Epishire Adds Bulk Email to osCommerce Shopping Carts

Dec. 18, 2008 - PRLog -- Finally there is a solution to the osCommerce Shopping Cart bulk mail problem. With Epishire’s new Bulkmailer it is now possible to email large customer lists directly through the popular osCommerce shopping cart in shared server environments.

Most small business owners using the osCommerce Cart and osCommerce based cart like Zen Cart have their shopping cart hosted on shared server environments. Shared servers are used because normally they provide enough  'bandwidth' to handle a lot of business and costs a small fraction of the expense it takes to maintain a 'dedicated' server.

A shared server means that there are many, often hundreds of other websites residing on a single computer, or server, at the web host facility.  When the osCommerce cart owner clicks send on several thousand emails in the customer database,  the shared server may 'blink', or shut down for a microsecond, just long enough to cut off the mailing request. This prevents a bandwidth spike that affects all the other websites on that server. A few hundred emails might get through but that's it.

So what can you do? You can purchase an account with an external mailing service like Constant Contact or MailChimp, or use a separate mailing program like DadaMail or phpList. These solutions work, but external mailing services require monthly fees, and all of these solutions require learning a new program, and maintaining a separate database. And you have to create the newsletter, or the email you send, in the external program.

Enter Epishire Bulk Mailer. This powerful email engine will install on any osCommerce Cart or osCommerce-based carts, like Zen Cart or CRE Loaded, and will ' throttle down' the sending of email to 1 per every 8 seconds, or 450 an hour. Since most shared server environments have a limit of 500 emails an hour, this means your mailing can run uninterrupted, no matter how big it is.

Epishire Bulk Mailer sends the newsletters created in the Newsletter Manager and works perfectly with the popular FCKEditor installed on many osCommerce carts.  Best of all you no longer have to synch your mailing list with a separate database. This eliminates elaborate API setups to process new customers and newsletter subscribers, and the handling of ‘unsubscribe’ requests.

Epishire Bulk mailer is simple to install and is operated from within the osCommerce shopping cart Newsletter manager.  There is virtually no configuration. Epishire Bulk Mailer consists of a small control panel with a customer selection menu and a send button. Simply select the newsletter, use Epishire to select the customer group and click send. That's it!

Epishire's simplicity of operation belies it elegance. As the program sends email, a small window appears, displaying the current email being sent, and a count of the emails sent and unsent.  Epishire also provides a link, allowing you to open up a report of each mailing with a time stamp, newsletter sent, and emails processed.

" I don't know how many hours we spent learning new programs or much we have spent on monthly fees over the years, but with Epishire  Bulk Mailer that all is in the past. No more having to coordinate or synch our osCommerce mailing list and unsubscribes with some other list,"  says Paul Resnick of Niora Naturals, an online skin care business.

Epishire uses little of a computer's resources, so you can use your computer as normal while mailing. It's 'timeout' proof because it reloads the window every 8 seconds, and if your computer crashes or losses power,  Epishire Bulk Mailer  'remembers' where it was. All that is needed is restart the mailer and it begins mailing where it last stopped.


Learn more about Epishire Bulk Mailer and more email solutions for osCommerce at www.epishire.com.

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Epishire is an independent software company specializing in creating email applications for osCommerce based shopping carts. Epishire is located in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle WA and was established in 2008.