Webstore Features

Our view of webstores

E-commerce has always been seen as a “web design” or “web development” challenge. When you want a webstore for your company, you approach a web development agency and they build one for you.

The Pakk approach is completely different. Pakk is a fully-integrated, all-in-one solution for running a modern commerce business. The approach is “business-first”, not “web-first”. Having said that, Pakk of course does webstores, and it does them really well - but understanding our approach is key to understanding the features of Pakk stores.

Your Store is a actually a web app

Don’t worry if you don’t know what a web app is - to end users it works the same way as visiting a regular webpage. However, the shopping experience is elevated to the next level because we’ve focused on building a sleek, fast and efficient buying platform - not a bloated, inefficient and slow website as is all too often the case.

Pakk Store features that shoppers love

• Significantly faster than anything they’ve ever used before. After a 2-3 second download on their first visit, all other interactions are instantaneous

• Moving from page to page, product to product, category to category is instant

• All “commerce” interactions, like adding items to the cart, changing quantities, adding to favourites list are all instant

• Add to cart and adjust quantities right from category and/or product pages

• Instant-response, global store search with inline results and inline “add to cart” control

• Filters that actually work. We put an obsessive amount of love into building filter and search tools that actually work and that customers will love to use

• Works perfectly on any device: phone, tablet or desktop

• Single page, extremely efficient checkout

• “Accountless”, “Passwordless” login. No more questions like “did I register or checkout as a guest?” and no more forgotten passwords

• Easy-to-use account centre where they can view previous orders, reorder easily, download invoices and pay for previous outstanding orders

• Super-simple favourites list where they can build up a record of their favourite products

• Live and accurate stock levels

• Intelligent messaging about when an order will be dispatched, e.g. “Order within the next 3 hours to receive tomorrow”

• Quick and responsive “sidecart” so they can access the contents of their cart immediately instead of having to go to a separate cart page

• Clean and uncluttered design - no flashing animations, carousels, popups or annoying overlays

• Fully integrated product and merchant reviews give shoppers confidence

• Responsive FAQs/help centre means they can get the answer to their questions instantly

Pakk Store features that business owners love

Our aim is to make Pakk stores as “self-managing” as possible. This is made possible because of our integrated architecture: you focus on configuring and managing your business inside Pakk, and the your online stores, to a large extent, just work.

Stores and brands

• Multi-store built right in. Run as many stores as you need to from your Pakk account with no extra difficulty or cost. Spin up stores for new projects or brands in seconds

• Have multiple stores running under a single ‘brand’ so they share the same design

• Localisation and translation of everything. We’ve built a deep translation engine so everything in your Pakk account is translatable. Run similar stores for different countries under different domains and with different languages, currencies and localisation settings

Setup and configuration

• Extremely easy setup. No coding, no technical complexity. Your store is ready to go in 3 clicks

• Free and unlimited “development domains” so you can get to work on refining your store straight away without buying a domain.

• Automatic and immediate SSL. Once you’re ready to go, just link up your domain and we’ll take care of generated and maintaining your site’s SSL certificate. No cost or worry for you

• Over 100 configurable settings. Tailor every aspect of how your store functions to your requirements: currency, language, logistics workflows, message texts, price display etc.

• One-click setup of Google Analytics

• One-minute setup of Stripe and Paypal

• Completely customisable email templates for post-sales communication with customers

Scalability and long-term maintenance

• Built in image caching and resizing. Upload one good copy of your images and Pakk takes care of the work of resizing and efficiently caching wherever necessary

• Infinite scaleability. Our architecture is built on modern cloud databases, cloud servers and CDNs, so growth will never be a problem

• No maintenance ever required from you. Because your store is technically a “web app”, we can push constant updates which are automatically applied the next time anyone visits your store - all without any intervention from you. Because all Pakk customers’ stores are based on the same framework, all bug fixes, optimisations and improvements that we discover for one store, are applicable to all stores - it’s like having a whole development team constantly improving your site forever and for free. Your store will not need redoing every 3-5 years and will never need a facelift or refresh - that’s all built into the framework, so we take care of it

• 100% Software-as-a-Service - no servers or technical infrastructure for you to run at all

Branding and design

• If you have multiple stores under a single brand - set the branding once and let all stores inherit it

• Easy and minimal branding. All Pakk stores are built on a standard template that we retain very tight control over. You set your logos, colours and fonts and we worry about making the store look great. No designer or developer needed

