The Official LexiConn Blog

Google Checkout No More After November 20, 2013

Robert Mangiafico — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:10:33 +0000

Google Checkout / Buy With Google Wallet button support in every ecommerce cart will officially be retired. After November 20, 2013, it will no longer be a viable service for any ecommerce merchant selling physical goods.

Google explains it in more detail in the Google Checkout Help Docs and in their Google Commerce Blog Announcement.

Google Checkout / Wallet never really gained large traction with consumers on the web. Google tried to make it a competitor to PayPal and Amazon Checkout, but their restrictions and poor implementation left it as an awkward way for customers to pay for their goods.

Google has decided to focus on their “Google Play” store and digital subscription payments, and is leaving the gateway / merchant account business to the other more successful institutions like PayPal, Amazon, and Authorize.net.

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So, make your plans now to phase out Google Wallet in your online store well before November 20th.

Three Secrets Budget Web Hosts Don’t Want You to Know

Robert Mangiafico — Tue, 14 May 2013 17:53:54 +0000

Some of the offers out there for web hosting seem like a steal. Hosts offering tons of space, unlimited resources, all for no more than a Starbucks coffee per month.

You’d be crazy to pass on these type of accounts, right?

Unfortunately, when a web hosting offer seems so attractive and at such a low price, there are some sacrifices that are made…

Those sacrifices are at the expense of the client, in order for the web hosting company to make a profit. Here’s three secrets that budget web hosts don’t want you to know.

1. Resource limits are quite restrictive

Most of the budget web hosts have to pack their servers full of accounts to turn a profit. It’s typical to see thousands of accounts per server.

Even with software that web hosts use to manage spikes and keep resources available, thousands of websites all clamoring for precious resources like CPU, memory, and disk performance will put a severe strain on the server. In order to avoid the server crashing or becoming borderline unusable, budget hosts set very low limits on what a site can use in terms of server resources.

If your site becomes somewhat busy, or a handful of visitors are hitting your blog or ecommerce application at the same time, your account will likely be throttled to reduce its consumption of cpu / memory. This means your site will be quite slow, unusable, or even suspended by the host. This can happen without your knowledge, and at a time where you need the resources to support more visitors.

Contrast this with a reputable web hosting company that has an undersold environment.

What do I mean by “undersold”? This means that the number of accounts per server are much lower than the maximum allowed. This allows any one site to consume the resources it needs within reason such that no throttling or suspensions occur.

A good web host will manage these resources effectively, and leave plenty of horsepower available to easily handle spikes in usage.

2. Too much data stored for effective backups and restores

Tons of accounts on a server with virtually no limits on disk space translates to servers with many Terabytes (1,024 GB = 1 TB) of data (some over 5 or 10 TB). That is a lot of data to backup and be able to restore.

When disaster strikes, and this enormous amount of data has to be restored, it could take *DAYS* for this to complete. Days is not an exaggeration. I’ve seen it many times.

Why would it take days? Assuming a conservative restore rate of 100 Gigabytes per hour, a server with 4 Terabytes of data would take just under TWO full days to be restored.

On the other end of the spectrum, a web host that undersells and has responsible disk space limits is in a better position for a fast recovery. Servers with 100-200 GB of data can be restored in a few hours at most.

3. Performance is quite abysmal

If you rely on anything besides plain text and images for your site, performance is quite important. In an oversold budget hosting environment, servers are already close to being maxed out. Hard drives are overworked, free cpu cycles are scarce.

This results in any dynamic element (i.e. MySQL, PHP, ecommerce, a blog, etc…) on your site being much slower than it should be. Your code is waiting in line like everyone else on the server, trying to use these resources. The log jam causes pages to load slowly.

How slow? We’ve seen other hosts deliver page loads for blogs and ecommerce applications in the 5 to 15 second range. That is an eternity to wait for both customers and search engines like Google. Visitors will penalize you by clicking to another site, tired of waiting for your pages to load. Google will penalize you by ranking your site’s speed below other websites, which can lower your site in the search results.

We’ve had new clients that use ShopSite as their ecommerce application believe that the admin panel for ShopSite is slow. It wasn’t until they moved to us that they realized that ShopSite’s back office is actually quite fast! They couldn’t believe the difference. That is what good web hosting should do for your site.

What’s it like in a properly managed undersold hosting environment? Dynamic pages should load as fast as plain text. Your visitors and visiting search engines will give you bonus points for a speedy and pleasant browsing experience.

Curious if your current web host is fast? Take our Speed Challenge and find out!

