FoxyCart.com News & Blog RSS

Basic Analytics Tip: Filter out your own IP

Brett — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:51:23 -0700

Just a basic tip that’s often overlooked but should be added to any physical or mental checklist when setting up a site: Filter out your own IP, as well as the IPs of your clients. The Google Analytics blog just posted an article that’s worth reading if you’re a Google Analytics user: Back to Basics: Filtering out your own IP address

Don’t forget to filter out all IP addresses that need filtering, like:

Your office IP
Your home IP
Your co-workers’ IPs (if they’re in separate offices or home-offices)
Your client’s office IPs
Your client’s home IPs

Remote office locations, such as Starbucks or co-working spaces

You’ll also want to make sure you’re aware of any IPs that change, such as the average cable or DSL internet connection. If that’s the case, you may want to set a monthly reminder to check your IP and update your analytics filtering, or perhaps use a cookie-based filtering method. The obvious disadvantage with the cookie method, however, is that most of us are constantly testing across multiple browsers and multiple computers or virtual machines. (Just for my own computers, I’d have to set cookies in probably 16 browsers spread across 6 different machines. That gets old quickly.)

Failing to filter out your own IPs will only create frustration and confusion, particularly with low-traffic sites, or sites that are getting a lot of traffic while you’re developing and launching. While it may seem like too much trouble, the importance to an online merchant of having accurate analytics data cannot be understated.

Kris Lamba Photography: Beautiful Nature Photography

Brett — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:11:47 -0700

Kris Lamba Photography

Products:

photography

Tags:

cart,checkout

Designed by:

Kris Lamba

Date added:

Jun 19, 2009

Photographer Kris Lamba just launched krislamba.co.uk, using FoxyCart to power his ecommerce, and was kind enough to send us some notes.

I had been selling prints through galleries for a while, which whilst convenient, wasn’t maximizing my sales potential. A close photographer friend of mine suggested I start selling and advertising online, so that I could reach a potentially limitless audience.

I decided on an ASP-based gallery, because it allows my to add new prints to the store anywhere (from my phone even) and can auto-generate the code for the purchase buttons with minimal effort. FoxyCart was the obvious solution, due mainly to the fact that it allows full customization with very little work (just CSS really). I wanted the online store to reflect the design of the site and FoxyCart is specifically designed for seamless integration.

The store is very search engine friendly and so far all my visitors have commented on how neat the checkout process is, a great success.

My favorite part of the FoxyCart process was the customization and templates. To create a fully custom checkout page with unique graphics took less than an hour using Firebug and the Web Developers Toolbar.

Heckler Design's OneLessDesk: A Designer Computer Desk

Brett — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:20:04 -0700

Heckler Design

Products:

furniture

Tags:

checkout

Designed by:

Dean Heckler

Date added:

Jun 1, 2009

While there are a lot of cool things merchants are using FoxyCart to sell, Heckler Design’s “OneLessDesk” series makes me want to re-outfit our own offices immediately. It’s quite difficult to find exceptionally designed office furniture, and designer home-office desks are even more scarce.

Dean Heckler is not only a wonderful furniture designer, but also a talented UI/UX designer. Only minimal customizations of the standard FoxyCart theme were necessary to add ecommerce to his website, and FoxyCart’s “automagicache” did the rest. The result is a one-page checkout experience that fit inside the beautifully designed Heckler Design website with very little effort.

Good Soil: Evangelism and Discipleship

Brett — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:48:25 -0700

Good Soil

Products:

donations

Tags:

cart,checkout,3rd-party

Designed by:

Burst Creative

Date added:

May 20, 2009

Kevin at Burst Creative was kind enough to share the following about their experience using FoxyCart for their very first ecommerce site.

The Good Soil website was Burst Creative’s first foray into the world of ecommerce, and as such we went searching for the right shopping cart solution. FoxyCart turned out to be the perfect choice.

One of the most appealing aspects of FoxyCart is the ability to integrate it seamlessly with the rest of the website. By redefining the css styles to match ours, and by purchasing our own secure certificate, we were able to achieve the same effect as if we built a shopping cart directly in our templates – and that without dealing with merchant account integration, live shipping costs, and PCI compliancy! We leave all that stuff to the very capable FoxyCart team.

FoxyCart also allows us the flexibility to store and display product inventory using our existing content management system (Expression Engine). This allows us to take full advantage of the CMS capabilities while utilizing FoxyCart features such as quantity discounts and downloadable products.

Girl Scouts use FoxyCart to Collect Donations

Brett — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:28:40 -0700

We’ve always loved Girl Scout Cookies in our offices, so we were thrilled to find out that the Girl Scouts — Arizona Cactus-Pine Council love FoxyCart as well. We received a lovely note and a box of cookies from Brian at GirlScoutsAZ.org, who is using FoxyCart to accept donations. Brian wrote:

Thank You!
FoxyCart helps us totally empower our ecommerce and online donation capabilities. We love it!
— Brian

We’re always happy to hear about how FoxyCart empowers our users’ organizations. Many non-profits have discovered how easy it is to use FoxyCart to accept donations online, quickly and securely.

