Early Impact, Inc. Official Blog

An ecommerce bridge to over 40 accounting systems

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:36:00 +0000

One of the biggest headaches of running an ecommerce business is getting data from the online store to your company's accounting package. As things grow and your company starts using a CRM and/or ERP system, moving data to and from those systems becomes another headache.

Up to this point ProductCart users have been able to leverage our shopping cart's integration with Quickbooks - which was developed in-house - and an integration with Peachtree accounting through CartSpan. And what about the many other accounting packages? And CRM systems?

Say "Hello!" to eBridge Connections, a SaaS application that bridges ecommerce systems and accounting, CRM, and other applications. They recently completed the integration with ProductCart. The eBridge Connector to ProductCart includes their three standard ecommerce touchpoints:

uploading inventory level updates to the Web store
uploading new products to the Web store
downloading orders from the Web store

The Connector offers two-way integration with over 40 popular accounting packages.

In more details...

It supports more than 40 accounting packages including Microsoft Dynamics GP, AX, SL, NAV & RMS, Sage MAS 90/200/500, Sage ERP 100, Peachtree, QuickBooks, SAP, Accpac, Epicor, NetSuite and more.
The eBridge Connections platform can also integrate ProductCart with EDI trading partners, like WalMart or Home Depot; CRM applications like Salesforce.com and eCommerce marketplaces like Amazon.com and eBay.
Pricing begins at around $1,000 per year and grows depending on the services needed.

In the words of eBridge's CEO, Colin Brown, here why it makes sense for a merchant to consider eBridge: “In a competitive ecommerce marketplace, most merchants don't have time to type orders into their accounting package manually. The new eBridge connector for ProductCart helps vendors automatically integrate inventory levels, orders and product data between their web store and their accounting package or ERP. This eliminates data entry, speeds up the order-payment-delivery cycle and allows ProductCart users to focus on growing their business.”

Here at Early Impact we don't have any direct experience using the eBridge Connector, but what we do know is that this type of integration often pays for itself pretty quickly as the volume of orders that you are processing goes up, and as inventory synchronization becomes a bigger issue. The time saved on boring data entry can always be spent doing something more sales- or marketing-oriented, and more fun :-)

To learn more and see if it could work for you, try out their solutions builder, or give them a call at 800-755-6921.

If you end up trying eBridge, please share your experience with other ProductCart users in the comments below.

FedEx Web Services Phase II is now available!

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:23:00 +0000

After several months of internal development and working closely with the certification team at FedEx, we are happy to announce that Phase II of FedEx Web Services has been completed! This new integration will allow merchants that enable FedEx's latest solution to not only provide real-time shipping rates to their customers, but also manage the shipping and label printing process directly within the ProductCart Control Panel. In addition, this new integration supports the highly popular "FedEx SmartPost". FedEx SmartPost is a great solution for online merchants wanting a cost-effective method to ship packages to residential customers, using the US Postal Service for the 'final-leg' of the delivery. FedEx SmartPost can deliver to every U.S. address (including P.O. boxes and military APO, FPO and DPO destinations). You can even use FedEx SmartPost for shipments to Alaska, Hawaii and all U.S. territories.

FedEx SmartPost customers still get full FedEx tracking visibility on fedex.com, including their estimated delivery date. Transit times are typically 2 to 7 business days within the contiguous U.S., based on the final destination ZIP code. Longer transit times to destinations outside the contiguous U.S.

FedEx Web Services is compatible with ProductCart v4.1 or higher. To update your store, use the "Check for Updates" link in the ProductCart Control Panel (you need to be enrolled in the Support & Updates Plan to download software updates). For instructions on how to perform the update, please refer to the following WIKI pages:

v4.1, v4.1 SP1 and v4.1 SP2:
http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/updates/FedExWs

v4.5 SP1
http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/updates/v4.6

Apps for ProductCart: a list of recently updated partner add-on's

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 04:47:00 +0000

There are many apps for ProductCart developed in the ProductCart community. We call them "Partner Add-on's", to differentiate them from the add-on's for our shopping cart software that have been developed internally here at Early Impact.

Many of these apps are very popular among ProductCart users.
Here is a list of apps that have been released or updated over the last few months. Note: the brief descriptions listed below are the ones provided by the vendor.

