Business Catalyst / FAQ

Adobe Business Catalyst is a unified hosting platform that enables you to work in your preferred editing environment to create sites that meet client requirements, without any server-side coding. The Business Catalyst hosting solution provides website management tools, email marketing, e-commerce, and an integrated customer database that makes it easy to build and publish websites.

Adobe Business Catalyst is very similar to web hosting because of the dynamic, built-in modules and features. You'll have an FTP account to upload web pages, CSS, SWF files, JavaScript, and images. Most nonprogramming-related tasks you can do with a regular web hosting company you can do with Business Catalyst.

Once your clients log in, they will have immediate access to their contact database, orders, web form submissions, products, catalogs, web pages, and email marketing campaigns from one central location — all built to work together.

Business Catalyst enables you to build powerful online businesses for your clients. Editing options are intended for on-the-fly content editing (for example, editing a simple web page). In order to customize the overall design, layout, and look of sites, you should have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS.

Adobe has built a dedicated extension that allows you to manage your Business Catalyst website directly inside the Dreamweaver user interface. The Business Catalyst extension works on Mac OS and Windows® operating systems. Download the extension here.

Business Catalyst does not limit your creative freedom whatsoever. You have complete control over the HTML and CSS that you put into the system.

Because Adobe respects your HTML code and won't change it, your website's XHTML standards compliance will depend on the HTML code that you create. However, if you do insert any system modules onto your web pages, the code generated by the system will be compliant.

For paid sites you can use your own web address or domain name. You can either redelegate your domain and use the Adobe DNS servers, or create an A record in your existing DNS service to point your domain to your new site at Business Catalyst — it's up to you. For instructions on this, see our Knowledgebase article. Note that if you are a Premium partner and wish to use our rebranding features, you will need to redelegate the domain to Adobe.

Yes. Anything you can run on another HTML page or on your blog should work just fine. At a base level, Business Catalyst is like any other web hosting platform.

There are a number of ways you can collect payments. You can use any of the existing payment gateways already supported, such as Authorize.Net, Google Checkout, or PayPal. Or you can opt to use the "Process Offline" method in which you capture payment details from customers, and then process them manually using your existing point-of-sale (POS) system. You can also enable customers to choose to pay by check or COD.

Yes. You get access to FTP to speed up managing your Business Catalyst website. You can even access system templates and layouts via FTP.

You can use the built-in workflow framework to choose who you want notified each time a customer inquires and how you want them to be notified, for example, via email, SMS, or both. If you want SMS notifications, you can buy a suitable SMS pack.

Yes. When you paste the HTML code for any of your web forms into your web pages, you can completely change the layout and use your own CSS to customize it to look the way you like.

No. Adobe does not take any portion of your client's online sales. However, the payment gateway or bank may charge a fee to process payments.

Refer to the buying guide for more information.

No, there is no limit at this time.

Yes. Adobe provides extensive APIs that allow you to connect most third-party systems to Business Catalyst. For example, you'll be able to synchronize your inventory, view recent orders, get a customer list, and more.

No. Business Catalyst is designed to fulfill most business needs without requiring you to hire programmers, and running server-side code such as PHP, ASP, and .NET is not supported.

Business Catalyst automatically generates a sitemap that Google, Yahoo!, and Bing can use,  helping to ensure that your website gets maximum visibility through these popular search engines.

Yes. You can easily add Google Analytics, which you can get directly from Google APIs, to any Business Catalyst site and get the rich reporting features that it provides. Business Catalyst also provides a built-in advanced reporting system with every site, which you can use without any extra configuration.

Yes. Business Catalyst has Unicode support. To create a multilingual site, simply create a collection of web pages for each language that you wish to support and link to them from a central location on your website.

No. You can have as many catalogs and products as you like.

Yes. Business Catalyst has support for using multiple currencies in your online store. You can set up your store so that customers from different geographies automatically see the right price and currency, helping to maximize your conversions.

Business Catalyst supports many payment gateways from around the world. If you don't see your payment gateway on the list, you can post it on the Business Catalyst wish list. However, Adobe cannot guarantee whether it will be added to the system.

