Most businesses aiming to trade online will probably get the product from an Internet service provider or other service provider, but because there are no monthly charges involved it becomes an especially good deal when used on an internal server. On the negative side, the weakness we found in Catalog 3.0 is still there in version 4.0, namely the inability to handle user registration and product discounts. This makes the software ill-suited to sites that need to use personalisation in their storefronts. And there is room for improvement in the release's setup wizard, the first feature that will strike existing users as being new. Although the way the wizard is designed is meant to ease the setting up of a new site or the managing of an existing online shop, it is not the most useful we have seen, especially for setup.
Most setup wizards take users through the process step by step.
After using the wizard for management a few times we decided to switch back to the main Catalog interface, which we found to operate quite well. In version 4.0 we were able to make use of this feature to carry out inventory management for an online catalogue. We requested alerts if the shop's stock fell below a specified level and stopped sales of a product when stock fell too low. With the new Snapshot capability, we were able to save all site settings to a file and easily restore a site at another time. Snapshot is a useful step to take before making major changes to a site.