So busy in fact we’ve had little time to post new articles on our blog. So we wanted to give you an insight into what’s keeping us busy here at AbleCommerce and ask for your help.
So what is it that’s keeping us so busy here at AbleCommerce? We’re busier than Santa’s elves working on exciting new ideas for our upcoming releases! There are so many ideas that’s it’s impossible to get them all into the next release cycle so we need your help to decide which are the most important.
Before we ask about specific features we need to get a general sense of direction to start. So we’ll begin with a Facebook poll to establish the areas we should be looking at improving first. Marketing, content management, personalisation, syndication, shipping, internationalization or core features are candidates for direction.
There are other active discussions about specific features, so please join us on Facebook and help shape the future of AbleCommerce.
AbleCommerce is now entering its 18th year in business, having survived both the dot.com crash of 2000 and the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008. We are now at a point where we seem to be heading into even more uncertain times.
With over 400 shopping cart solutions on the market, we’re certain to see this consolidate in the coming months as the credit market for small business evaporates further. This is aggravated by the fact that the credit card processors are becoming more aggressive in enforcing PCI-Certification at the merchant level. Given the high cost, in both terms of time and money to get an application VISA/PCI certified, many lower-tier shopping carts are going to be squeezed out of the market.
We’ve seen two of our primary competitors acquired in as many years. One to be completely phased out in a bankruptcy liquidation, and the other being picked up by a firm with no experience in developing commercial software applications.
In every down turn in history, there will always be an upside for creative entrepreneurs to identify new market needs. So, while some business models will be hurt, the online ecommerce space can be a low risk venture to those needing additional monthly income or a completely new career.
Did you know that 70% of all new jobs in the United States are being created by small businesses? When the recovery begins, it will be built upon the efforts of small business owners!
While others are panicking, I’d like to suggest that you step back and look at this as an opportunity in disguise without fear. You may not come up with the next Google in your brainstorming, but perhaps you might come up with something that will provide for your family.
We sincerely wish you the best in these troubled times, and should you find yourself in the market for a shopping cart platform, we hope you consider AbleCommerce knowing we’ll be around when you need us.
Mobile Commerce is small, but growing rapidly. Merchants who sell to customers who are heavy mobile users (like teenagers), or who sell to segments amenable to mobile purchases (music, car parts, clothing) should look closely. Here are a few statistics:
- PayPal processed $500,000,000 in mobile payments last year
- By 2015, it expects the mobile commerce market to reach $115 billion, or 8% of total online sales
- 37% of smartphone users have made a purchase on their handsets in the last 6 months.
Customers using smartphones purchased 12% of clothing purchased on eBay, 8% of auto parts, 7% of sporting goods and 6% of cell phones. - The top categories for mobile commerce are: travel, computers/electronics, apparel, books/music/DVDs, office supplies, housewares and tickets.
- Less than 1/3 of retailers have a mobile strategy.
Clearly the mobile commerce market is starting to take shape. So how do enable your site for mobile commerce? Some good news is that AbleCommerce itself works well through a mobile browser. So just by using AbleCommerce, you’ve got a good start.
However, if you really want to optimize your site for smartphones, check out Web2Market’s Mobile Commerce plugin. The Mobile Commerce plugin makes it easy for your customers to navigate your site using a small screen. Web2Market has rewritten the layouts of the home, category, webpage, checkout process pages. Here you can see the billing checkout page:
Checkout page
The plugin automatically detects the device, and displays either a full page, or a mobile page. It fully integrates with AbleCommerce, so you continue to manage your site as before. Best of all, it’s all within your site, so no additional hosting fees!
The Mobile Commerce Plugin allows mobile devices to browse and order products from your AbleCommerce site. The plugin contains:
- Mobile home page
- Mobile category page
- Mobile product detail page
- Mobile Login page
- Mobile Account/Member pages
- Mobile Contact page
- Mobile Basket page
- Mobile Wishlist
- Mobile Checkout – 4 step checkout process for mobile customers
- Easy Management – The AbleCommerce administration is unchanged, you continue to manage the site as you did before.
- Product Images/Icons – used throughout browsing and checkout process
- Enhanced Design – Uses customizable CSS unique to mobile browsers and uses completely custom and separate AC theme so you can make adjustments specific only to Mobile version
- Mobile browsers are detected by Javascript technology
Want to know more? See a video demo? Check out their Mobile Commerce plugin page:
http://www.web2market.com/mobile-commerce-plugin-p104.aspx
What the heck is a QR Code?