Yes. With the Business Catalyst e-commerce functionality, you can sell both physical and electronic products. In the case of electronic products, the system will automatically provide your customers who have made a successful payment for their purchase with a link to download the products. You can limit how many times an electronic product is downloaded after purchase.

The Business Catalyst Administration area is available in English, French, German, Spanish, and Swedish. Currently there are no plans to add other language support for the Administration area. However, this does not affect the languages in which you can make your actual website available.

There are a number of ways you can use the Business Catalyst product:

• Use virtually any popular web browser. On Mac OS, Business Catalyst supports Apple Safari 5 or later, Firefox 4 or later, and Chrome 18 or later. On Windows®, Business Catalyst supports Internet Explorer 8 or later, Firefox 4 or later, and Chrome 18 or later.
  
• Use FTP.
• Use Adobe Dreamweaver® or Adobe Muse™ software to manage your site. Refer to the system requirements for those products for more information.
  
  
  

The data centers that host Business Catalyst are located in Tier 4 data center facilities, and the servers have:

• Multiple cooling and power distribution paths for stability
• Multiple active power distribution paths to help prevent down time from blackouts
• Redundant components for fault tolerance
• High connectivity and power into the machines

All of the data center facilities are connected to the Internet via Tier 1 networks, or have peering arrangements with Tier 1 networks. This means that the servers are essentially hooked in to the "backbone" of the Internet, which generally results in higher network speeds and lower latency from your customer's browser to the servers. Adobe uses reasonable efforts to make the services available 24x7.

The Business Catalyst data centers are located on three continents to help customers receive optimum response times from their websites:

• North America (New Jersey, USA)
• Europe (Dublin, Ireland)
• Asia Pacific (Sydney, Australia)

Adobe Business Catalyst has a highly fault-tolerant server configuration in its data centers. All servers also have regular full and differential backups. However, it is important to note that recovery procedures cannot be initiated for individual file backups, as they are intended to perform "full recovery" of the servers in the event of a hardware or software failure only.

At an individual site level, we provide several backup options for customers. You can use FTP to copy your web pages, templates, and layouts as often as you see fit. A Customer Report Generator can be used to export all customer-related information at your convenience.

There is no cost for trial sites. As a Free, Standard, or Premium partner, you may create as many trial sites as you need. It can often be effective to create trial sites when presenting the Adobe Business Catalyst solution to new prospects. You pay only when you decide to upgrade to a paid site.

We accept payment by credit card only (Visa, MasterCard, or American Express).

It's entirely up to you how billing should work. Some Partners do not want the hassle of billing customers. In those cases, when you upgrade the site you can choose for Adobe Business Catalyst to have the billing relationship with your customer. In this scenario your customer will be aware of Adobe's role since the customer will receive invoices with the Adobe brand on it, charged at the scheduled rate. You will need to obtain the customer's credit card details before upgrading the customer from a trial site to a paid site.

Alternately, you can have the billing relationship with your customer. You will be billed at the scheduled rate for each site and will be solely responsible for any billing and collection of payments between you and your customer. Premium partners will have access to some great tools to help manage customer billing, including the ability to set up consolidated billing for your customer sites.

• A 20% commission accrues to Standard and Premium partners on hosting sales. For more information, refer to the buying guide.
  
• A 10% override commission accrues to Standard and Premium partners on hosting sales of referred Standard and Premium partners.
• Commissions may be redeemed and paid into your PayPal account once the balance of a given currency that you earn commission in reaches the value of US$500 or more.

Yes, as long as all invoices are up to date with payments, you may cancel a site and no further billing will occur.

No payments can be refunded for sites that are canceled.

Yes, if you bill the customer directly. It is highly recommended that if you mark up pricing, you provide value-added services on top of platform hosting.

You can add additional users/email accounts, disk space, SMS, and extra newsletters. Purchasing any of these extras is done via the Partner portal > Clients tab > System Usage. All extras purchased are set up on recurring billing, with the exception of extra newsletter credits purchased on a one-time basis and valid for use up to 12 months from the date of purchase. To view a list of extras, please see the pricing guide.