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Not all web hosts are run equally well. They may have slick ads and talk up their services, but if they put too many accounts on a server, and have price points that require packing them in like sardines… limits, storage, and performance will suffer to a large degree.

If you rely on your website for income or as a go-to resource for others, you’ll want to insure that the web host you choose can deliver on its promises. Ask questions like:

How many accounts do you put on a server?

How do you ensure my site will run fast and always have access to server resources?

Are there any Terms of Service limits placed on my account?

What is the typical amount of disk space used per server?

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Google Shopping Feed Changes – Custom Goods Affected After July 15, 2013

Robert Mangiafico — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:18:26 +0000

Google recently announced
Updated Google Shopping Feed Specification Changes that are going into effect shortly. They list six changes for merchants submitting data feeds.

The two most important ones that may impact merchants are:

Custom, Vintage or Collectible Goods that do not have unique identifiers will be required to submit a new field “identifier exists” beginning on July 15, 2013 for US merchants.

Google is recommending submitting higher resolution images with at least 800 pixels in height and width. This is not a requirement, just something they believe will help products stand out.

Custom Products Without Unique Identifiers

Previously, if your products did not have unique identifiers, all you needed to do is get an exemption from Google for these products.

Starting July 15, 2013, Google will now require that any product that does not have a unique identifier will have to be submitted with a new attribute:
“identifier exists”

This new attribute will need to be set to “FALSE” for any product without a unique identifier.

The previous policy of obtaining an exemption from Google will not be supported after July 15th.

How to Submit identifier_exists using ShopSite

If you’re using ShopSite as your ecommerce solution, and you currently submit a feed to Google, it’s quite easy to add this new attribute:

1. Setting the extra field name to match the Google attribute (identifier_exists)

Preferences -> Extra Fields

(click image to enlarge)

2. Putting the word “FALSE” for each custom product in the matching extra product field

Products -> Edit Product Info

(click image to enlarge)

3. Sending the extra field to google:

Merchandising -> Google Search -> Configure

(click image to enlarge)

These 3 steps will allow you to remain in compliance with Google’s new rules come July 15th. It is safe to submit this new field now, as Google supports it.

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Make sure you take action before July 15th if you sell custom products that don’t have unique identifiers and submit a feed to Google. This will allow these products to continue to appear in Google Shopping.

As for the larger image recommendation… Although Google is not requiring these larger more detailed images, their recommendation can easily become a mandatory one down the road. It might be worth investing the time and effort to meet their recommendation if you get an appreciable amount of sales from Google Shopping.

ShopSite Tip – Consistent Image Resizing

Rich A. — Tue, 07 May 2013 11:52:18 +0000

It’s a question we hear quite often:

“Why is that image so large?”

Sometimes a couple of products have images which are huge compared to their neighboring products. Why are they so large? It’s usually caused by the image resize settings.

Pixels Not Percent

You can set your image size options on the Images > Configure screen in ShopSite, which gives you the option of using a specific pixel size or a percentage:

Pixels or Percentage

If your images are not displaying in the desired size, first check the image size setting to make sure it’s set to the one you want to use. For example if a More Info product image is wrong, see if the product’s “More Info Page Image Size” is using the correct setting. Assuming the selected size is correct, the next step is to review its settings on the Images > Configure screen.

Is the “# percent of original size” option enabled? If so, that is most likely the issue.

Since the original images you upload could be a variety of sizes, the “percent of original size” option can lead to inconsistent image sizes. Try enabling the “max width” and “max height” setting and configure them to a dimension (in pixels) that works for your design. Then resize the product image and test again.

Setting a specific dimension will allow you to have a consistent size across all your images, regardless of their original size when uploaded.

What Size Do I Use?

There are many ways to find the best size – here are a few tips:

- Using Firefox, right-click on a product image on your site which displays in the correct size. Select “View Image Info” from the popup menu and the “Dimensions” field on the next screen show will the size of the image.

- Set a new max width or max height Image Size and the test it by resizing an image, publishing, and viewing the product that you want to fix.

- Ask your designer what image size they recommend. They most likely designed your site to use a certain sized image or a certain size range.

But It Still Doesn’t Resize!

Is your image still not resizing? Check the image file name and make sure it ends in .jpg, .gif, or .png. ShopSite can not resize other image types and the filename must end in its correct extension in order to be resized. (You can’t save an image as a .gif and rename it to .jpg. Its actual file type must match its extension.)

What About Resizing On Upload?

