FoxyCart Blog

Coupons are great, except when they're not...

Adam Judd — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Coupon promotions are a great way to bring customers into your store and encourage them to complete the transaction where they may otherwise not be completely sold on their purchase. From looking at data across all FoxyCart stores, we’ve noted that stores that provide coupon discounts have as much as 83% more transactions, bringing in 60% more revenue than stores without. While that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, if you put some time into creating a coupon and marketing it, we believe it will definitely be worth your time.

Too good to be true

Recently, gaming hardware manufacturer Razer found itself in a bit of a tight spot. They regularly run coupon promotions to attract new customers and reward existing ones, but a coupon found its way into the public that was never meant to. It seems that a third-party company that was testing Razer’s discounting system accidently left a test coupon in the system that the team wasn’t aware of. The coupon, activated simply by the generic code “1234” gave the customer an unbelievable 90% off of their order. All it took was for one serendipitous individual to try a few common codes, post their discovery online and the social networks took care of the rest with thousands of orders placed in the space of a few hours.

Razer was quick to respond to the issue, and after pulling their site offline for a short time to investigate, posted to Facebook with their decision to honor the orders.

“While we have the option of cancelling the orders legally, we’ve always had a customer comes first policy at Razer and in respect of this incident, we have decided to honor the orders that were placed using the unauthorized code by Razer fans buying single products for their own use.”

Co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan on Facebook

The decision was an unexpected bold move by the company as an effort to increase goodwill with the customers - and it worked. Comments on posts about the event are littered with expressions of support for the company that will no doubt turn into future sales, and reports of customers cancelling their majorly discounted orders and reordering at full price.

Prevention is simple.

While testing is definitely something we encourage you to do a lot of - often it can be something that you complete and move on without cleaning up your work. That definitely looks to be the case with Razer, and is a scenario that could very well happen to anyone. If you haven’t already jumped over to your FoxyCart administration to look through your active coupons - we absolutely recommend it. It would also be worthwhile reviewing your add to cart links and forms across your site - ensuring that any testing or out of date add to carts aren’t still active anywhere. We’ve had reports in the past where a customer has made a purchase for a product at a price that the merchant didn’t think should be possible - but a hidden away add to cart in a dusty corner of their website had an old price for the product that enabled them to purchase it. While Razer turned their sticky situation into a positive one in terms of customer goodwill (albeit they may still be making a considerable loss on the persisting orders), we suggest periodically reviewing your site’s enabled features and functionality to ensure it is not a situation you find yourself in unexpectedly.

To finish off though - while this is certainly an example of something to be aware of when working with coupons - don’t take it as a reason not to use them at all. The return on investment that we see with stores who are using coupons as a promotion tool shows a noticeable growth in sales. Coupons can be a very flexible tool as well; whether you include a banner on your website, an email campaign to subscribers or hand out coupon cards to prospective customers at a trade show - the possibilities are endless. And when coupled with FoxyCart’s flexible discounting system, you can achieve some very inviting offers for your customers and some fantastic results to your bottom line. Why not give them a try!

Are you someone who has been, or are using coupons in your store? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below on how you used them and your experiences with working with them as a tool.

Why Does FoxyCart Support Bitcoin?

Luke Stokes — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 06:00:00 -0700

I started researching Bitcoin a couple months ago. As the core developer of a shopping cart provider, I'm very interested in all forms of payment processing. I've used Venmo, Dwolla, Square, etc. and it's always interesting to see how innovations can improve a merchant's ability to accept payment. Most of them still use the underlying credit card network to get the job done.

Bitcoin caught my attention. I posted about it March 2nd on my personal blog and outlined the story of watching it go from $17 per BTC to $34 per BTC in February. It's hovering around $215 today, just over 5 weeks later.

As you're reading this, the price is:

If you're not familiar with Bitcoin, a good place to start is weusecoins.com. In a nutshell, it's an "experimental, decentralized digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network." (from the main Bitcoin wiki).

