FoxyCart.com News & Blog RSS

Want to say hello in person? FoxyCart Meetups!

Brett — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:10:28 -0700

This wasn’t supposed to be quite so last minute, but Brett will be flying to Nashville next week for a few things, and while he’s there we wanted to meet any and all FoxyCart users in the greater Nashville area. (Part of our team is already in Nashville, so there will be two or three FoxyCart team members wherever we end up meeting and eating.)

Tuesday, September 22
Evening
Location TBD, depending on interest

Interested? Please let us know, and if you’re not in Nashville but you know FoxyCart users that are, please let them know. We’ve been so busy focusing on the recent server migration and our next version that we’ve neglected the planning for this event, so please help us spread the word if you know any Nashville folks.

Scheduled Downtime, Status, and Failover

Brett — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:03:22 -0700

Scheduled Downtime: Saturday, 2009.09.12, 01:00am EST

In order to continue to provide reliable e-commerce service to our users, we are upgrading our main application servers. The new servers are faster, helping us to handle future growth while providing increased security, redundancy and performance. We are also switching datacenters in order to improve response times to Europe. In addition, we have expanded our security audits and ensured that your data will remain as strongly protected as ever on our new servers.

We are excited about this move and want to assure you this has been planned in great detail to ensure a successful transition.

Impact on Connectivity

Because this migration involves two separate datacenters, it will involve downtime. We have scheduled 2 full hours for this transition:

US, PST: 2009-09-11 10:00pm-12:00am PST
US, EST: 2009-09-12 01:00am-03:00am EST
International, GMT: 2009-09-12 05:00 and 2009-09-12 07:00 GMT

During this period you should plan for any FoxyCart requests to be non-functional. How requests will be handled is outlined on the new status.foxycart.com.

Planning

Strategically planning for this migration has included several dry runs and testing to ensure the highest level of success possible. Although there is very little room for human error and we do not anticipate any problems at this point, the entire FoxyCart team will be monitoring this procedure to immediately resolve any issues should they arise.

Recovery Plan

Should problems occur, we will revert DNS entries back to our current servers. We have already shortened the TTL (Time-to-Live) values for all of our affected DNS records so that our DNS changes will take effect as immediately as possible. We don’t anticipate needing to switch back, but this is our “just in case” fallback position in order to restore service by the end of the maintenance window.

Links of interest:

FoxyCart Forum discussion about this maintenance window
FoxyCart.com on Twitter
status.foxycart.com for all the latest information
Explanation of failover systems on status.foxycart.com

FoxyCart Status and Failover: New Systems, Improvements

Since the FoxyCart javascript and CSS files are typically included in the head section of a web page, problems loading those files can prevent loading of the rest of the page. As part of these system improvements we now have failover monitoring that will re-route requests to pages that will load when the main FoxyCart servers are unavailable. It’s very basic, and is described in more detail here, but the risk of having pages completely unreachable due to non-loading FoxyCart scripts is now greatly reduced.

CoverDuck.com: Spa Covers

Brett — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:20:28 -0700

CoverDuck.com

Products:

spa, custom orders

Tags:

order form

Designed by:

Mendenhall Design

Date added:

Aug 6, 2009

There are times when a product requires such an advanced product order form that it makes the average web-designer’s head spin. Using a standard “all in one” e-commerce platform, such complex order forms can be a nightmare. No so with FoxyCart. We often say, “If you can build the form, FoxyCart can handle the product.”

CoverDuck.com required a complex form to take custom measurements for spa covers. Because of FoxyCart’s flexible product handling functionality, Mendenhall Design was quickly and easily able to create an extremely usable order form that matched their site’s look and feel perfectly. Josh at Mendelhall Design had this to say:

FoxyCart was just the thing that we were looking for. CoverDuck.com sells such a specialized product so they needed a shopping cart that could collect all the information that was needed for each order, FoxyCart was the only shopping cart that fit the bill. It is a great product for designers looking to build a custom shopping experience. Thanks Foxycart.

The Calorie Club Deluxe Calorie Counting Kit

Brett — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:09:55 -0700

The Calorie Club

Products:

weight loss

Tags:

checkout

Designed by:

The Interactive Dept.

Date added:

Aug 3, 2009

The Calorie Club Deluxe Calorie Counting Kit is an exciting new weight loss program that uses traditional methods of monitoring caloric intake and maintaining a healthy diet to assist folks in losing weight immediately. Portland-based web development studio The Interactive Dept. chose to implement Foxycart for the e-commerce portion of the website. Here’s what founder Greg Spies said about Foxycart:

I’ve been looking for a solution like Foxycart for years! We have actually avoided eCommerce projects in the past because of the complexity of setting up and customizing traditional “out of the box” solutions. Those systems were always too large, too complicated and not nearly as customizable as they suggested.