ShopSite has an option in the Image Layout Defaults section of the Images > Configure screen which lets you resize the “original” image when you upload it. Doing so can help percentage-based resizing work better, but be careful if you use this setting. There is no “undo” after you resize the original. So if you make the original too small the only way to have a larger image would be to upload the original image again and make sure ShopSite’s not set to resize it on upload.

If you leave that setting off and don’t resize the original, you can always change the 3 resize options and resize your images at anytime. Assuming of course that your original image is larger than the largest image you want to show on your site. ShopSite will shrink images, but it can not increase an image to be larger than the source file.

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Still no luck getting the image to display correctly? If you’re a LexiConn customer feel free to send us details of the issue and we’ll check it out for you.

My Disappointment with the Web Hosting Industry

Robert Mangiafico — Wed, 01 May 2013 12:20:01 +0000

I was recently following a discussion by web hosting owners and employees about the use of new software for web hosts. They were discussing software that can help web hosts manage resources on servers. Software which helps regulate server environments.

I was shocked and disappointed with how the conversation progressed. It was along these lines…

Host A: “Product X is great. It allows us to easily host 1,000 or more accounts per server without any issues with load spikes, or instability“

Host B: “Yeah, Product Y has enabled us to host 3,000 – 4,000 sites per server, really maximizing our potential“

Host C: “I agree. The software throttles any heavy users, keeping things humming along for the most part. Everyone wins“

Vendor A: “Yes, our software has many of the large hosts packing in 5,000 or more websites per server. It’s great.“

Host D: “Yep. The software auto throttles the more resource intensive clients, allowing the serve to remain stable, even with thousands of sites hosted on the server.“

Almost everyone in the discussion was singing the praises of both the software and the fact that they can pack em in like sardines and not have their servers crash.

No one was stating what I found to be obvious:

In doing this, each individual client (aka “sardine”) is the one that loses, although the good of the whole is sort of maintained.

What do I mean? I’ll explain…

Each server has a finite number of resources to go around (memory, CPU, drive load). Think of each server as a pie. The hosting clients are then sharing these resources between their sites.

In pie terms, you have customers that are each eating a slice of pie from the whole pie. The more customers there are, the smaller each slice becomes.

If you have thousands of clients on a server, the size of the slice they have when it comes to available resources is quite small (think crumb size). All it takes to go over your allotment is a small spike in traffic, or traffic that’s hitting your dynamic pages like your blog, shopping, cart, etc…

What’s wrong with throttling?

So what, you exceeded your allotment. Who cares right? The overall server is stable.

When these software solutions throttle your site, that means they slow it down. Not just a little. They slow it to a crawl. They limit what it can do, so as to not use the resources that the other thousand plus are clamoring for. This means your website suffers greatly. You’re penalized for any appreciable use you try to get out of your site. You lose, “everyone” wins.

The sad thing is everyone has come to expect this as the norm. Slower than normal websites, throttled resources, very limited accounts, it’s all just part of how it all works.

Except that this is *NOT* the norm for web hosts that provide true quality and performance, day in and day out.

Shared hosting done right

Why was I so shocked by this nonchalant convo other web hosts were having?

I was shocked because we provide a service that is directly opposite of what these other hosts were promoting.

We limit the number of accounts to 100 – 200 per server max.

We don’t throttle any accounts, so any one site can use the resources needed (and available) whenever it’s needed.

We use better quality hardware than many hosts that packs thousands of accounts on a server, allowing our clients to experience truly fast web hosting.

To me, this is how web hosting should be. This is what clients should expect as the baseline for their accounts.

Not some overloaded, severely throttled, watered down version of hosting that many of the major hosts out there profess to be enterprise level hosting.

Hosting is not magic. There are a set number of resources per server, a set number of clients per server, and income generated from a monthly price that is charged.

In the fastest “race to the bottom” mentality, many web hosts have decided to jam each server full of thousands of clients, severely limit resources, make the entire process mediocre at best in terms of speed and performance, and charge the equivalent of a can of coke per month in fees.

Of course they need to put thousands of clients on a server – They are not charging enough to make it work otherwise. The hosting clients suffer, the servers are not even remotely fast, and the level of customer support (many times outsourced) is abysmal at best. But hey, the hosts don’t have to do much work now, as the super-duper automated software will magically keep the server stable.

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You should expect more from your web host. Hosting does not have to be something you suffer through.

