A brave new world of retailing is upon us and things have moved very quickly in Motorcycle retail in the past year.  Many dealers are now aggressively pursuing online shopping solutions.  Some suppliers are mandating utilising of their own web solutions.  Seems like everyone is getting on the band wagon.

C9 has been working away on aligning our technology to help fulfil this need for over 12 months now.  We are positioning with a comprehensive approach that will give you peace of mind that your strategy for embracing Internet retailing will not be hindered by technology limitations stemming from your dealer system.  C9 has expanded to embrace 'Cloud' capability, and done so in such a way that we can offer simple to understand solutions that have sensible pricing.  Yet we have not compromised flexibility or capability in doing so.  Nor are we compromising our core business focus; building and expanding Australia's best Motorcycle DMS.

The broad goals and outcomes of our strategy is that we can offer:

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Over the weekend we have upgraded our server infrastructure into order to facilitate rapidly growing demand for hosting. We now have 10 times the storage capacity and significantly improved performance available for serving web pages etc.

Almost all services are now migrated.  Email and domain names will migrate over the next few days.

We will be decommissioning our backup server in the united states; because of cost practicalities it is unable to gracefully scale up to larger volumes at a reasonable price.  To compensate for this we have two additional backup services in place:

• New server infrastructure uses mirrored RAID
• New server infrastructure uses CDP technology (continuous data protection) to replicate to a physically separate backup store.

So backup profile is as follows:

• Total unique near realtime data copies:  4
• Total unique disaster recovery copies: 2

All our primary web service infrastructure is provided by an Aussie company: web 24.  I recommend them highly, professional, helpful and competent.

C9 has for some time now offered a complete end to end web solution that permits online shopping.

But for dealers that already have a website,  your web site developers now can access your c9 database from within the website, to browse spares, units, and place web orders that appear automatically within c9 point of sale!  The access, just like c9 provided website, works 24x7 and does not require you to have your c9 system running all the time.  This will allow you to engage your web site provider to provide a polished web shopping front to your business that perfectly preserves your websites looks and feel and is tightly integrated into c9.

Technical details for web developers

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The c9 DMS platform provides us at c9 alot of capabilities to remotely provide support to your installation; the ability to run c9 remotely and the ability to access the c9 database means that the process of providing quick and useful support is usually as simple as phoning us up and explaining the problem and we take it from there.

Under some extra-ordinary circumstances although, the remote tools built into c9 may not be enough. Also you may wish to access your shop remotely for software other than c9; such as your accounting software.  For these circumstances you will require installation of additional software that allows you to gain complete remote control of one or more of your computers in the shop.  The preferred program we recommend is called 'logmein'. Following explains how to install logmein.

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C9 software has built into it a specially designed spare parts order export specifically for Husqvarna.   To use this file though you need to change settings in Husqvarna online website. The settings are as follows:

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C9, and some of our competitor DMS platforms, offer the ability to query available stock while in the middle of point of sale.

In c9, you select a part on screen and press the 'F12' key. It will query for quantity held by the supplier.

For example:

For dealers, this ability is a massive time saver; and saves them the hassle to login to a dealer website and re-key the part number in order to query to see if the item is in the country; or call the supplier to query for the part.  The result is better experience for everyone, the spare parts manager, the supplier and importantly the customer on the other side of the counter.

For suppliers to offer this feature to C9 or other DMS they need to publish some sort of Internet based integration application programming interface that will allow DMS platforms to connect in.

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The section Managing Website Categories explains how to setup menu items that display on a webpage.

This section explains how to map spare parts and units into those categories so that they display.

You can map spares or units into website in multiple ways. You can either map them individually one item at a time or you can map them in groups. i.e. put all Yamaha parts or all Road Motorcycles onto a website with a single click.  The option you select depends on how you want to organise your data and how organised your data is.

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On a c9 published website is a menu which web users can expand and navigate. To illustrate:

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