The Official LexiConn Blog

ShopSite Version 11 SP2 – What’s New, What’s Important

Robert Mangiafico — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:23:36 +0000

ShopSite’s latest and greatest, Version 11 Service Pack 2 (11 SP2), is on the street. It’s a great release chock full of new features and improved usability.

Here’s what I’ve found to be of interest to merchants…

For a full list of all new features, check out the ShopSite 11 SP2 New Features page.

“Processing” overlay on cart page

Commerce Setup -> Order System -> Layout Info -> “Display “Processing…” splash screen”

Such a simple little feature – Have a “Processing” graphic appear and dim the screen while ShopSite is recalculating shipping options or updating the cart. And yet, it’s a great usability enhancement! No more confusion to customers who type quickly and try to change other items in the cart while ShopSite is re-loading the page for a zip code change.

A “must enable” feature in my mind.

Merchant alerts – Turn ‘em on!

Commerce Setup -> Merchant Alerts -> Configure

Now you can be instantly notified when a shipper like FedEx or USPS is having an issue, or if your payment gateway is having a problem.

It’s a great way to be able to stay on top of problems in your store.

Combine Same Products

Commerce Setup -> Order System -> Shopping Cart -> “Combine Same Products”

Another small change that can have a big impact for some merchants. This feature will combine products that are the same (that do not have ordering options enabled) onto the same line item. No more having 5 line items of all the same product.

Checkout error highlighting

Another simple yet important feature – If a client forgets to fill in a field on checkout or fills it in incorrectly, the field and text will be highlighted red to make it easier for the customer to see what they missed / have to correct.

Tax exempt support in customer registration

You can now set a tax exempt status for a registered customer. You can include their ID and expiration as well.

Wholesale module improvement

With SP2, it is no longer required that a customer go to the cart first once logged in for the wholesale module to work correctly. Once logged in, the tracking cookie is set automatically, so the customer can go right back to the site and be recognized as a logged in user.

UPS account rates now possible

Commerce Setup -> Shipping -> Configure UPS

If you ship via UPS, you can now elect to have your account rates displayed as opposed to the retail rates.

WordPress plugin

Merchandising -> Social Media -> WordPress

Ever wanted to embed your products automatically in your blog? Now you can with the WordPress plugin! Easy to use, and adds an instant upsell to your blog.

Products reviews built-in

Merchandising -> Product Reviews

ShopSite has added a built-in product review system. Similar to our review module, it allows you to add reviews to your pages that customers can submit/read.

Our add-on module will continue to work, be supported, and integrates with our order status module.

Re-order functionality

Registered customers who log into their account can easily re-order with a click of a button. Our order status module with re-order functionality will continue to work as well.

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As you can see, lots of new features and services to help make your store better! If you host with us, simply request the upgrade, and we’ll get you to the latest version. It is a seamless upgrade that does not involve any downtime.

ShopSite Tip – USPS API Activation

Rich A. — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:20:28 +0000

You’ve configured the ShopSite USPS API but why is an error message showing up?

USPS Message: An XML response was not returned from USPS.

This is a very common problem because there is a step during the configuration settings that is easily missed when signing up for the USPS API. If you do not contact the USPS after receiving your API login details and ask them to change your account to the production servers your account will stay in test mode, which will result in the error above.

What To Do

In ShopSite, on the Commerce > Shipping > Configure (for U.S. Postal Service) > Re-Subscribe USPS screen, Step 2 will have the details for what needs to be done, and Step 4 will have your User ID which was previously entered:

USPS – Re-Subscribe Screen

If you no longer have a copy of your original setup email from USPS, make a note of the User ID on your screen since it will be needed when you email them.

If you do have the original setup email, you can reference it for the details, but if not just send an email to “uspstechsupport@esecurecare.net” with the following information:

I am requesting to have my USPS API account switched to the production servers.

API User ID: [put the user ID from the re-subscribe screen here]
API: USPS Web Tools Rate Calculators APIs
3rd-Party Cart: ShopSite

Thank You

That’s all there is to it. The USPS Internet Customer Care Center is staffed from 7:00AM to 11:00PM Eastern Time and once they make the switch the USPS rates will begin returning correctly.

ShopSite Tip – Tracking Search Results With Google Analytics

Rich A. — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:04:31 +0000

ShopSite has a feature to view details on what customers search for on your ShopSite store, but if you’re already using Google Analytics to track your website you can greatly increase the details available by tracking your ShopSite search form in Google Analytics. It may sound like a complicated thing to configure, but it’s actually just a couple of simple settings.

Note: This does assume that you are already using ShopSite’s search functionality on your website.