Some say Bitcoin is to commerce what email is to communication or blogging is to journalism. They say it's as disruptive as MP3s to the music industry. Some even claim it will change society more than the Internet because of how it could remove the need for a central banking system (and, thus, the government's use of such a system). With these incredible claims, it's not hard to see why the price has been skyrocketing.

But is it just a bubble?

Yes, according to the Bitcoin Wiki FAQ, "in the same way as the euro and dollar are. They only have value in exchange and have no inherent value. If everyone suddenly stopped accepting your dollars, euros or bitcoins, the 'bubble' would burst and their value would drop to zero."

But what can it do?

How would you like to avoid paying 3% in processing fees? Eliminate chargebacks completely? Or transfer money between accounts without having to wait 3-5 business days? What about getting money to contractors, non-profits, and vendors on the other side of the world? Bitcoin can do this instantly and with a tiny fee (or you can choose to leave the fee out if you don't need your transaction confirmed immediately). It's also completely decentralized, so it can't be controlled or confiscated (you heard about banks in Cyprus recently, right?) and the money can't be "double spent" due to the way the p2p network validates transactions on the blockchain (which is basically the leger downloaded by every node in the network).

As of our latest release on March 25th (version 1.1), you can accept Bitcoin on your FoxyCart store right now. Just set up an account over at Bitpay.com and put in your API key in the payment section of the FoxyCart admin. That's it. As an early adopter, you might even get noticed by the media like this bar in NYC that CNN Money just wrote about. The earliest known transaction via Bitcoin was 10,000 coins for a pizza. If that merchant held on to the coins, they'd have over $2M in buying power right now.

Are there risks involved?

Or course! It's like the wild west of cyrpto-currencies. You might sell a product for $50 in BTC and find the price drop 20% an hour later (I've seen that happen a few times in the last 2 months — though the price recovered just as quickly, and then went further up). That said, services like Bitpay allow you to immediately convert to your currency of choice if that's how you priced your items. If your computer systems aren't secure, your Bitcoin wallet could get hacked via key logging software or other evil viruses. Bitcoin is like digital cash and when it's gone, it's gone. If you do get involved, make sure your antivirus is up to date, your wallet is securely backed up and you're using password management software for secure, single-use passwords. There are also endless debates in #Bitcoin on IRC and the Bitcoin Forums about what weaknesses exist in the system. Those debates continue improving the protocol and the open-source clients that support it.

Could this be the future of currency?

It's been said good money drives out bad money. Many believe a decentralized currency that can't be inflated or devalued is good money. Time will tell if they are right.

As your payment solution provider, we're working hard to stay up-to-speed on the latest trends and technologies related to your customers' checkout process. Almost weekly we're approached about some new payment system or gateway. We feel this one is worth looking into and investing some time to understand. Enough people already believe it's the future to create a market and increase adoption. The Bitcoin wiki list of merchants is being added to regularly. You'll see us listed there as well, as we accept Bitcoin as payment for FoxyCart services.

As we've been doing since 2007, we'll continue to improve our technology to serve you and answer your questions as best we can.

One thing is for sure, this Bitcoin thing is super interesting and a lot of people are watching intently. Some are taking action. What happens tomorrow is anyone's guess.

Changes for the week ending 2013-03-31

Sami Fiaz — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 03:50:00 -0700

Changes for the week ending 2013-03-31:

v1.1: minFraud checks are no longer done on checkouts using Unified Order Entry (UOE)..
v1.1: Downloadable products previously would not allow product options and they would temporarily show line item discounts, even though line item discounts are not valid for downloadables. Both issues have been fixed.
v1.0 - v1.1: Fixed a bug where decimal values were formatted incorrectly with decimals turned off in the admin.
v1.1: Added following Twig filters: date_modify, replace, upper, lower, title, trim, date

FoxyCart v1.1, and an update

Brett Florio — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:37:38 -0700

We've been hard at work on FoxyCart since our last release, and we're happy to announce our v1.1 release (full changelog) which brings a few new alternate payment methods to FoxyCart. We're calling them "alternate" because for the majority of the history of ecommerce, payments have traditionally been through credit and debit cards, processed through traditional payment gateways (like Authorize.net or Chase Paymentech, or any of the 50+ gateways we support). This has been a great option, but, as entrepreneurs ourselves, we're excited about new payment methods that offer flexibility to the customer and lower fees (or a variety of other perks) to the merchant.