Abandoned Cart Follow-Up for ProductCart 4+
Increase sales by automatically following up on incomplete orders!
Admin Session Keep-Alive
Keep your control panel session alive for as long as your browser is open! Prevent loss of data input because of session timeout and save time by not having to log in repeatedly over the course of your business day.
Category Sorter
Leveraging the power of jQuery, this tool provides a visual display of your product images as they are assigned to your product categories, and allows the store admin to drag-and-drop them into the preferred sort order.
ConstantContact API Integration
Allows your store to automatically post your visitor's e-mail preferences to your mailing list hosted in your ConstantContact account.
Cross Selling Assignment Wizard
Want to spend less time assigning products to the Cross Selling feature? Check this out!
Customer Consolidation Manager
A very handy utility to review all of the customers who have established multiple accounts in your store, and to then consolidate all of their orders under a single customer profile.
Dyanmic Continue Shopping
Increase sales by dynamically returning customers to where they were when they click the “continue shopping” button!
Free Shipping Alert
Increase sales and upsells by alerting your customers how close they are to getting free shipping!
HTML Emails Add-on
Promote your brand – including your logo, social media icons, core navigations links – whatever you like – to enhance your brand recognition and online presence through your email communications.

The ProductCart Support & Updates Plan... What and Why?

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:12:00 +0000

Over the past few years, several customers have asked us to explain the specific terms and purpose of the Support & Updates Plan, so we decided to turn it in to a blog post.

Before we talk about that however, we think it makes sense to briefly describe the different types of shopping cart models, and the support implications that go along with them.

Technical support and different licensing models

As most customers already know, there are basically 3 options for merchants needing an on-line store:

Open Source
Software as a Service (also known as "SaaS" or a "Hosted Solution")
Licensed Software

Open source is typically defined as software where the source code is available to the general public without copyright restrictions. For more details on generally accepted definition, please checkout the following section on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software#The_Open_Source_Definition

Examples of Open Source Shopping Carts are: Magento, Zen Cart and osCommerce.

With Open Source applications, customers (users) do not pay anything for the software itself, which sounds great on the surface! So, why doesn't everyone use an Open Source application? The answer will likely vary among those polled, but for the most part, those that choose not to go with an Open Source application (especially for something as important to them as their on-line business) will say it's because when something goes wrong... there typically isn't a specific person or company that is going to take responsibility and provide a resolution.

In addition, when it comes to integrating 3rd-party services (UPS, FedEx, USPS, Authorize.net, PayPal, etc.), Open Source applications usually lack the Product Management oversight to keep them current, and these features are often highly integral to the each merchant's ability to be successful.

In the case of Open Source software, the merchant really has no assurance that a problem will be resolved in a timely manner, which can then be highly detrimental to their business. I've always felt that the following quote from John Ruskin has some merit, particularly when considering products that are "free" (or too inexpensive to make sense):

"It’s unwise to pay too much, but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money -- that’s all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot -- it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better."

SaaS (or "Hosted") shopping carts are ones where the merchant pays a monthly fee for the right to use the shopping cart. Examples of hosted carts are: Yahoo! Stores, Shopify and Magento Go. The major benefit of a hosted cart is the low "cost of entry" for a professionally developed application.

Monthly fees for most merchants will range between $20 - $200, which includes hosting, so initially this can be quite compelling when comparing it to a licensed application such as ProductCart... until you do the math over the life of most stores.

Technical Support is usually included in the monthly cost, but since the eCommerce provider has complete control over the entire environment (hosting, software, server components, payment gateways, etc.), the support burden for them is much lower. It's important to understand that under this model, there is an inverse correlation between the provider and the store owner when it comes to 'control'. Basically, the more control they have over your site, the less control you have.

Licensed Software (such as ProductCart) is where a merchant purchases a license to use the software (similar to purchasing a copy of QuickBooks or Microsoft Office). The licensee does not receive any sort of ownership on the intellectual property itself, but simply a 'right to use' the software for a single on-line store.

Customers that purchase a license can host on any compatible server and have total control over all aspects of the design, functionality and end user experience... things that are absolute "musts" to many store owners.

In addition to offering more flexibility and control, a licensed solution can also be much less expensive over the long run. Many ProductCart merchants have been using our shopping cart for well over 5 years, which means that they would have paid over $3000 under an average (monthly) hosted plan!

Why there is a Support & Updates Plan

Hopefully this gives you a general understanding of the different 'models' under which a merchant can sell from their own domain/store. Some of you are probably thinking: "whatever... just tell me why I need to pay an annual fee to obtain Support & Updates!".

Okay... well, the fact is that the price of a ProductCart license simply does not cover ongoing development costs (e.g. writing specification documents, programming new features, updating 3rd-party integrations, etc.). Nor does it cover the cost of providing technical support. Something that we have learned over 10 years of providing a licensed shopping cart application is that over half of the support tickets we receive are actually submitted for issues not even related to ProductCart directly!