With Foxycart and its easily editable templates, our final website matches the design comps perfectly. The store environment fits into the rest of the website seamlessly – and the modal windows look and work great!

No serious programming contractors (or serious budgets) were needed to complete the store and setting-up Foxycart with Autorize.net was beyond simple. Throw in an ecstatic client, and Foxycart was a big win for us.

DiaMed Direct: Medical Equipment and Supply Distributor

Brett — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:58:59 -0700

DiaMed Direct

Products:

medical equipment

Tags:

3rd-party

Designed by:

Graydian

Date added:

Jul 23, 2009

DiaMed is a CLIA waived medical equipment and supply distributor for hospitals and office-based physicians, with over 400 manufacturers and 200 stock units totaling over 6,700 products. Using FoxyCart, Graydian Technology + Design was able to create a fully cusomized e-commerce solution that integrates with their existing systems. Here’s what Rodney at Graydian had to say about the experience:

FoxyCart is fully and easily customizable, which in our industry is necessary as clients always have changes that need to be implemented and other eCommerce solutions can take hours or even days to weed through the foreign code to make that change.

We are taking advantage of the SSO/API/DataFeed capabilities of Foxycart, and it was easier to set up than we thought it would be. Since implementing the SSO option we have seen the clients sales double in the first day!!!

To accomplish the SSO, we are using a PHP session control script w/a MySQL database. If the end user is authenticated via our authentication script, they are also authenticated via the FoxyCart SSO script. Upon any customer creation or edit, all information is synced with the FoxyCart databse via the API. We also use the data feed for order history available to both the site admin and the end user.

Long Grass: Authentic Safari Apparel and Gear

Brett — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:40:35 -0700

Long Grass

Products:

clothing

Tags:

checkout,3rd-party

Designed by:

Parscale Media

Date added:

Jul 21, 2009

Long-Grass.com sells authentic safari apparel and gear using a heavily customized theme in a feature- and content-rich site. The most interesting aspect of the Long Grass + FoxyCart integration is how Parscale Media was able to design the site without any limitations, including a very informative safari trip planning and packing list. Rather than Parscale needing to learn yet another system on which to build a site, they used ExpressionEngine and the FoxEE module to quickly and easily add e-commerce to their system of choice. Brad at Parscale Media had this to say about using FoxyCart:

FoxyCart changed the way we sell eCommerce solutions. Not only is it affordable, the power of Foxycart simply makes things possible that were not possible before!

USPS Integration Upgraded, Improved

Brett — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:47:07 -0700

The following was emailed to all FoxyCart admins that have live stores using USPS for rate requests. It is copied here for reference.

What’s Happening

We’ve recently reworked our USPS (United States Postal Service) rate requests to use V3 of their rate request system. Though we plan on making some major improvements to shipping in the future, we feel this upgrade is important as it will improve the accuracy of some rates. As part of this upgrade, we are also fixing a bug we discovered this past week involving incorrect container names being sent to USPS.

To fix this, we’ll be updating our database with the correct container names and sizes which will affect all stores using USPS. While we make it a rule not to make changes that will affect live stores, because of the way this data is handled in our system, this is a system-wide change, and not a version specific change.

Affect On Live Stores Using USPS

Stores currently using USPS shouldn’t see any changes to the rates they are currently receiving from USPS on their FoxyCart checkout. Rather, this upgrade will allow you to be more accurate. Depending on your currently selected container type, your store may be automatically switched to the “VARIABLE” container type (which is what’s currently being used), so there should be no change to rates returned. You can get much greater accuracy by following the steps below, however.

What If You Don’t Take Action?

Your shipping container selection in the FoxyCart admin will most likely be reset to “VARIABLE”, and you should see no change in the rates being presented to your customers on checkout. We do recommend you change your settings as appropriate, however, as it will give you more accurate shipping rates for your customers.
Action You Need To Take

We plan on making this change over the weekend. Once we do, you should be able to login to your FoxyCart admin and update your container to be one of the following:

VARIABLE
FLAT RATE BOX
FLAT RATE ENVELOPE
RECTANGULAR
NONRECTANGULAR

And set your package size to be:

REGULAR
LARGE
OVERSIZE

Feedback and Questions

Please login to your store on or after Sunday and make sure the container type matches what you’re shipping and that this upgrade is working for your store. If you have questions, concerns, or success/failure reports please comment on this forum post.

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.