The payment methods that are initially available in the v1.1 launch are:

Dwolla, which allows bank transfers in a quick an easy manner. And at only 25¢, it's a great new way to accept payments. (Unfortunately, it's currently limited to US merchants and customers.)
Amazon FPS, which allows customers to pay using their Amazon accounts. (US merchants only, but international customers.)
Bitcoin (BTC, currently available through Bitpay.com) is "is a decentralized digital currency based on an open-source, peer-to-peer internet protocol" (to quote Wikipedia). We're actually pretty excited about the possibilities Bitcoin presents, particularly with our users selling to increasingly global markets. (The absence of chargebacks and low fees make Bitcoin an attractive option for merchants to receive payments in.)
iDEAL (through Ogone) is a popular bank transfer payment method for The Netherlands.
DIBS supports netbank payments, also for Europe.

Perhaps more importantly than these particular new payment methods, however, is that this payment methods are built on top of new functionality that will allow us to add more alternate payment methods. On the radar are Google Checkout, 2co, and other Bitcoin providers. As always, please vote for new payment methods on our request board. We can't make any promises about timeframes, but we do try to meet the greatest needs of our community.

Speaking of new features…

If you've ever asked us, you know that we never give release dates for future functionality, but we would like to let you know that we're currently focusing on…

a new fully responsive default theme for the cart and checkout (with some other slick improvements that should increase conversion rates),
the Hypermedia API, and
a new shipping platform. (We know we've been working on this one for a long time, so we'll forgive you if you consider it vaporware until it's released. But we're continuing to work on it.)

We're very (very) excited about the future, and we sincerely appreciate your support. As always, we take any and all feedback seriously. We know some of our community has been waiting a long time for new features, and we're working hard to make FoxyCart even more powerful, easier to implement, and higher-converting than ever before.

1.1

Sami Fiaz — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:36:29 -0700

Upgrading

Please view the upgrade notes in the wiki. If you have any issues with v1.1 please let us know.

Features

System Wide

Updated the jQuery library to version 1.9.0 and Colorbox to 1.3.23. Note that with this latest version of jQuery the method .live() has been removed in favour of the new method .on(). This change may require some changes to your custom code.

New Gateways

Improvements, Notes, & Bug Fixes

Cart / Checkout System

Fixed a bug when checking out with a returning customer logged in via their own password or UOE. A new password hash and password salt were being created, even if the password had not changed.
Subscription past due items are no longer included when calcualting coupons and category discounts.
When calculating coupons, current and future subscription items are now calculated separately.
When calculating category discounts, current and future subscription items are now calculated separately.
When adding an already existing non-subscription item to the cart containing subscriptions, a new item would be added instead of increasing the quantity of the existing item.
When loading up a subscription template via a sub_token, we no longer keep a perviously modified copy of that template in the cart. The subscription template will be loaded fresh with each click of a sub_token link.
Prepopulation no longer forces an anonymous customer. This was causing problems for SSO checkouts.
Updated the FC.checkout.requireShippingAddress() function to use a language string checkout_copy_billing_to_shipping and added the HTML into the Twig template. The function has also been updated to only run if shippable products are present and mutliship is not active for the store.
Fixed a bug where percentage based product level discounts were not taking product price modifiers into account.
Fixed a bug with the receipt text email, where in instances where the shipping address was the same as the billing address, it was only displaying the billing address (Patched back to 1.0).
Updated the text email reciept template to include proper formatting and alignment of labels and values
Added a "Powered By" FoxyCart logo to the default checkout template. You can easily remove this if you like, but we've added it in to let your customers know you're using one of the best ecommerce platforms available.
Downloadable products previously would not allow product options and they would temporarily show line item discounts, even though line item discounts are not valid for downloadables. Both issues have been fixed.
MinFraud checks are no longer done on checkouts using Unified Order Entry (UOE).