Configuring Google Analytics

In your Google Analytics account, click on the “Admin” link near the top right, followed by “Profile Settings”. You should see a form similar to the one below:

Search Settings (Click for full size)

Now do the following:

Enter “storeid” in the “Exclude URL Query Parameters” field (this cleans up page reports)
Turn on the “Do track Site Search” (this enables the parsing of search variables)
Enter “search_field” in the Query Parameter field (this is the variable ShopSite uses for the search terms)
Turn on “Strip query parameters out of URL” (this further cleans up page reports)

That’s all there is to it. Just visit your store and run a few test searches so you’ll know there will be data for the report. It may take up to 24 hours for the results to start showing up in Analytics.

The Analytics Reports

Search Results Sample

In Google Analytics you will find the search reports on the Content > Site Search menu. There are a variety of reports available, such as showing details about how often the search tool is used, and to the right we have a sample of the Search Terms report which provides details on what users search for.

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ShopSite’s search logging will still excel in 1 major way – counting how many products appear in the search results. Google has no way to know whether search results were returned or not, but ShopSite’s stats will show you the products with the most results returned, and the products that had no results returned.

Google Analytics will not replace ShopSite’s search logging feature, but you may still find it a very useful way to learn more about your customer’s habits and how they are using your website.

Marketing Your ShopSite Store With Pinterest

Rich A. — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:38:37 +0000

Having launched just two years ago in March 2010, Pinterest has skyrocketed in popularity, obtaining the #38 spot on Time’s “50 Best Websites of 2011” list in August 2011.

It’s popularity has continued to grow, which is evident by the “Pin It” buttons that have been popping up on websites such as on Etsy.com.

What Is It?

Ecommerce Infographics

Pinterest allows its users to share items they find on the Internet. When browsing a website the user can use the “Pin It” feature of Pinterest to pin an image from a website and have it appear on their list of pinned items (called a “Board”) on Pinterest. The pinned image then links back to the website where it was found. For example, here’s a board of we created showing ecommerce infographics.

Should I Use It?

This will depend on your product line and who your primary customers are. Categories such as Home, Arts & Crafts, and Fashion make up over 40% of the “Pins” on Pinterest – so these are the most popular types of products people are sharing. [1]

68% of Pinterest users are Women, 50% of them have children, and 49% of them are within the ages of 24-44.[2]

How do your products and customers relate to those stats? If you are selling industrial supplies of interest to men your products may not see much activity by Pinterest users, but if you’re selling something for the home or children, especially if it’s hand-made or creative, it may be just what Pinterest users are looking to share.

The Pin It Button

Pinterest provides a code generator for their Pin It button which can be used to manually create code to place on a page – but the code is static so you would need to manually change it for each page you want to place the Pin It button on.

Pin it Button

To make implementing the button easier with ShopSite, here is ShopSite template code which can be used in a product template. This will automatically use the product name, the More Info page URL, and the More Info product image to create the Pin.

Place that template code in your product template, in either the “[-- DEFINE PRODUCT --]” or “[-- DEFINE MORE_INFO_PAGE --]” section where you want the Pin It button to appear.

TIP: Not using More Info pages? Then change this line in the code above:
var produrl = escape(“[-- PRODUCT.MoreInfoURL --]“);
to be this instead:
var produrl = escape(window.location.href);
and the URL of the current page where the button is appearing will be used for the link.

…

That’s all there is to it – just a few lines of template code and your visitors can start pinning your product photos all over Pinterest and driving more traffic to your site. The referrals Pinterest sends to online store continues to climb (more than Youtube, Google+, and Linked In combined![3]), so start adding the Pin It button to your pages so your site can gain visitors too!

Sources:
[1] – rjmetrics.com: http://info.rjmetrics.com/blog/bid/53831/New-Pinterest-Data-What-s-Everyone-Pinning-About
[2] – mashable.com: http://mashable.com/2012/02/25/pinterest-user-demographics/
[3] – shareaholic.com: http://blog.shareaholic.com/2012/01/pinterest-referral-traffic/

ShopSite Tip: Removing Page Links from Search Results

Rich A. — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 21:00:04 +0000

We’ve written blog posts and tutorials on the ShopSite Search system a few times in the past, but today we wanted to review a topic that comes up pretty often: How to remove the page links from search results.

The stock search templates will display your products as well as links to the pages those products are assigned to, but what if you want to show just the products without the page links? This post will explain how to do that with a couple of settings and template changes.

Link Template Override

On the Merchandising > Custom Templates > Page/Product screen create a new Page template with a name of “search_nopagelink”. Edit the new template and configure the code to be just the following:

[--DEFINE LINK_TO_PAGE--]
# No Page Links
[--END_DEFINE LINK_TO_PAGE--]

This new template will be what controls the display of the link.

