Interchange is a software package that is designed to help you conduct business efficiently on the Internet. It's a tool that has the potential to dramatically increase your productivity, and to make your life significantly easier. Interchange accomplishes this in several ways:

Interchange is a holistic system. It combines site and content management with inventory and product management, to provide an integrated solution. That means Interchange can automate a lot of the hard, repetitive tasks that plague static web sites. An example: with Interchange, change a price once, and it's changed on every page that it needs to be changed on.

Interchange divides up the work of Internet commerce into several spheres of influence or ``tiers,'' each of which can be administered by the person most capable of handling it. Technical staff, site designers, and product managers all play different roles in a successful ecommerce site; Interchange honors those roles and doesn't try to make people do things they don't want to do. The database administrator, for example, doesn't have to worry about the graphic design, and the graphic designer doesn't have to worry about product merchandising.

Interchange is licensed so that it can meet your business needs. We recognize that there just isn't a single packaged application that can possibly solve all the problems of the business world. There's simply no such thing as an ecommerce panacea. That's why we decided to open-source our system -- so that you can modify it to suit your needs. Need to integrate with a legacy point-of-sale system? You don't need to wait for us to do it; you've got the code, you can do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you. Want Interchange to talk to your customer database? You can do it. Traditional closed-source applications just don't let you do that on your own time frame.

Interchange has been built on open technologies and industry standard systems. We use standard SQL databases, standard web servers, and the de facto standard Internet programming language, Perl. It's all designed to take advantage of your existing technology infrastructure and staff expertise. Why reinvent the wheel?

Interchange is server-side software, with a web-based interface that allows you to administer all aspects of Interchange. You don't have to worry about installing client applications at multiple points across a heterogenous network, or worry about upgrading modules on different machines. All you need is a browser. On vacation in Hawaii, and need to make an emergency change to your site? No problem. Just dial in to your favorite ISP, fire up your browser, and change it. Using the web as an interface means your site is always available, no matter where you are, or what sort of client machine you have.