Admin

Fixed an issue where caching category email templates wouldn't use the url specified and wouldn't display the saved url. It also wouldn't show any error messages (Patched back to 1.0).
The billing menu was not showing the original payment made to start a FoxyCart store subscription (Patch back to 1.0)

Language Additions

Added: checkout_copy_billing_to_shipping

Location Changes

Added the ability for locations to be marked as inactive, which will remove that location from the dropdown on the checkout, but maintain it for historical transaction records in the administration.
Added: Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba (BQ), Curaçao (CW), Sint Maarten (SX), South Sudan (SS)
Modified: Saint Helena to Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha (SH), Palestinian Territory, Occupied to Palestine, State of (PS)
Deactivated: France Metropolitan (FX), East Timor (TP), Netherlands Antilles (AN), Yugoslavia (YU), Zaire (ZR)
States Added For: Ireland, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba

Miscellaneous Changes

Updated Colorbox style1_fc.css stylesheet to return the close button by default to be positioned on the right, and only be on the left for the FoxyCart cart modal set up.
Added new flag icons for new countries and missing icons
Added additional styles to the payment methods on the checkout, making the label full width and adding spacing between the plastic payment icons
Updated the unserialize function to build an object instead of an array, as attributes with a name of 'length' were causing issues when added to an array. This means that the event functions are now being passed an object of name/value pairs instead of an array.

Changes for the week ending 2013-03-24

Sami Fiaz — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 03:45:00 -0700

Changes for the week ending 2013-03-24:

v1.0 - v1.1: Fixed a bug with the receipt text email, where in instances where the shipping address was the same as the billing address, it was only displaying the billing address.
v0.7.2 - v1.1: Updated links in minFraud help text in admin. Links were broken since MaxMind updated their website.
v1.0 - v1.1: Fixed an issue where caching category email templates wouldn't use the url specified and wouldn't display the saved url. It also wouldn't show any error messages.

Changes for the week ending 2013-03-17

Sami Fiaz — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 01:40:00 -0700

Changes for the week ending 2013-03-17:

v1.1: Fixed a bug where percentage based product level discounts were not taking product price modifiers into account.
v1.1: Added Payment Gateway: Bitpay
v1.1: Added additional styles to the payment methods on the checkout, making the label full width and adding spacing between the plastic payment icons

Changes for the week ending 2013-03-10

Sami Fiaz — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 13:35:00 -0700

Changes for the week ending 2013-03-10:

v1.1: Fixed subscription cancel button that wasn't submitting request.
All versions: Fixed a broken privacy policy link in user agreement.
All versions: Fixed an alignment issue with continue shopping button on cart with which was few pixels down.
v1.1: Made sure currency format is uptodate with C99 standards.
v1.0: Fixed a PayPal Express subscription issue that occurs when subscription frequency is set to 30D instead of 1M
v0.7.2 - v1.1: Fat Zebra payment gateway now allows recurring billing and previously saved credit cards to be used on checkout (without the CSC).

Changes for the week ending 2013-03-03

Sami Fiaz — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:35:00 -0800

Changes for the week ending 2013-03-03:

v1.1: Multi-ship address subtotal amount displaying as raw in text receipt.
v0.7.2 - v1.1: Renamed API Key to Secret Key in Stripe Payment Gateway settings.
v1.0 - v1.1: Fix for live taxes being incorrectly applied to shipping without handling.

Changes for the week ending 2013-02-24

Sami Fiaz — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:25:00 -0800

Changes for the week ending 2013-02-24:

v1.1: Updated location file to include latest ISO information.
v1.1: Gateway: DataCash

Changes for the week ending 2013-02-17

Sami Fiaz — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 04:50:00 -0800

Changes for the week ending 2013-02-17:

v1.0: External URL for the unique cart template was not being cached. This is fixed now.