If you have never heard of QR codes, you aren’t alone. But unless you’ve been under a rock the chances are good you have seen one without even realizing what it is for.
QR stands for Quick Response. This fancy name makes a simple idea seem more complex. A QR code is nothing but an upgraded version of a barcode. Almost everyone can understand the barcode concept. When you are at the grocery store and you buy a case of your favorite beverage, the clerk runs it across a scanner to pick up a mark that might look something like this:
The scanner reads these bars from left to right, converts this to a number, and determines what item is being purchased. QR codes are a similar concept with one major difference. Instead of a scanner reading strictly left to right, the QR code is a grid that is read left to right AND top to bottom. The benefit to this second dimension is that the code can hold much more data within a practical size limit. QR codes can easily contain URLs, email addresses, or any kind of text based data you can imagine. The two dimensional nature of the code makes it look kind of like a crossword puzzle:
Why does this matter to retailers?
One word: smartphones. Consumers are increasingly connected to the Internet as part of their daily lives. The most frequent use of QR codes in product marketing is to provide a bridge between the print based world and the online world. All modern smartphones can scan a QR code and take the consumer directly to an encoded URL.
QR codes are not quite as common in the United States as in other nations, such as Japan or the United Kingdom. They are catching on here though and represent a very big opportunity for merchants to build interactions to an ever more tech-savvy customer base.
How does it work?
Imagine a potential customer is leafing through a magazine and spies two advertisements. Also for the sake of the example imagine they are quite similar:
Both companies are making use of user friendly URLs. But typing these URLs out on a mobile phone can be tedious. The imaginary Silver Star Corp. has taken their advertisement a step farther by providing their URL in QR code format. If you are an interested consumer who recognizes this mark, you press a button on your phone to launch a QR decoder application, point your phone camera toward the code, and presto! The URL will be decoded for the consumer within the blink of an eye. If Gold Star and Silver Star are selling similar products, and it’s easier for the consumer to get to Silver Star’s link, they might never make it to the other site.
It’s all about making things easier for smartphone users. Typing things out is sooo 2010.
Uses with AbleCommerce
All versions of AbleCommerce can be used with QR codes since they are simply a means of presenting encoded text to a consumer device (smartphone, tablet computer, etc). You might use one to encode the URL of a particular product in a printed advertisement, or perhaps you wish to include a QR code for your website on your business cards. This concept might seem new and strange now, but there was once a time when printing a website address on a business card seemed new and strange.
There are many Internet resources that can help you create QR codes. Just search in your favorite engine for qr code generator and you will have plenty to choose from. Playing with one of these tools is a good way to experiment and learn more.
If you are an occasional user of QR codes in marketing campaigns a site like this would be sufficient. But to if you wish to take it a step farther and actively use these codes, we have some free code samples that can make your life easier.
Sample 1 is a new page for creating QR Codes with any content you desire. Installation instructions cover how to add a QR Codes option on your admin marketing menu.
Sample 2 is a shortcut from the product page. This modification will allow you to add a button to the edit product page so that you can quickly obtain the QR code for a URL pointing to the product. Clicking on the button will display the QR code in a popup.
Both of the samples are in a combined ZIP file with installation instructions that can be downloaded here.
In our last blog posting we talked about the primary reasons that we don’t recommend multi-store ecommerce for the vast majority. This time we’ll cover the performance and customization issues surrounding multi-store ecommerce. Finally, we’ll honestly address when multi-store could be a benefit.
Ecommerce software has become complex though the years with literally hundreds of common features which require complex programming and frequent database calls to operate. When you add in the additional calls to separate stores from a single database, it’s easy to understand why it would be slower. Up until version 7.0, AbleCommerce had supported multiple stores per database, but we dropped it to improve performance and ease of customization. There is less code to deal with, and it’s much easier to test – hence the popularity of our new version with developers.
We are seeing an increase in inquires for AbleCommerce, mainly from developers and users of other shopping cart software applications. We hear how tired they are of digging through layers upon layers of ‘spaghetti code’ to accomplish minor customizations. Speed issues and lack of stability are frequently cited problems that stem from poorly conceived foundations, which is multiplied when they further layered multi-store into their code. A review of our code compared with these others will quickly reveal the elegance of our API which makes seemingly difficult core level changes minor by comparison.
