk modules.
  • Grant permissions to Windows account users to access specific catalogs, catalog properties, and catalog categories.
  • Grant permissions to Windows account users to manage profile properties.

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