If you have any comments, praise, or criticism about FoxyCart please do let us know. And if your comments come with a box of cookies, fudge, wine, coffee, or kind words, all the better!

FoxyCart v0.5.1: Single Sign On (SSO)

Brett — Mon, 11 May 2009 00:32:49 -0700

FoxyCart v0.5.1 has some very exciting new things added to it. Please make sure you read the changelog below before upgrading, and please report any issues you may have in the 0.5.1 thread on our forum.

Upgrading

Please view the upgrade notes in the wiki. If you have any issues with v051 please let us know.

Features

FoxyCart JavaScript

IMPORTANT: jQuery is no longer called in noConflict mode. Any $j() or $j. javascript references will no longer function by default. Please see the documentation about re-mapping the $j shortcut back to jQuery, or the changelog to adjust your own javascript accordingly.
Upgraded jQuery to version 1.3.2.

System Wide

The XML datafeed now happens immediately upon a successful transaction.
The XML datafeed is now tied to the store version as of v0.5.1., so upgrading to v0.5.1 will also update your XML datafeed version.
The FoxyCart session name has changed to fcsid.
FoxyCart javascript and CSS files (such as foxycart_includes.js and theme CSS files) can now be called using http://.
The template caching funcitonality now errors if any cached file returns an HTTP response code equal to or greater than 300.
Shipping account numbers now configurable on a per-store basis for account-specific rate requests for UPS and USPS.
Most gateways now allow an "auth-only" setting (as opposed to the default "auth-capture" functionality).

Checkout

Shared Authentication: Shared authentication is now available. Please see the documentation for details.

XML Datafeed: New Fields

shipto_addresses
- address_id
- date_created
- date_modified
transactions
- subscription_end_date
- next_transaction_date
transaction_details
- downloadable_url

Improvements, Notes, & Bug Fixes

Cart

FoxyCart will no longer throw an error if someone has a "coupon" input field on their add-to-cart form but the user doesn't enter a coupon.
Focus is now set to the first a.fc_link_forward when the cart loads. This will prevent awkward cart reloading in certain situations when using forms to add items to the cart.
You can now add hidden (h:) cart attributes while doing a cart=view.
Added sub_startdate and sub_frequency to the JSON cart object.

Checkout

The CSC help link is no longer part of the tab index.
TEXT and STANDARD default themes have been adjusted slightly to handle the changes to the customer_email input when shared authentication is enabled.

SlideShowPro E-Commerce with FoxyCart

Brett — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:29:48 -0700

Almost from the time we launched FoxyCart we’ve had users asking about integrating with SlideShowPro, which is probably the most solid Flash slideshow / photo gallery app available. Having used SlideShowPro and SSP Director on a handful of sites I was always interested, but I’m about as good at Flash as I am at flying so my interest never amounted to anything more than that.

Thankfully, we have an amazing community, and recently forum member steeeeephen contributed an Ecommerce for SlideShowPro integration using FoxyCart. This could be used to sell either digital copies of photos, prints, or both.

If you haven’t seen SlideShowPro before we highly recommend you take a look. It’s quite impressive, and pairing it with FoxyCart makes it even more useful.

Datafeed Changes, Minor CSS Tweak

Brett — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:38:59 -0700

Minor CSS Tweaks for IE7

We’ve made a very small change to the “standard” theme CSS to fix an IE7 rendering issue. The clear value on the #fc_receipt_shipping_container styles has been changed from _clear:inherit; to *clear:inherit;. While some may not like CSS hacks, it’s a quick and easy way to fix IE6 and IE7.

If you’ve used the standard theme’s CSS as a starting point to do any customizations you may want to confirm that your receipt still displays as desired in IE7. (We don’t recommend using the standard theme to customize, however. Please see the screencast on customizing your checkout for more details.

Changes to Failing XML Datafeeds

In order to improve system stability we have implemented a change to how XML datafeeds that fail are handled. At this point, if your datafeed fails 3 consecutive times it will be disabled and a notification email will be sent to all the admin users that have access to the store. You can turn the datafeed back on at any point thereafter, after you have tested and confirmed that the store’s datafeed processor is working as expected.

Additionally, in the next version of FoxyCart the datafeeds will be handled slightly differently, but for existing FoxyCart versions we are taking steps to limit the number of transactions that are attempted to be fed per datafeed. This means that if is exceptionally heavy traffic system-wide that your datafeed might come in delayed for more than one minute. In practice we don’t expect this to be an issue, but it is now a possibility.

If you have any questions or concerns about these changes please let us know in our forum.

v050 Notes: Death & Taxes

Brett — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:03:32 -0700

The following was originally emailed to all FoxyCart users on 2009.03.15. It is published on our blog for reference.

FoxyCart now supports the latter. Introducing v050.

“SUPER TAX” Advanced tax calculation and support for multiple tax bands.
UNIFIED ORDER ENTRY can turn your FoxyCart checkout into a sort of “super virtual terminal”, useful for phone and fax orders.
Rewritten subscription handling and Subscription XML Datafeed.
A User API for bi-directional sychronization.
JSONP support for easier cart customization.
Revisitable receipts. Receipts can now be reloaded by customers.
More details in the changelog

The upgrade process

The upgrade to v050 should be painless, but you will have to re-setup your taxes. As always, you’ll want check the complete upgrade notes in the wiki.

