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Klatu's e-Commerce Engine Differentiates Between Imported and Locally Sourced Products, Calculating Importation and Landed Costs Accordingly

New functionality permits e-store to automatically calculate importation and landed costs only on imported products. An e-store may include local and imported tangible (hardware or software) products as well as intangible products such as licenses, courseware and service and support packages.

Klatu's eCom e-commerce platform has been enhanced to differentiate between a local catalog (already nationalized products) and a catalog of products that must be imported from another country. Products may be tangible (hardware and software) or intangible (software licenses, service, support and other warranty plans).

The reseller may buy local (nationalized) products from a local distributor or other supplier, or import and stock them. The underlying engine allows the e-store to display these products as a separate catalog or within the e-store's main IT catalog. In either case, the e-store displays these products as "local" at the product line level, differentiating them as readily available. Markup levels are a catalog attribute so products in a separate catalog can be marked up differently.

In either case, the customer may select from both kinds of products and complete a single purchase. The reseller may also choose to deactivate the imported product while local stock is available or allow the customer to select based on price and delivery time. The customer may also use this mechanism to auto-replenish inventory by sourcing the order from inventory and using the customer's orders for replenishment.

The same mechanism permits a reseller to add non-product offerings such as maintenance plans, support plans, customized bundles, and any combination of products or services that the reseller wants to combine for sale. Other functionality within the e-commerce engine allows the reseller to associate these products with other products, creating an unlimited cross-sell platform that combines imported products with local products or service and support packages. This also enables the reseller to associate third party warranty providers.

A reseller could sell and bundle an imported notebook with a manufacturer service-support plan (such as HP's CarePaq™ support packages, and offer a locally taught course on using Microsoft Windows®. The e-store uses this differentiating mechanism to properly manage and price all products and services, regardless of origin or type.