Community or Enterprise ?

Since version 3.2.0.0, KonaKart comes in two separate installations:

• A free Community Edition which can be downloaded from our downloads page.
• Enterprise Extensions which we charge for. See our prices page for pricing details.

The Community Edition is intended for small businesses and charitable organizations. A condition of the license agreement is to display “Powered By KonaKart” with a link to our web site, on the main page of the on line store.

The Enterprise Extensions are available as a separate installation kit which is installed on top of the community edition to provide more features and functionality. Although we would prefer you to keep it, the “Powered by KonaKart” link is not mandatory for a KonaKart based store when the Enterprise Extensions are installed. Currently the features present only in the Enterprise Extensions are:

• Multi-Store. The Enterprise Extensions version allows you to run an unlimited number of stores with a single KonaKart installation and a single database schema.
• Indexed Search. Indexed search using Lucene search technology gives you a lightning fast search experience even for very large product catalogs.
• Suggested Search. As you type into the search box, a list of suggested search items appear matching the typed letters. The suggestions are weighted by popularity so the most common suggestions are shown first.
• Sophisticated marketing functionality that allows you to capture customer data as the customer uses your KonaKart eCommerce store; and to use that data within complex expressions in order to show dynamic content, activate promotions and send eMail communications. For example, you could show a banner or activate a promotion only to customers in a certain age bracket that have Product A in their wish list and at least $50 worth of goods in their cart.
• Promotion evaluation directly for products, rather than as Order Total modules. This allows a customer to view the available promotions for a product without having to add it to the cart.
• Unlimited number of custom product attributes. Each attribute may include metadata for validation and widget selection during data entry using the Admin App.
• Unlimited number of miscellaneous objects may be associated with products and categories.
• Wish List functionality. Customers can add products to a wish list. The KonaKart API supports multiple named wish lists for each customer.
• Gift Registries. Registered customers can create and manage gift registries such as wedding lists. A public gift registry can be searched for using various search parameters. Once found, any items bought from the registry may be automatically shipped to the address defined by the registry owner. The store front application contains an implementation of a wedding registry.
• Reward Points which enable you to increase customer loyalty and increase sales by rewarding customers for purchases as well as other actions such as registering, writing a review, referrals etc. The points may be redeemed during checkout.
• Gift Certificates. Gift Certificate products may be connected to any type of promotion and activated through a coupon code contained within the certificate.
• Job Scheduling. This is achieved with an integration of the Open Source Quartz scheduler. There is a framework for adding your own batch jobs and the source code of some useful example jobs.
• Support for Recurring Billing. Payment Schedule and Subscription objects have been introduced to support recurring billing natively using a KonaKart batch job or through a payment gateway that manages the billing process at regular intervals.
• Google Base integration which allows you to publish your product information for inclusion in Google search results.
• XML Import/Export feature for KonaKart objects such as product, customer, order etc. This feature can be run with a script, providing arguments to define which objects to import or export. Some example scripts are provided.
• Java Message Queue Integration (Apache ActiveMQ) to support the guaranteed delivery of messages to external systems.
• Digital download products (txt and .pdf) may now be indexed in the SOLR search engine and text fragments (snippets) surrounding search keywords can be returned from the search.
• For applications requiring an unlimited number of prices for products, these prices may be set in a new database table and accessed instead of the standard product prices saved with the product data. This functionality allows you to define any number of catalogs, each of which may contain different product prices. Each catalog may also contain product stock information and a date for when the product will become available if out of stock.
• Internationalization. The language of the admin app may be changed dynamically.
• PDF invoices can be created and sent to customers as email attachments and downloaded from the store-front application. The created PDF invoices can be stored on disk for archiving purposes or created dynamically whenever they are required.
• The KonaKart APIs are available as Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation) calls. The Community Version of KonaKart allows you to call the APIs as Java methods, through SOAP and JSON (application engine only).
• Customer events that may be used for reporting purposes. You can log any event such as when a product is viewed or removed from the cart or when a customer starts and completes the checkout process. Events may be logged in another database so as not to impact production performance.
• Bookable Products such as courses and tickets may be defined. Each product can have an associated schedule and a list of bookings.
• LDAP module to connect to an LDAP directory in order to validate customer and admin user credentials.
• Variable quantity product options to enable the customer to define the quantity of an option rather than specifying only a fixed amount. i.e. Customer defines number of extra GB of disk space.

Support Packages and Professional Services are available for *all* versions of KonaKart.