On the Preferences > Search Settings > Search Layout screen enable the “Link Template Override:” checkbox and in its template drop-down select the “search_nopagelink” template that you just created.

But It’s Still There!

If the link is still appearing for some of your products, check the product’s Search Destination field and see if it’s set to “More Info”. That will be on the Edit Product Info screen. Change it from “More Info” to “Store” and the link will go away. (Your product’s name and image will still link to it’s More Info page unless you have a custom template that isn’t coded to do that.)

“Result Pages” Text

The changes above are all you need to do to remove the page links, but you may have just 1 more change left to clean up the search results.

Some search templates display a label for the page links, which defaults to the text of “Result pages”. If you don’t see that text (or any other label for the page links that appears out-of-place) then your change is complete. However if you do see that text here are the steps to remove it:

Check the Preferences > Search Settings > Search Page Layout > “Search Template” field to see which search template your store is using.
Edit that template (or make a copy of the stock version if you don’t already have a custom version) on the Merchandising > Custom Templates > Advanced > Search Templates screen.
Find the line that contains “[--Store.SearchResultPage --]” and either remove that template tag or place a “#” as the first character on the line to comment it out of the code.
If you had to make a copy of the stock template, go back to the Preferences > Search Settings > Search Page Layout > “Search Template” field and set it to the name of the template that you created.

The “[--Store.SearchResultPage --]” tag is what displays the “Result pages” text so by removing the tag the text will no longer display in the search results.

Using Columns?

If you are using a template that displays your search results in columns, this method of hiding page links will not work correctly for you since blank columns will appear where the page links would normally be. ShopSite has an article here with sample code for hiding page links while cleanly displaying the products in columns:

http://www.shopsite.com/templates/cookbook/search-columns.shtml

For suggestions on configuring ShopSite Search and more examples of what you can do with custom search templates you may be interested in viewing these articles:

9 Things To Check Before a Big Traffic Event on Your Ecommerce Site (Part II)

Robert Mangiafico — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:06:31 +0000

Last week we took a look at the first 5 things to do before a big event hits your website. Items such as using a CDN, static content, lots of RAM, and using the right software all play a major role in having a successful outcome.

Today we’ll finish the list with the last four things to consider…

6. Put the entire splash page on the CDN

Here’s a secret we learned that can make or break a large TV spot – If the main way viewers get to your site is from a link on the TV show’s website, create a static landing page, and put the entire page and *all* of its contents on the CDN.

Then give the TV show the URL to the CDN page directly.

Wala!

Your main page is ready to handle tens of thousands of visitors at once without crashing. You can even take this a step further and put entire static pages on this special CDN URL, to further off-load traffic and load. This frees up resources for your ecommerce application to take in tons of orders quickly without issue.

7. Set limits low to start with

Even if you think you have things tweaked to handle 10,000 visitors at once, there’s bound to be an unforeseen issue you failed to account for, that will cause a problem. We’ve found that it’s easier to set webserver limits on the conservative side (i.e. the maximum number of processes that can run simultaneously), and then adjust them upward as the situation permits.

This avoids the entire server or software crashing right out of the gate, and the scramble to get back up and running quickly.

Geek tip: If you’re running the Apache webserver, make sure you’ve recompiled it to increase the default “MaxClients” setting from 256 up to something like 2048, and then set the MaxClients parameter in the config file to a conservative value like 512 or 768 initially.

8. Monitor in real-time

This is vital to insure you’re able to react quickly (and hopefully proactively instead of reactively) to conditions that develop when the traffic skyrockets. Once a website is mentioned on national TV, it’s only a few seconds before thousands of visitors hit the site all at the same time.

Don’t be caught off-guard, not ready to monitor all the parameters. You (or your web host) should have a screen or screens dedicated to real-time information on the CPU load, memory used, number of webserver processes running, system-wide error messages, etc… This way you can spot a trend before it turns into a major problem.

This type of monitoring has helped us numerous times when adjusting settings and software to cope with a higher load than expected, or visitors hitting a page that was not expected. We’ve been able to detect and adjust quickly due to this type of set up.

9. The most important thing to check…

Last, but certainly not least, is the mundane and not fun process of testing everything ***BEFORE*** the event. You want to work out the kinks and spot the problem areas before crunch time.

What are you looking for?

Security / SSL errors and warnings during checkout

Finding and eliminating dynamic content that is not needed

Browsing through the web error log looking for missing files, PHP errors, etc… that could be an issue

Double checking the link/URL from the TV show’s website is accurate and links to what you want

All static content that could be on the CDN is actually being called from the CDN

…

Taking the time to plan everything out, test beforehand, and having a web host that understands what’s involved in a high traffic event can be the difference between 7,000 orders in a few short hours (one of our ecommerce clients did this 2 weeks ago), and having your website down for the majority of the time resulting in a substantial loss.