Changes for the week ending 2013-02-10

Sami Fiaz — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 04:50:00 -0800

Changes for the week ending 2013-02-10:

v1.0: Added flag icons for new countries and some that were missing previously.

Changes for the week ending 2013-02-03

Sami Fiaz — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 04:45:00 -0800

Changes for the week ending 2013-02-03:

v1.0: Getting empty email when you modify subscription through sub_token. This is fixed.

Changes for the week ending 2013-01-27

Sami Fiaz — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 04:40:00 -0800

Changes for the week ending 2013-01-27:

v1.0: In HTML email "Order Summary:" text seems to be sitting outside an open/close strong tag, rather than inside. This is been fixed.

Hypermedia Dog Food

Luke Stokes — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:02:16 -0800

As you may know, we've been working really hard behind the scenes on a completely redesigned REST (or Hypermedia) API. We had a lot of debate on which hypermedia format to go with. (Side note: Our readers added some amazing comments on that post! Thank you!)

Because some of our larger users still work exclusively with XML as opposed to JSON, we ended up going with HAL as our default format though we also support Siren at a basic level (no actions yet). We have properties on our collections so we haven't quite figured out the best way to support Collection+JSON, though we may spend more time on this in the future.

One of things I've heard quite often from frustrated API users is the people who create the APIs don't actually use them. They don't know how difficult they are to work with in order to actually accomplish something useful. We can relate to this at our very core because at our very core, we're developers.

Every member of our team writes code. They use FoxyCart for their client projects. They understand how FoxyCart takes a developer or development firm from "I don't do ecommerce because I always lose money on the project" to "Took me like 26 minutes from start to finish to set the site up for e-commerce." (We have plenty of awesome quotes, if you're interested).

In short, we eat our own dog food.

Hypermedia Dog Food, to be exact.

Before completing the API, we started working on a simple curl wrapper HTTP client (HyperClient). We wanted to get a feel for what an HTTP client which understands link headers and has local cache would look like.

We then started exploring creative ways to document link relationships. <rant>Why do all "hypermedia" API documentation systems focus entirely on the url of the resource end point instead of the link relationship? Don't code to URLs!</rant> We wanted to try something different and came up with an interactive link relationship tree diagram. It's still a work in progress, but so far I've enjoyed using it.

We also embraced Mike Kelly's HAL Browser with a couple tweeks of our own to support some OAuth headers. You can see it in action hitting our API sandbox.

Even though the API is really close (our TODO list is public), we've put things on hold a bit because there's a lot more dog food to eat. One of the goals of our API is to equip Content Management Systems around the globe with an amazing ecommerce tool for their users. That means everything the current FoxyCart admin does needs to be supported via our API. We realized that means building an entire admin powered solely by the API.

So that's what we've set out to do.

We're in the very early stages of development, but so far things are coming along nicely. By completely rebuilding our own admin to use our API, we're enjoying the doggy treats before anyone else. We've already noticed a couple things that needed to be improved in the API. We added a couple missing link relationships and we moved some of them around. We also changed a few property names to avoid confusion. We're getting a good understanding for what the API absolutely has to do in order to build a fully-functional FoxyCart admin interface.

We're really excited about what this API will do for our users and the control it will give them over their ecommerce platform. We already have a few people tinkering with the API sandbox and we're learning about the best ways to help them. As an example, one morning before breakfast I (Luke) put together an example of creating a FoxyCart store with a single form submit using the API. You can take a look at the slapped together code on GitHub if you're interested. These early pioneers have also shown us how much of our community doesn't understand or have experience with OAuth 2.0. That seems to be one of the biggest barriers to entry for the API so far (that, followed by understanding hypermedia in general). Before we launch, we'll have some documentation and tools to help in that regard.

