May 27 2009 - Valley Village, CA. Today, Lynx Media, Inc. announced the release of Lynx Ecommerce, a hosted web solution that synchronizes First Edition subscribers to the web.
According to Len Latimer, Lynx Media’s President, “We’ve spent years talking to clients and reviewing other systems, and now we’re extremely pleased with this new web solution which allows subscribers to review and renew their subscription, make a payment, manage their bill-to, ship-to, and snowbird addresses and set their own privacy opt-ins. Subscribers can also manage their gift and group subscriptions, and easily report customer service issues like lost or stolen issues - all 24/7”.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, Lynx Media chose to use DotNetNuke, an award winning open source framework, which is well suited for subscriptions, ecommerce and custom programming. The framework boasts of superior user authentication security, exceptional content management, and advanced SEO (Search Engine Optimization). DNN has over 575,000 registered users including TV Guide, and enjoys a very active support group with thousands of designers and programmers specializing in DotNetNuke.
Since management and page production is handled through a web browser, in-house programmers or knowledge of HTML or FTP is not required. Writers in remote locations can post articles only visible to themselves and editors until approved for publication.
Lynx Ecommerce is a complete “done for you” website in which each publisher has their own separate install of DNN set up by Lynx Media. It can be used either as a complete web solution or a linking shopping cart to a publisher’s existing website.
The email component of the Lynx Ecommerce includes the ability to offer unlimited opt-in newsletters, auto-responder replies to information requests, auto-responder sequenced campaigns to opt-in prospects, writers, subscribers, or other lists, based on days start date, newsletter management and sending based on a scheduled date and time, and expiring email campaigns to subscribers based on days until expiration, all user customizable.
Lynx Media has also secured master licenses to “best–in- class” third party modules including RSS modules, news ticklers, document/news articles management and archiving, classified ads, events, announcements, YouTube viewers, image galleries, email/newsletter management, SEO management, email marketing, Goggle AdSense and Google Analytics, testimonials, job listings, business directories, banner management and much more. Publishers may offer “Subscriber Only” areas as well as subscriber downloads that support multiple membership levels such as Silver, Gold, and Platinum levels.
The Lynx Ecommerce shopping cartsupports almost any product type and includes support for recurring subscriptions, assignment of roles, and the download of electronic products. The cart system supports more than 50 payment gateways such as Pay Pal (standard and pro), Authorize.Net, 2CheckOut, VeriSign Payflow, World Pay, and Protx, as well as manual (off-line) credit card processing. It supports unlimited ship-to addresses, flexible tax zones, real-time rate calculations for USPS, FedEx, Airborne, and DHL and even has customer wish lists.
According to Latimer, “All in all, we feel this is destined to be the one of the very best solutions available for magazine and newsletter publishers’ websites.”