“I honestly continue to be impressed with most other aspects of the application. There have been several instances where I’ve gone in to change the code for one reason or another, and instead have been pleasantly surprised to find that certain methods or properties already exist, and all I have to do is call them, or call them a slightly different way. The organization and commenting of the code is truly top quality. I can already tell that I’m going to sleep much better knowing that my company has such a solid framework at the core. Seriously, I cannot tell you how many times AspDotNetStorefront just “breaks.” Why should I have to spend my time fixing their careless mistakes? I’m really not trying to slam them, but that’s my real review in the few years that I’ve used their software.” , says Jason Hendee, Cables for Less
So given the pitfalls of multi-store ecommerce, when and why would you want to consider them? If you have read Multi-store pitfalls and follies: Part 1 Google rules you’ll remember that your marketing and content staff will need to increase in proportion to the number of stores you are trying to launch. So the question to consider is this – can multiple narrowly focused niche sites increase your search engine rankings and sales, enough to justify the cost?
I’ve tried to find actual examples of stores using multi-store and didn’t find anything to help quantify when multi-store would be a benefit to small or medium merchants. A good example of a retailer using multi-store is newegg.com, with their neweggbusiness.com website. The primary benefit was to highlight business products over consumer products, while offering deeper discounts and reporting tools to aggregate multiple buyer purchases into a single view for accounting purposes. Newegg has reported sales of over 2 billion a year and nearly 2000 employees. So they have the resources to leverage multi-store and to provide a customized user experience for their clients. Clearly though, they don’t represent the vast majority of the millions of ecommerce stores on the internet.
That really doesn’t help answer the question of when multi-store would be of benefit to small or medium sized merchants. Hypothetically, I can answer this with the following example. Say you’re a DVD/CD reseller with a wide product line, clearly you wouldn’t attempt to sell Christian titles alongside adult DVD’s or CD’s with racy lyrics. So resellers with opposing product mixes could benefit from multi-store ecommerce, if there is overlap in their product mix which could be presented in multiple stores.
So while multi-store has its place, it’s typically not going to help the vast majority of small to medium businesses. In fact, by spreading your resources out among multiple websites, overall, it’s going to lower your SEO rankings and sales.
AbleCommerce has been helping entrepreneurs with their shopping cart needs longer than any anyone, so we’ve seen a lot of changes and fads over the last 18 years. We know by now that you don’t always jump on the latest bandwagon just because others are doing so. The latest trend in ecommerce is what merchants and software vendors call a “multi-store” feature – the ability to sell your products on different websites. For merchants marketing the same products over multiple domains, you should be aware that this type of multi-store solution is in direct violation of Google’s site content policy.
There are software vendors that recommend multi-store to all merchants, big and small, even though the vast majority of merchants would actually realize a net loss in profits with a multi-store approach. Now that multi-store has been out awhile, it’s easy to find merchants that jumped into the water early, and now are jumping out as they realize the facts of this folly. We’ll be separating fact from fiction in our latest blog posts and explain why multi-store could be a benefit to you, or a major pitfall.
Considerable time and energy is spent on the topic of search engine optimization – and for good reason. It’s often the best investment a merchant can make to improve their bottom line. Unfortunately, SEO is at the heart of the single biggest issue multi-store’s face – duplicate content.
Google is at war with the content farms. The duplicate content that these farms create reduces the quality of Google’s search results and makes it hard for users to find relevant information. Content farms scan the web for unprotected content and publish it to relevant domains in an attempt to collect advertising revenues when users unsuspectingly click through to these useless sites.
You may think you’re safe by creating different themed sites, but the Google experts use advanced algorithms to weed out duplicate content. Even when framed inside unique websites, Google will check the IP address to see if it’s coming from the same server. Google also checks the domain records to see if the content is coming from the same owner. There are many other tricks they use, and so much more that we cannot imagine in their never ending quest to provide relevant results.
Publishing your products using multi-store ecommerce software falls into all of the pitfalls mentioned above. If all websites are running on the same server, and the product content is duplicated, it’s very easy for Google to figure out if it’s all coming from the same company. Per Google’s Webmaster guidelines, it’s quite specific – “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”
“Back links” are another issue that is given the same amount of marketing effort as SEO. Long ago, Google incorporated the idea of back links into their ever changing and secretive ranking methodology. Back links, under the logical premise, means that the more people linking to a page will be a distinct measure of its importance. For multi-store merchants, are you willing to double or triple your marketing budget in order to build multiple niche websites, in the hopes of gaining incremental business? Most, if not all, merchants would be better off spending their time and effort building back links on one website rather than many. Quite simply, in Google terms, 333 back links for 3 websites does not even come close to ranking as high as 999 back links for 1 website. We rarely see even the largest merchants diluting their brands in such ways. Doesn’t that tell you something?