We think hypermedia APIs will be standard in the coming years, and we don't want to be left behind. In fact, we'd like to lead the way and help our fellow developers learn about them through a great example we support. We don't have it all figured out, but every day is a step toward the future.

So far, the food of the future tastes good.

About FoxyCart

We empower developers, SaaS providers, and enterprise users with the best looking, most flexible, most powerful ecommerce platform. We do this through training, technology and excellent service. The FoxyCart experience is efficient for our target market, their clients and their customers.

Changes for the week ending 2013-01-13

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 04:27:36 -0800

Changes for the week ending 2013-01-13:

v1.0: Fix for downloadable files being updated in the admin with a different file than the original (which would break the existing download links).
v1.0: Twig was entering store domain before post_url for checkout form action address. This issue has been fixed.

Shout Out to FoxyCart Merchants We Patronize

Brett Florio — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 13:17:57 -0800

One of the comments we’ve heard a few times from FoxyCart developers goes something along the lines of…

I actually like testing the FoxyCart checkout process because it’s so fast.

On that note, we wanted to highlight a few FoxyCart merchants that we (either as a company or individual FoxyCart team members) have purchased from. Though we’ve done a lot of test checkouts over the years, it’s actually really surprising to experience it with our real money. Kind of an interesting experience to see just how fast the checkout is at taking customers’ money (safely and securely, of course).

Twelve South

If you’ve ever owned an Apple product or visited a gadget blog, odds are you’ve seen Twelve South’s amazing Apple accessories. Though a few of our team have various Twelve South products, I finally got one with the BookBook for iPhone 5. I can’t fit as much as I did in my old wallet, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing as it’s forced me to be a little more organized to avoid wallet bloat.

Twelve South has a FoxyCart checkout as beautiful as their products, and we’re proud to serve them. (Also in case anybody remembers from ages ago, Twelve South’s first BookBook release actually brought them so much traffic they temporarily overwhelmed our servers, so they’ll always have a special place in our hearts for that :)

Alfred App

I’m pretty sure everybody on our team with a Mac uses Alfred, which is a brilliant utility along the lines of Quicksilver or LaunchBar. It’s difficult to express just how powerful Alfred can be for powerusers, but suffice to say it’s the first app I install when setting up a new Mac, and I’m honestly not sure what I’d do without the clipboard history functionality. So, so good.

Andrew at Alfred has set up a very nice checkout customization, but also has done a custom licensing server relying on FoxyCart’s API and webhooks to handle the sale of the Powerpack upgrade. If you’re a Mac user, grab Alfred now (for free) and give it a go.

Baltrakon

T-shirts. Comfy, comfy t-shirts with designs that almost always draw amused comments. If we ever had a FoxyCart retail store, I’d lobby hard for the official uniform shirts to be done by Baltrakon.

Though their integration is relatively straightforward, they have two separate FoxyCart stores, one to handle English and one to handle French, so that’s a nice touch to better serve their target market.

What about you?

As web developers we often build sites for companies we’re actually really into. If you’ve got an example of a site you’ve done that you actually buy from, let us know in the comments. What was your favorite part of the build, and what’s your favorite part as a customer?

Changes for the week ending 2013-01-06

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 02:45:00 -0800

Changes for the week ending 2013-01-06:

v1.0: ^^store_url^^ placeholder wasn't working at checkout. This has been fixed

Changes for the week ending 2012-12-30

Sami Fiaz — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 05:10:00 -0800

Changes for the week ending 2012-12-30:

v1.0: Added support for username/password authentication for Beanstream.
v1.0: As of v1.0, email clients that don't support the <tfoot> tag were shoing the cart footer above the cart body. This has now been fixed.
v0.7.1 - v1.0: Fixed Realex integration issue caused incorrect handling of errors.

Changes for the week ending 2012-12-23

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 05:05:00 -0800

Changes for the week ending 2012-12-23:

v0.7.0 - v1.0: Europe/Oslo added to the list of timezones.