IPS has a fully featured community suite of products including forums, blogs, image galleries, file management, live chat, and content management. We felt the clear missing piece to this product line was an application that allowed you to monetize and promote your community.
We are happy to introduce IP.Nexus to fill that space!
The new IP.Nexus application is designed to help you earn money from your community both directly and indirectly. Direct options include features such as payment processing and shopping carts whereas indirect methods may be banner tracking and donations. Everyone here at IPS is very excited to introduce this new application and hope our customers will be able to take advantage of the variety of features in the product such as:
- Shopping cart functionality.
- Pre-defined packages and custom packages for purchase.
- Custom fields for package definition for great flexibility when creating packages to purchase.
- Purchase standalone items.
- Purchase packages to upgrade to a "higher" member group and automatic downgrades on expiration.
- Support ticket system including incoming email parsing.
- Community donation system with goal support.
- Ability to give members "credits" for commissions, awards, or other purposes.
- Credits can be used for future purchases or member can request a payout. Payout support included.
- Members can give out a referral link and can earn commission on sales that members they refer make.
- Multiple payment gateways including PayPal, Authorize.net, and offline payments. More gateways will be added based on feedback.
- Global search box on every page of IP.Nexus admin area to easily lookup customers, invoices, or support tickets.
- Stock actions/replies for support ticket system on admin side.
- Multiple status types for tickets.
- Ability to track tickets for future follow-ups.
- Upload banner images for display and tracking using IP.Board's ad management system.
- Customer overview page showing complete customer history, current orders, and options.
- Audit new transactions and purchase to catch fraud.
- Integration with IP.Downloads to handle purchasing of files.
- Support for sales commission in the IP.Downloads integration.
- Functions available for third-party developers to initiate payment processes in other applications. Payments are handled by IP.Nexus creating a central payment system.
We are quite sure you will want to see it to believe it and, over the next few weeks, we will be posting individual blog entries going over the features listed above (and others) with screenshots and videos. Subscribe to the IPS Company Blog to get email updates when an entry is posted or subscribe to the Blog RSS feed.
When will it be available?
As always that's very hard to say. The good news is that every single feature listed here is already completed! We are not announcing a future product being worked on: we are announcing a product nearly done. In fact, IP.Nexus will be given to our internal beta testing team very soon. From there we will collect the feedback from you and integrate any features we missed. We expect a final release before the end of summer 2010 and beta releases within the next month.
How much will it cost?
No price has been set as yet but you can expect it to be priced similarly with our other applications. As is our tradition, we will offer a very good early-adopter discount price.
What about Subscriptions Manager?
We have a product, Subscriptions Manager, available for free for IP.Board that handles upgrading/downgrading member group permissions with paid packages. Nothing will change with this product and it will be available just as it is today. We will continue to make maintenance and compatibility releases. Those of you who are currently using Subscriptions Manager and may want to upgrade to IP.Nexus will be able to do so without data loss.
I have a question, comment, cheer, or suggestion...
Great! One reason we are announcing IP.Nexus now is to get feedback on how our customers may see themselves using a product such as this. We want to create a system you will want to use that suits your needs. Obviously handling the profit and promotion aspects of your community is something we are taking very seriously and we will be actively seeking your feedback on the best way to do this. You will notice comments are disabled on this blog entry as we do expect a lot of feedback so please use the newly created IP.Nexus feedback forum. Looking forward to hearing from everyone!