Fresh content is King in the land of Google results. This is substantially the same issue as back links. Unless you are going to double or triple your content writing staff, you’ll end up rationing out your fresh content between multiple websites, and overall reducing your competitiveness with other merchants that are more focused with their efforts.
The idea of publishing blocks of your products onto other domains with the goal of gaining incremental business might sound attractive, but given the SEO pitfalls, it’s rather disingenuous of these other platforms to be pushing a “multi-store” feature to merchants.
To be continued next week, in part 2 of this blog, so make sure to sign-up for our blog! We’ll be addressing software stability, ease of customization, server performance, and outline a few scenarios where multi-store would be a benefit.
An update for AbleCommerce 7.0.7 is available. The Service Release is a cumulative patch correcting issues found after the release of AbleCommerce 7.0.7 build 14481. The AbleCommerce help site was also just updated to make it easier to find the most relavent and up to date information, but for your convenience the change log is included below.
Details and download of 7.0.7 SR1a
Change Log to 7.0.7 SR1a (build 14600)
| Issue ID | Issue Description | Additional Information |
| AC7-98 | Revert changes made in pagehelper.cs to correct issue with the Keep Shopping button returning user to the wrong location | the change made in 7.0.7 introduced a category page performance issue when a product is assigned to more than one category |
| AC7-153 | Custom URL case sensitive when AbleCommerce is installed as application in IIS | May result in 404 Not Found error if the installation resides in a virtual directory |
| AC7-152 | Update GoogleBase feed to include product shipping weight | new Google requirement |
| AC7-154* | Upgrade should rebuild FTS indexes | * manual step within the readme. applicable to upgraded installations beginning with first version 7.0.0 |
| AC7-158* | Reduce noise in merchant error log by filtering potentially dangerous requests generated by Hackersafe | * see readme for manual steps to modify the global.asax |
| AC7-160 | Combination of product coupons leads to negative basket total | alternate checkout with 2 combinable coupons that exceed 100% |
| AC7-163 | Zip+4 codes not valid with basket shipping estimator control | symptom may appear when using AvaTax service |
| AC7-164 | Assist merchants with anon. user cleanup | see Anonymous User Maintenance for important information |
| AC7-167 | Answering customer’s note from order doesn’t trigger the option to mark all notes for order read. | |
| AC7-168 | Order number needs linked from Manage Notes pg | |
| AC7-170 | VS2010 cannot build website due to circular reference | developer related. two files must be removed, see readme. |
| AC7-171 | Basket Summary page throws error during site compilation | BasketSummary’ does not contain a definition for ‘BasketId’ when viewing Abandoned Basket report |
| AC7-173 | Uvumi image gallery is not compatible with IE9 | affects the retail pages if using multiple product images |
| AC7-175 | web.config for asp.net 4.0 needs requestValidationMode set | apply before a new installation, see readme |
| AC7-178 | Null basket item errors when max quantity property is used | product must be using a min. and max quantity of 1 |
| AC7-181 | Update copyright notice in admin footer | |
| AC7-184 | Enable Package Breakup option does not stay set | USPS and UPS configurations |
| AC7-186 | Revise descriptions to show unsupported Fedex and new Fedex webservices | |
| AC7-187 | Include instructions on obtaining a FedEx registration for webservices. | * see Setting up FedEx Web Services for additional information. |
| AC7-188 | Conclude testing for FedEx webservices integration | |
| AC7-191 | Custom URL field not visible unless site Allows Reviews. | |
| AC7-192* | Require anonymous user maintenance setting | * see Anonymous User Maintenance for important information |
| Addendum SR1a build 14600 |
Includes minor updates to sync the DLL versions, make .NET 4.0 the default choice of installation, and the latest DataPort client files. | see readme for information on the exact file changes |
* step needs to be performed manually
Numbers of search engine marketing strategies are available in the whole market. To build a successful business one or several techniques can be used. First of all you need a web page then need a good page rank. Once your website is indexed in the search engines it will help you to get the page rank. You have to use proper keywords in the material of your web page for getting good result. In past, the progress of web is very fast and lot of variations is there, that you cannot strike the first-rate by using a single keyword without pay-out so much cash and time to achieve target.
Now the use of lengthy (long tail) keywords by the clients is preferred by all SEO companies. But in fact it does not work properly. To hit the top position in the search engine, it works as another suitable option, though it can be a focus for some visitors. You will just stand out amongst many single keywords, if you are having lengthy keywords. These lengthy keywords can only take you at the top of the list in the search results but this will not give you the required traffic.
The most common keywords which are used by the searchers are short tail keywords which consist of one or two words. On the other hand, the search contain short tail keyword is very critical and search engine may lead to all related information about the keyword.