• Simple, block-based homepage builder allows you to feature anything on your store’s homepage included images, texts and videos from Youtube or Vimeo

• Menu builder for auxiliary and footer menus

• Custom USP bar for picking out 3-4 key differentiators like “Free Shipping” or “10,000 Happy Customers”

• Customisable links to social networks

Content and autogeneration

• Autogenerated, beautiful product mega-menu from your category hierarchy - no extra work required to maintain a menu system which is always in sync with the site’s actual categories

• Automatic display of Delivery Page and embedded delivery information on products pages based on the Shipping Methods you set up in your account

• Autogeneration of almost all the boring pages and text slots an online store needs: Privacy Policy, Cookies Policy, Terms and Conditions and Contact Us. All you do is maintain the correct settings in your account and these pages are autogenerated and kept up to date for you

• Totally integrated content building options like posts, pages, FAQs and social posts - intelligently link from products and vice versa

• Reusable blocks of content can be set up once and reused all over your sites

• Create customer registration forms with welcome emails and notifications to admin

Products and merchandising

• Maintaining 100%, real-time stock levels on your site takes zero input from you because Pakk is an integrated platform and always knows exactly how much of each product is available (including taking into account reservations and back orders)

• Multi-level categorisation with configurable meta-data (title, description, image) for each category

• Multi-axis product variants with easy variant selection and optional help pages to guide customers in selection

• Set up custom attributes specific to your products and have them automatically display in a clean, easy-to-read way on product pages. Custom attributes are also searchable and filterable

• Cross-sell and up-sell with related item groups

• Composite products allow for sale of complex kits, packs and groupings with automated display of pack contents to customers, automated and intelligent calculation of stock availability as well as optional “substitutability” of individual products within the pack

• Upload spec sheets and other relevant documents for customers to download right from product pages

• Completely integrated review system for both product and merchant reviews

• Autogenerated “New Products” category based on configurable number of “days old”

• Autogenerated “Shop by Brand” category with display of brand logos

• Autogenerated “On Sale” category featuring all discounted products

• Free “tagging” of products. Simply tag products as “Bestseller” or “Hot” to grab shoppers attention

Customer management

• Server-synced cart and favourites list means you can see from the admin panel what each customer has in their cart/favourites at any time and even edit the list in order to help them with their shopping

• Use custom “price schemes” to offer differentiated pricing at either a site level or right down to specific customer level

• Customers can use self-serve options in the account centre (view orders, download invoices, pay invoices), drastically cutting down customer management burden

• Customers can get answers to common questions from the integrated, fast and easy-to-use FAQ system

• Restrict site access, ability to purchase and/or pricing display to only registered customers if required

• Passwordless login means zero forgotten-password problems and massively reduced security risk. A Pakk data breach could never leak customer passwords, because we don’t store any!

Payment and shipping

• Create any number of custom Payment Methods including offline, pay-later type methods (pay by invoice)

• Customise names, descriptions and logos for payment methods

• Integrated with Stripe and Paypal

• Create any number of Shipping Methods

• Price shipping methods with hundreds of possible algorithm combinations: fixed, linear increase according to total cart value or weight or even band-based calculations

• Restrict shipping methods by country, postcode or postcode area

• Restrict or enable Shipping Methods based on specific product being in the shoppers cart

Discounts and pricing

• Set up named Pricing Schemes with flexible discount/markup and either blanket apply them to whole sites, or only for specific logged in customers

• Offer free shipping over a certain cart value

• Create complex discounts based on fixed or percentage amounts of cart value and apply to certain products or groups of products

SEO

• Automatic HTTPS (including HTTP -> HTTPS redirects) ensures search engines only ever see the secure version of your site

• Guaranteed discoverability by Google - some web apps are not easily processed by search engines - Pakk stores don’t suffer from this problem

• High site-speed and mobile usability rankings

• Clean and semantic HTML

• Customise title, meta description and URL for all web displayable entities (products, categories, posts, pages etc)

• Server-side rendering of basic meta ensures Google, other crawlers and snippet generators (Facebook and Twitter previews, for example) work flawlessly

• Automatic generation of “structured data” so search engines can easily index your products and content

• Works with Google’s “web crawl” feed technique for populating Google Shopping feeds without any extra work on your part

• Automatic generation of sitemaps that can be easily interpreted by Google Merchant Centre