We understand that it "goes with the territory" of providing a licensed solution, but it doesn't change the fact that it's impossible to sustain any software company over the long-term without covering ongoing development and support costs. We believe that most customers realize this, and will also do the math as a way to see that ProductCart (even with the Support & Updates Plan) is still a very good value over many of the alternatives.

How you can help us provide better support

A final comment to our community on helping us provide timely and meaningful support to you all. It is EXTREMELY helpful to us (and ultimately to you and other customers since it will lead to quicker resolutions) if you take just an extra minute or two when submitting a support request, to provide the relevant information that will facilitate our investigation and troubleshooting process.

For example, we often get a support request that states something very generic, such as "My store is not working - please help", only to find out after several e-mail exchanges that the customer moved their store to a new hosting company and didn't even mention that in the ticket! So, please provide any information that might be relevant to the problem.

Also, for any tickets that are related to a specific feature or problem, please provide a simple "bullet list" that describes how we can quickly replicate the issue (which will save everyone time). For example:

login to my ProductCart Control Panel
go to this product (enter the actual link):
E.G.: http://www.domain.com/ProductCart/admin/modProducts.asp?idProduct=319&prdType=std
try to remove the Option Group "Color"
it's not allowing it to be removed

This is much more helpful than submitting a ticket with a simple description like "some of my Option Groups can't be removed". In a case like that, we have to hunt around the ProductCart Control Panel to find a product that contains options, and possibly even find a specific one where the behavior is occurring (if it's not across the board).

Or in the case of an issue in the Storefront such as "certain products aren't returning shipping rates during checkout", please paste a link to the actual product detail page for one of those specific products so we can review all of the relevant settings. It might be that the "No Shipping" checkbox was inadvertently checked... or that the product weight is "0" (which is not acceptable for calculating dynamic shipping costs).

The bottom line here is that "specifics" will help us pinpoint the issue more quickly, and get back to you more promptly!

Subscriptions are hot. ProductCart is ready (and getting better!)

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 05:16:00 +0000

News that The Honest Company - an online merchant that sells diapers and other baby essentials as a monthly subscriptions - recently pick up a hefty $27 million in venture funding caught our eye today.

Subscription-based businesses have been around for a long time, but a new trend is now emerging: ecommerce stores that sell products that typically used to be the object of one-time purchases, and are now sold as subscriptions.

It makes sense. Subscriptions are great for merchants - providing a steady income stream - and for customers - who avoid having to make repeat purchases for items that they consume regularly.

Of course, it's a model that only works when both the quality of the products and the service is high and remains high over the course of the subscription, as the issues experienced by Netflix have demonstrated loud and clear (after all, canceling a subscription only takes a few clicks).

When those ingredients are there, however, it can deliver substantial rewards to ecommerce merchants, and great value to their customers.

In the case of The Honest Company, the focus is on quality, environmentally-friendly products (many are plant-based). The company shows that the cost of the subscription is comparable or lower than regular purchases. Diapers, detergent, etc are consumed at a regular pace, which makes them perfect candidate for a subscription-based service.

Do you offer products and services that could be sold as a subscription?
Do you also offer one-time purchase items?

The combination of ProductCart and SubscriptionBridge might be exactly what you need. A powerful shopping cart program combined with a flexible subscription billing service, working together to deliver a solution that allows you to take advantage of both business models: one-time purchases and recurring billing.

Learn more about selling and managing subscriptions with SubscriptionBridge
Discover the advantages of using ProductCart and SubscriptionBridge together
Read the ProductCart + SubscriptionBridge documentation

As we write this, we're working on a number of new features that will make the integration between ProductCart and SubscriptionBridge even more useful and efficient. More on that soon on this blog!

New ProductCart case study: Direct Pet Supplies

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 07:18:00 +0000

First of all, we love their mascot. Secondly, they did a fantastic job overall with their ProductCart-powered store. So, meet Direct Pet Supplies, the latest addition to our popular gallery of ecommerce case studies.

More or less every month, we take a closer look at an online store that uses our awesome shopping cart software, and particularly caught our attention. This month we focused on this fun-looking catalog of over 18,000 pet supplies.

One of the reason why we like publishing these case studies is that we always learn something new. For example, we loved what Direct Pet Supplies did with the top navigation, incorporating a featured product and a category image next to the list of sub-categories (we had never seen a featured item being incorporated right into the category navigation: what a cool idea!).

New ProductCart case study: MONO Cases

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 06:25:00 +0000

MONO designs and produces great looking cases for all sorts of musical instruments, backpacks for busy DJs, and many other products. The design in all of their products - modern and clean - gives them a very distinctive personality, while conveying an image of great quality.