If you expect a good volume of orders, don’t try to cut corners on price or options that will help you thrive during the segment.

And most importantly, make sure your web host is prepared for and capable of helping you achieve your goal with a high traffic event such as being on TV or a national website. If they’re not, talk to us.

photo credit

9 Things To Check Before a Big Traffic Event on Your Ecommerce Site (Part I)

Robert Mangiafico — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:28:37 +0000

Expecting a large influx of website traffic to your online store? Are your products being featured on a TV show like The Today Show or Good Morning America?

Odds are unless you’re already a big company, your hosting account is probably not ready for this burst of heavy traffic. Not being prepared will likely result in your website crashing and being down for this important event. That’s not a good thing.

Fortunately, we’ve helped many small ecommerce clients survive and thrive for big traffic events, and have learned a few things along the way.

Here are 9 things you should do to prepare for the national spotlight:

0. Move out of shared/VPS hosting for the event

Before we start on the 9 things, if your account is using shared or VPS hosting, you will want to get it to a dedicated server. Your website *needs* to have full use of all the resources, and cannot share these resources with others.

Shared and VPS hosting will almost always be overwhelmed, which can force a web hosting provider to shut off your site to protect the other sites on the server or node.

We’ve found that going to a dedicated server is the best way to handle these events.

IMPORTANT – Make sure you tell your web host *PRIOR* to the event. Even better, give them as much advanced notice as you can. Hopefully your web host has experience with these type of scenarios and can offer you advice and a solution to weather the storm.

1. Leverage a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

This can have a huge impact on how well your site performs. A CDN allows you to put static resources (like images, CSS, and JavaScript code) on a global network that not only makes your website load faster around the world, but off-loads a ton of traffic from your server for these files.

Make sure you get *every* static file on the CDN. Every image, every CSS link, every JavaScript file. The less your main server has to do, the better.

Not sure if you got ‘em all? View the source code of your pages and search the URLs. Or use a browser plugin like Firebug that will show you every file loaded on a web page.

2. Static content as much as possible

Dynamic content (i.e. php code, ASP code, Perl) is a sure-fire way to bring your website down quickly under heavy traffic. Dynamically generated code uses a lot of memory and CPU. When thousands of visitors hit your site at the same time, this can crush even the most powerful server or servers.

The best thing you can is either eliminate or greatly reduce the amount of dynamic content on your site. This is particularly important on the landing page and the popular product pages. Unless you’re checking real-time inventory, you can often get away with no dynamic content without sacrificing functionality. (Note that JavaScript and css are not considered server-side dynamic content, so use them as much as you’d like.)

Another trick we learned – If you need a quick way to convert dynamic content into a static page, simply view your dynamic page on the web, view the html source code, and copy and paste that as your new static page. Or, simply load the dynamic page on the CDN, and the CDN will cache the static version of this dynamic page.

3. Never enough RAM

RAM in a server is like money – You can never have too much of it.

If your server runs out of RAM, things will go downhill quite fast. We often add 12 GB or more of RAM for large events to handle the initial onslaught of visitors. RAM is vital for any dynamic content, and even static content will use up large amounts of RAM under heavy traffic.

4. WordPress Blog? Use WP Super Cache

If you have a WordPress blog on your site, these can become a large drain on resources if they receive a lot of traffic. We’ve seen a blog gobble up 12 GB of RAM during a Good Morning America segment within seconds.

This doesn’t mean you can’t keep your blog. The best thing to do is install and configure the WP Super Cache plugin. This plugin basically converts your blog into a static blog, only updating content when things change (edited post, new comment, etc…).

WP Super cache is the number one way to traffic-proof your blog.

5. Use the right shopping cart

You can make all the preparations in the world, but if your cart cannot hold up under multiple orders per second, or consumes resources like Cookie Monster with a plate of Chips Ahoy, your goal of selling thousands of widgets will not be achieved.

Ideally, your cart should use very little resources, load quickly, and be able to handle multiple orders per second without delay or order corruption. You’d be surprised how many carts can’t do this very well (*cough* Magento *cough*).

We’ve found that the ShopSite ecommerce platform does exceedingly well in high traffic situations. It’s compiled C code, meaning it’s ultra lightweight when it comes to consuming resources, and can handle 10 or more orders per second without any issues. Some of our most successful clients have achieved thousands of orders in a few short hours using ShopSite as their ecommerce application.

Whatever ecommerce platform you do use, make sure it’s been tested under heavy load so you can work the kinks out before it’s too late.

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This should be enough to get you started in preparation for your upcoming big event.

Next week we’ll finish the list with items 6 through 9, which include some technical tips and one super way to knock it out of the park.