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Knowledge Base

Navigate to Customers —> Knowledge Base from the home page of your admin area.

The knowledge base (KB) is a place to store all of your company's information that's necessary to answer questions that your customers might ask. Some examples of things to store are:

1. Frequently Asked Questions & Answers
2. How-To Guides / Training Manuals
3. Employee Handbook
4. Standard Operating Procedures
5. Extended Company Policies / Internal Policies

The main benefit is that it's a completely search able database of information (knowledge) for both your internal company staff, as well as your customers via this public KB search page:

http://www.yourdomain.com/kb_results.asp (you'll want to create a new link on your storefront so your customer's can find this page if you choose to use it)

You can create public articles for your customers to see as well as private articles that can only be searched or viewed by your administrators. The KB search engine searches the title, body, and keywords of every KB entry and allows you to upload multiple attachments to any KB article. This allows you to upload related documents and files to the information such as PDF files, images, zip files, word documents, excel spreadsheets, etc.

Creating Article Categories

Like products, you can group your knowledge base articles into categories. To create a category, follow the below steps:

1. Navigate to Customers —> Knowledge Base
2. Click the KB Article Categories tab
3. Click ADD
4. Set the ParentID and Name fields
   • If the category is the top category, set ParentID to [0] MAIN CATEGORY
   • To make the category a sub-category,then set the ParentID to the category you want it to be a sub-category of
5. You can optionally add a Description which appears at the top of the article category page

Creating Articles

To create a Knowledge Base Article, follow the below steps:

1. Navigate to Customers —> Knowledge Base
2. Click ADD
3. Fill in the Body field which contains the contents or all the information of your article
4. Optionally you may fill in the Title, ApplyToCategoryID(s) and Keywords fields
5. If you only want your administrators to see the article, put a check mark in the Private field.
6. You can also add attachments to the article by clicking the Add Attachment button at the top of the article while editing the article

We STRONGLY recommend filling in the strong>Title, ApplyToCategoryID(s) and Keywords fields. By filling in a title, when your customer searches, they know what the article is about. The keywords are used as part of the search and by filling in the keywords, your customers will be provided with an Intelligent Search / Hints feature which gives them a list of words or phrases that contains what they have typed. See screen shot below:


All knowledge base articles will show the last date modified at the top below the title, the assigned keywords / tags and at the bottom it allows customers to give feed back on the article and shows related articles. If any attachments are uploaded, they can be removed by clicking the Delete link next to the attachment listed while editing the article.

Knowledge Base Article Reviews

The software supports allowing your customers to give feedback on the knowledge base article. The feed back form is at the bottom of the article and looks as follows:



The reviews can be seen by navigating to Customers —> Knowledge Base —> Reader Comments. Here you will see each review, the rating, title of the article that was reviewed and the IP address of the customer who wrote the review.

Managing KB Search Hints

After adding keywords to each article, in order to make them part of the Intelligent Search / Hints feature, you need to add them to the searches database. To do so, navigate to Customers —> Knowledge Base —> KB Search Hints. This page shows all the keywords in the Intelligent Search. If you have added or changed the keywords in your articles, you will need to come to this page and click the Update My Hints Using My KB Keywords. This will update the list on this page.

How to link directly to a KB article

The syntax for linking to any article directly is:

/kb.asp?id=123

where 123 is the KB ID.

A complete HTML example of a hyperlink would be: <a href="/kb.asp?id=123">Your Link Here</a>

The recommended method would be to just provide a link to your knowledge base page so that customer's can browse the categories or perform a search for the article. When you create a link to that page, the link should be coded as follows:

<a href="/kb_results.asp">Your Link Here</a>

On the Knowledge Base Home page, below the categories it will display the Top 5 Most Helpful Articles and the Newest / Recently Updated Articles. This is useful if the same question is always being searched, your customers can go to the Top 5 Most Helpful Articles and their question may be right there for them to click on. The articles that appear in the Top 5 Most Helpful Articles are determined by the rating score they have.