Their ProductCart-powered store blends beautifully with the rest of the Web site, while features such as the product image gallery let customers discover the MONO product line in a very visual way.

Read more >>

Why we chose PayPal for mobile checkout

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:23:00 +0000

Mobile commerce is getting hotter and hotter, with over $10 billion worth of products and services being purchased on mobile devices this year - according to Internet Retailer - and over 60% of shoppers saying that they are willing to buy using their phone during this upcoming, 2011 holiday season.

Now, there are two main reasons why mobile shopping is not already bigger than it is:

Not everyone has a smartphone... but that's changing fast. Now 4 out of 10 phones in the US are smartphones, and the percentage is growing rapidly.
Checkout is a royal pain in the neck. If you've ever tried filling out a full checkout form with a mobile phone, you know exactly what we're referring to.

Let's focus on this second point as some ProductCart users have asked us to clarify why only PayPal Express Checkout for mobile payments is supported as a payment option. In a nutshell, it's about the user experience. Here is what we mean.

Only two hands
Have you ever tried to buy something with a smartphone? One hand holds the phone, and the other one uses the phone keyboard. And the credit card? How are you supposed to be able to simultaneously pull out your wallet, get your credit card out, and hold the credit card so that you can copy the digits into the checkout form? It simply does not work.

If you try to hold the phone and fill out the form with one hand, then the finger that enters the information is your thumb, which is too big (for most people) and leads to a series of wrong entries. Not fun.

Not sitting down
Ok, so, if you are sitting down, you get your credit card out, park it on a table or on one of your legs, and things get a bit easier. But... you simply can't do that in many mobile scenarios. The beauty of being able to shop with your phone is the idea that you can buy a book, a gift, an event ticket, ... while you're on the bus, or waiting for the subway, or in line for a hot chocolate. Which means: you're standing up.

Optimized checkout
That's why - when we worked on the Mobile Commerce Add-on for ProductCart - we chose to use PayPal Express Checkout for mobile devices as the only payment option. Checking out with your PayPal account via Express Checkout makes it possible for you to complete a mobile ecommerce transaction without losing your sanity :-)

Let's see how it works.

After locating a product in the mobile-optimized catalog and adding it to the shopping cart, customers click on the "Checkout with PayPal" button.

They can log into their PayPal account using either email + password, or cell phone number + PIN. There are over 103 million PayPal users around the world, so there is a good chance that your customers will have a PayPal account. If not, they can just click on "Pay with a card" and enter their credit card information.

After that, they simply review their billing and shipping information....

... review the order total one more time...

... and place the order. Done! If you've never placed an order on an ecommerce store this way, you've got to try. It's pretty impressive how painless the process truly is.

Final thoughts
We understand that some merchants - for a variety of reasons - are not in love with PayPal. We hear you, and we will look at other payment options in the future.

For now, though, this really is about the user experience, and we believe that PayPal Express Checkout for mobile devices does the job, and does it well.

[By the way: the Mobile Commerce Add-on for ProductCart is only $195 and it's really easy to add it to your ProductCart-powered storefront.]

AddThis integration in ProductCart v4.5: a handy little feature

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:08:00 +0000

A handy, little feature in v4.5 of our shopping cart software is the AddThis integration. It makes it easy for you to add social networking icons to your store, letting visitors share those pages on social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. Here's a screencast on how to use this feature.

AddThis is a free, very popular social sharing platform. You can select a variety of styles and pick which icons to include. Learn more at AddThis.com. We hope you like this new feature and certainly look forward to your feedback.

For more information on this and other settings that can easily be configure in the ProductCart Control Panel, please refer to the ProductCart documentation.

Stay tuned for more screencasts introducing what's new in the latest version of our shopping cart software! [Follow us on Twitter to be notified when there's something of interest to ProductCart users]

Introducing the Sales Manager for ProductCart v4.5

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 04:13:00 +0000

One of the most important new features introduced with ProductCart v4.5 is the Sales Manager. The idea was to make it really quick and easy for a store manager to:

Pick products in the store catalog
Put them on sale
Start & stop the sale
Keep an archive of all pending, running, and completed sales
Make it easy for store visitors to find products that are on sale

Here's a screencast that shows you how it all works.

So, to prepare for running a sale.

Create a small icon that will be shown next to the price where products are shown
Come up with a name and a description for the sale. The description can contain HTML.
Prepare some links (text and/or images) to make the sale visible (e.g. a colorful graphic for the home page).
Use the friendly Wizard to create and run the sale!