As the industry converges towards a commodity based, commune like environment, where everyone must suffer a little for the good of the hosting company, realize that there are hosts out there that still care about each person’s hosting experience. Hosts like us that cater towards the business based website that needs fast hosting. Hosts that provide the resources required for a successful website.

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Two SEO Checks You Must Do Now

Robert Mangiafico — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:22:07 +0000

Ever wonder how easy it is to lose your ranking in Google and Bing? Unfortunately, a few of our clients found out how easy it was to lose ranking last week.

Both methods of losing ranking happened without any overt signs. However, two simple checks can easily spot and quickly remedy the situation…

First Check

Go to Google, and type this into the search box:

site:www.Your_Domain.com

(replacing “www.Your_Domain.com” with your actual domain name)

Go ahead and do it now, I’ll wait….

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If all is well, you should see the number of results be close to the total number of pages in your site, and, more importantly, the descriptions under the first 5 to 10 results are in-line with what you’d expect.

If, on the other hand, you see descriptions for many of your pages including things like Viagra or custom knock-off watches, it’s likely your site was hacked by SEO spammers who insert code into your “.htaccess” file to redirect only Google and Bing/Yahoo to special pages optimized for whatever it is they are trying to sell.

Google Results (click image to enlarge)

You and your visitors won’t see these “special” pages, but Google and Bing will, and will likely drop your ranking like a rock thrown into a pond.

Second Check

In your web browser, go to this URL:

http://www.Your_Domain.com/robots.txt

(replacing “www.Your_Domain.com” with your actual domain name)

If you see the following Disallow line, that’s a problem:

Disallow: /

That tells the search engines to *NOT* index your entire website. We had a few clients recently who had mistakenly put this in their robots.txt file and it caused Google to drop them from search results.

Other Disallow lines like:

Disallow: /cgi-xyz/sb/
Disallow: /logs/
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are normal in most cases, and not cause for alarm.

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These two simple checks take less than a minute, but can save you hours of work, prevent the loss of ranking, and more importantly, prevent the loss of sales and revenue.

If you’re hosted with us, and you’re not sure if the results of either check is correct, just let us know, and we’ll take a look.

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Your store’s email address can make or break deliverability

Robert Mangiafico — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:25:51 +0000

Did you know that setting your ecommerce store’s “from:” address to something other than your domain can cause your email receipts to be marked as spam or never arrive? That’s right, using your GMail address, yahoo address, etc… as the default address for your store can wreak havoc on your emails being delivered when customers place purchases…

Why this is a problem

When you set your store’s email address to another address like your GMail or AOL one, this raises all kinds of red flags when your email receipts go out (or a forgot password email for customer registration). Normally, emails that get sent from GMail, AOL, or any other major email provider are “coded” with a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record.

SPF tells other mail servers where an email should come from when it is sent. By setting your store’s email address to another domain, the SPF check now fails, as a GMail address should never originate from your ecommerce hosting account. This will cause email servers to often reject or mark as spam your receipt emails, as to them, it looks like a spam or forged email address.

What Should You Do Instead?

If you love using your GMail account for email, all is not lost. The easiest thing to do is set up a forward for an address at your domain (like sales@your_domain.com) that forwards all emails received to your GMail address. This way, the “from:” field on email receipts, gift certificates, forgot password emails, etc… is an address at your domain. This won’t trip any filters for people receiving these emails, and if they reply, it goes right to your preferred email service like GMail.

Two other benefits from doing this:

1. Your emails look more professional when they arrive coming from an address at your domain.

2. Customers can more easily recognize that the email is coming from your site as opposed to a random Yahoo or AOL address.

If you’re using ShopSite for your ecommerce store, you can set the “from: address under:
Commerce Setup -> Order System -> Email

Email Settings (click to enlarge)

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So make this simple change in your store if you’re using an email address not at your domain for email receipts. You’ll instantly boost deliverability, and send a more professional looking email to your customers.

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ShopSite Tip – Why Does/Doesn’t a Product Show in ShopSite’s Search?

Rich A. — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:49:40 +0000

The ShopSite search system usually shows all your products automatically, but once in a while you may find a time where it’s displaying products you don’t want to have appear, or products you are trying to have display are not showing up. In this article we’ll cover the most common causes for both situations.

Products Are Missing!

Index for search during update
Check to make sure the “Index for search during update” option on the Utilities > Publish screen is enabled. If this is turned off ShopSite will not update the search database and you could be searching old data.

Publish Your Site
The search database is only updated during a publish, so click the Regenerate button on the bottom of the Utilities > Publish screen to rebuild the database.