Haven’t set up a store yet? It’s easy too!

It only takes 5 or 10 minutes. Really, it’s quite easy to get something going. Check the getting started guide at our wiki, or just jump right in to the FoxyCart Admin.

– Peter M.; Josh R.

Whatever your platform, FoxyCart has you covered.

Thanks to our always amazing users for providing tutorials and code for an increasing range of programming languages and frameworks. A few that you might be interested in include:

Wordpress tutorial and screencast by Chris of CSS-Tricks.com
Google Analytics ecommerce tracking, even with a *.foxycart.com domain
Python/Django code to test the XML datafeed

FoxyCart v0.5.0: SuperTax, Advanced Subscriptions, User API...

Luke — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 12:08:02 -0700

FoxyCart v0.5.0 has a lot of new things going on. Please make sure you read the changelog below before upgrading, and please report any issues you may have in the 0.5.0 thread on our forum.

Upgrading

Please view the upgrade notes in the wiki.

Features

System Wide

API. A user API has been added that allows setting and retrieving of customer records (including multiple ship-to addresses).
Subscriptions. The subscription handling functionality has been overhauled, allowing customers to modify and cancel their own subscriptions, as well as improved administrative functionality in the admin.
Subscription past due amount. Subscriptions now have a "past due amount" that keeps track of failed subscription transactions.
Subscription XML datafeed. A new subscription-specific XML datafeed has been added which posts to your existing datafeed location.
System-wide messaging. Cart, Checkout, JSON and XML have gained consistent system-wide messaging (errors, warnings, information).

Cart

Taxes. Fully featured detailed line item tax entry system configurable per category.
JSONP.output=json now accepts an optional callback parameter to support true JSONP. As such, callback is now a reserved parameter name, and cannot be used as a product option name.
Coupon Codes. You can now set a limit to the number of uses per coupon code. This was also patched back to version 0.4.0.
Subscription end dates. sub_enddate can now be set to configure end dates for subscriptions.
The default size for the "foxybox" has been increased.
Added the category code to the cart display with class fc_cart_category_code.
output=json no longer requires cart=view.
The default action even if no parameters are passed to the cart is now to view the cart
You can now use a price modifier such as {p:50} on a subscription frequency.
You can now add up to 999 products to the cart at one time (instead of just 99)
Removed name="fc_cart_form" from the form on the cart template. The id="fc_cart_form" remains.

Checkout

"Unified Order Entry" allows a store to set a "super password" that allows FoxyCart to function like a glorified and integrated virtual terminal. Useful for handling phone or fax orders.
Taxes and shipping are now correctly broken out into details for Authorize.net.
When selecting an alternate shipping address, the shipping country and state will be pulled from the customer address if no shipping address is defined.
Added JQuery to the receipt page.

Receipt

Revisitable receipts. Receipts can now be reloaded by customers.
New ^^receipt_only_begin^^ and ^^receipt_only_end^^ placeholders to contain analytics, affiliate, or other tracking code.

FoxyCart JavaScript

The fc_json cart JSON object now includes weight_each and weight for each product item as well as a total_weight value. This was also patched back to version 0.4.0.
The foxycart.js file included in the foxycart_includes.js now comes with a fc_CurrencyFormatted method which you can override that will format your currency for display in the "minicart" (which is a div with an id of fc_total_price).

Admin

Improved subscription management and functionality.

Improvements & Bug Fixes

Cart

output=json now returns valid JSON (not wrapped in fc_FoxyJSON()).
Fixed a bug which lost the transaction when using downloadables and cart=checkout (patched back to 0.4.0 as well).

Checkout

Fix for future subscription price which was not including the product quantity.
When a customer requests their password on the checkout page, it now uses the from_email for the store if one is defined.
Fixed a bug in Multiship for returning customers that, in some cases, was not correctly setting the select box to the correct address name after authenticating.
Returning customers who have subscriptions with that store are now required to check the "save my payment info" checkbox, even if the current order doesn't contain subscriptions.
"#" in the address were breaking shipping rate calculations. Patched back to 0.3.1, 0.3.2 and 0.4.0.
Fixed a bug where the "lost my password" email was not using custom language settings. Patched back to 0.4.0.
Fixed a bug where returning customers who selected a new payment card and checked out didn't get an updated masked card number (though the actual saved card number was updated). Patched back to 0.4.0.
Fixed a bug when a customer logs in as one customer and then changes their email address to be a different customer or a new customer, the old customer id is still used and gets updated.
Update Customer actions no longer create "no shipping option available" errors. Patched back to 0.4.0.
~~FedEx no longer shows Ground as an option when shipping internationally to Canada.~~ - reverted as this was preventing Canadian stores from seeing any shipping rates.

Other

Sage Payments Gateway now supported.
Image caching now allows for XHTML valid URLs.
^^store_name^^ now properly replaced in email subject lines.
Better support for non-Latin character sets.