For example if you want to make search for cameras in this case the keyword will be “camera” and you will get the results containing all types of cameras along with their details and history. But if you make a specific search by using long tail keyword then you may minimize your results to zero, additionally it will have increase in sales.
Although the long tail keyword do not bring much traffic to your website, but it can help you to get higher ranking as compared to short tail keywords. As a fact that long keywords bring in good results it should not be overused in your page. Whatever it may be simplicity is the key for internet marketing. Don’t use shortcuts and be straightforward to have a victorious business.
Why would someone require SEO optimization services? Well, the answer to this question is simple because people who want to create their online business and make their business a presence, great SEO is a must.
SEO is an extensive method that can be used by people, companies and businesses to reach to a large amount of customers. It is very necessary for a business to create sufficient use of professional SEO services as they enormously help the business in getting excellent search engine results. The visitors you get from these results are much more likely to purchase your products or services. Excellent SEO practices are crucial to your online business!
The search engine is the vital point on the internet and every user produces profits from search engines in some way or another. Million of users have the right to use search engines on a daily basis, you need to be confident that your promotion is included in the results they come across. Regardless of the kind of a business you have, you can be a focus for a large number of target viewers and thus, produce a large number of sales for your company.
It is very vital for a business to grasp the idea of the Internet and how its mechanisms work. That is the first step in recognizing the significance of professional search engine optimization services. Immeasurable people login to the Internet to search on topics important to them. It could be products, services or information. Users put their keywords in search engines and get the results they are looking for.
Every business wants its website to be on top of the list so that users find their site first. This is where you will need the expertise of skilled SEO professionals. They will make your website in such a way that it magnetizes users and thus generates more traffic to your website. The role of SEO Vancouver services is to provide your business with related keywords which convinces users to not only access your site but spend more time on it. They will analyze the client’s business and search for appropriate keywords which they think will be fruitful.
Advantages of Professional SEO Services:
SEO services quality can be determined on the expertise of skilled website designers, content writers, SEO experts and marketing specialists. Some of the advantages of SEO services are:
- Improved sales
- More traffic
- Brand attractiveness
- Low chances of threat
- Exceptional usability
- Browser compatibility
- Effective cost involved in promotion
SEO experts emphasize more while designing a website for a business to generate more traffic and thereby get more online sales.
Several bloggers, to increase their search engine rankings, put in their best effort to find a way to create backlinks to their blogs. In some cases it becomes very easy for bloggers, but most are not successful when creating the desired links. Why does this work for some and not others? What are the secrets to success?
Great plans to create valued backlinks are needed for success. Are you ready to educate yourself in the right methods to create backlinks? If yes then follow these five steps.
1. Write and Submit Articles
Many people write articles only for getting back links to their websites, they are not intended to provide any valuable information. There are several websites which allow you to submit your articles but not all of them are good or loved by search engines. You should spend some time and make a list of the most authoritative article directory that search engines love. Once your article is approved on these directories then you can submit it to any others. Getting a link back from any of authoritative websites means getting vote from them. The more back links you receive from these websites, the more your webpage will appear in search engines.
2. Social Media
Facebook and Twitter really increase the importance of social media websites and these sites are highly favored by the search engines. You can also create additional back links to your blog by sharing your blog post links on these websites. Try to post your blog links in Facebook Groups. As soon as your group post is published, it will beindexed in google and will create back links. Furthermore there are several people who love to share informative blog posts on their social network like Facebook, so this sharing will make your content viewed by many people.
3. External Comments
External comments means commenting on other blogs. This will also help you to get back links, if you are commenting on a blog which is on “Do Follow” then that blog will give you a link back and that link will be indexed in google as well. If the blog has a high ranking and is on“No Follow”, this can also be effective if you are sharing something informative and insightful in the comment box then you will start getting the interest of the readers of that blog. This will result in increased traffic to your website or blog.
4. Trackback/ Pingbacks
Trackbacks and Pingback are rwo of the simplest ways of getting back links as well as traffic to your blog. It is quite simple. You just publish the link of another website which you think has related information about your content, and when you publish your post, the other website will be notified about your inclusion. This will encourage other blog owners to return the favor by providing two-way link. Besides all this, Track backs or pingback helps to build a relationship with other bloggers.
5. Join the Tribe
You can spread your word to millions of people and can generate several backlinks quickly when tribe members like/share/vote on your post through social bookmarking websites. So always add social bookmarking add-on or buttons below the content of your blog to facilitate and motivate the readers to share your content on their network.