Look for the “No store page has a search field” error
Did you just run the regenerate mentioned above? Scroll to the bottom of the results and see if the search database was updated. You may see “Index All” followed by details about indexing products and pages, which shows the database was updated. Or you may see a message of “No store page has a search field; indexing not performed”.

If that error appears, then the search database was not updated. Your developer most likely hard-coded a search form on your pages which is why the Search Field is turned off. You can get around this by adding a new page (call it “Search Field Enabled” so you know what it’s for) and turn on the “Product Search Field” setting which is on the Edit Page Content screen. Save your new page and publish your site. The page will not show to your users since you didn’t link to it anywhere, but now the search database will update on a publish. This will allow your search results to stay updated.

Page, Product & Search Settings
The tips above control the update of the search database, but products could also be missing due to a setting specific to a product, the page not being indexed, or settings in the Search system itself. Instead of detailing those settings here, let’s jump over to another article we have called Setting Up ShopSite Search Correctly.

In that article please see the sections titled “The basics of ShopSite’s search” and “Search Configuration Settings”. Those will explain multiple settings which will control if products appear in search results.

Extra Tips:
- Products must be assigned to a page in order to appear in search results
- Make sure the word you’re searching for is not in the “Stop List” on the Preferences > Search Settings > Search Indexing screen.

Products Are Showing Up When They Shouldn’t!

The Search Destination Field
If a product should never show up in search results, on its Edit Product Info screen set the Search Destination field to “None”. Save that change then publish, and the product will no longer appear in search results.

You want it to show up when people search for it, but it’s showing up other times too? Please see these next tips:

Indexing Configuration
The “Indexing Configuration” section of the Preferences > Search Settings > Search Indexing screen controls which fields are indexed for search. Fields such as the Product Name, SKU, Search Keywords (Pro only), and Description are the most common to have enabled, but you can enable other fields here as well and the text in those fields will be indexed.

If you had a product appear in the search results when you searched for something else, compare the fields enabled here to the content of those fields for the product. For example, if you searched for “Blue” but the product “Red Wagon” appeared in the search results, see if “Blue” is one of the words in the product description field, or any of the other fields enabled for indexing. The “Red Wagon” product probably has “Blue” in one of its fields.

Search Terms Are Stems
On the Preferences > Search Settings > Search Page Layout screen is a “Search Terms Are” section. This controls whether the search term entered is treated as a whole word or if it’s a stem. If it’s set to Whole Words and you search for “Car” it will match only on “Car” in the indexed fields.

If Stems are used, words like Careful or Racecar can trigger results for “Car” depending on whether you enable the wildcard at the end of the stem, the beginning, or both.

Here is an excerpt from our Setting Up ShopSite Search Correctly article showing how we recommend configuring it:

Getting this setting right is important. I would recommend the settings above for these reasons:
- You want whole word searches as this will return the most relevant results. It gives the user products with the exact keywords they typed.
- You want the “auto new search with stems if nothing found” so the system will try to check for plurals, past tense, additional letters at the end if nothing is found.
- You only want the stems on the end of the word. i.e. A search for “book” would also return results for “books, bookend, bookish” if the main keyword was not found.

As you can see, there are many ways to control search results, which causes ShopSite’s search system to be very powerful, but it can also be frustrating if the search results are not working the way you expect.

If you’re a LexiConn customer and you don’t find a cause for a search issue feel free to email us the details and we’ll track it down for you.

The Official LexiConn Blog

Google Checkout No More After November 20, 2013

Three Secrets Budget Web Hosts Don’t Want You to Know

1. Resource limits are quite restrictive

2. Too much data stored for effective backups and restores

3. Performance is quite abysmal

Google Shopping Feed Changes – Custom Goods Affected After July 15, 2013

Custom Products Without Unique Identifiers

How to Submit identifier_exists using ShopSite

ShopSite Tip – Consistent Image Resizing

Pixels Not Percent

What Size Do I Use?

But It Still Doesn’t Resize!

What About Resizing On Upload?

My Disappointment with the Web Hosting Industry

What’s wrong with throttling?

Shared hosting done right

Top Ecommerce Blog Posts and Articles for April 2013

Two SEO Checks You Must Do Now

First Check

Second Check

Your store’s email address can make or break deliverability

Why this is a problem

What Should You Do Instead?

ShopSite Tip – Why Does/Doesn’t a Product Show in ShopSite’s Search?

Products Are Missing!

Products Are Showing Up When They Shouldn’t!

Top Ecommerce Articles and Blog Posts for March 2013