We hope you like this new feature and certainly look forward to your feedback.

For more information on the Sales Manager, please refer to the ProductCart documentation.

Stay tuned for more screencasts introducing what's new in the latest version of our shopping cart software! [Follow us on Twitter to be notified when there's something of interest to ProductCart users]

ProductCart v4.5 starts shipping today

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:15:00 +0000

Today we started shipping ProductCart v4.5 to new customers. The ProductCart v4.5 Update for existing customers should be available on Monday (we're doing some final testing on the update script to make sure everything works right!).

We're excited about ProductCart 4.5 (... and apologize for the delay in making it available to you!).

From an updated Control Panel user interface...

... to the handy, new "Sales Manager"...

... ProductCart builds on over 10 years of ecommerce development to deliver shopping cart software that runs better, is richer in features, and preserves the ease of use that ProductCart merchants love.

And there's plenty of surprises too, such as the availability of the new Early Impact Payment Gateway, with a built-in PCI compliant credit card vault that can reduce the scope of your PCI compliance while allowing advanced features such as letting a customer save their credit card information for future purchases.

More to come on all of the above with dedicated blog posts over the next few weeks.

Amazon's new look: what to learn

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:47:00 +0000

We recently published an article about the Target.com redesign. Target launched a new Web store after deciding to run its ecommerce operations independently of Amazon.com, which the US retailer had been using for some time as the ecommerce platform.

Amazon too is in the process of launching a new design for their massive online store, and our friends at Practical eCommerce just published an interesting article on what lessons can be learnt from the changes implemented by the ecommerce giant.

Among the things noted by Practical eCommerce:

Clean design over cluttered layout
Put search front and center
Interface elements like content sliders can help
Details make a difference (e.g. consider using CSS shadows, which are now supported in IE 9, FireFox 4, Chrome, and Opera)
Focus on visual merchandising

For more, see lessons from the Amazon redesign.

One interesting fact about the Amazon - Target divorce: it appears that the folks at Target might have underestimated how difficult it is to scale operations to support huge traffic increases:

The new Target ecommerce store experienced outages during the launch of a popular new clothing line (Missoni)
A Target executive left the company as a result

Not easy to run massively scalable ecommerce Web sites! Amazon likely knows more about that than probably anybody else in this industry.

Smaller merchants should keep this in mind as well: as soon as you can afford it, invest in your hosting infrastructure. Ask your Web host what options you have for more reliability and higher scalability, how fast you can switch, and how much it will cost (and if they don't reply with a quick, sensible answer, you know it's time to look at a new Web hosting partner).

FedEx Web Services update

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:22:00 +0000

A number of things slowed us down over the past two months, but we are now really (really!) close to releasing ProductCart v4.5.

Among other new features, ProductCart v4.5 will include an updated integration with FedEx, which was necessary as FedEx has been phasing out the "old" FedEx API, will complete the phase out in May of 2012, and has already stopped onboarding new customers on that API.

Here are some clarifications on how your store might be affected by the new integration with the FedEx Web Services.

Activating FedEx
If you are a new ProductCart user, or an existing store that did not have FedEx active and wishes to activate it, you can no longer do so with the original integration.

In ProductCart v4.5, you will be able to activate FedEx using the new integration with the FedEx Web Services.
If you are using v4.1, we strongly recommend that you update the store to v4.5. If that is not an option, please open a support ticket and we can send a compatible version of the files for v4.1.

Shipping Rates
ProductCart now obtains shipping rates from FedEx using the new FedEx Web Services. Although a lot has changed under the hood, the features available to ProductCart-powered stores remain largely the same.

One thing that has been added is support for FedEx Ground Multiweight rates. These special rates are available by contract only. Contact your FedEx account executive for more information. Here is an overview.

Shipping Wizard & Label Printing
The ability to finalize a shipment and print a FedEx label from within ProductCart is not yet available as part of the new integration with FedEx. Unfortunately, the related certification process requires a tremendous amount of manual work (hundreds of labels that need to be individually created, printed, and sent to FedEx), and we simply did not have the time to complete this as part of ProductCart v4.5.

We understand that being able to process a FedEx shipment from within ProductCart is very convenient. However, it is not clear to us how many ProductCart merchants are really using this feature. Please contact us if you are using this feature or were planning to use this feature. We want to hear from all of you to form a better idea of how urgent this project is.

In the meantime, you have 2 options for FedEx label printing:

Export to Ship Manager: We have created a new feature that allows you to export order information and import it in the FedEx Ship Manager. You can then process the shipment and print the label there (including thermal label printing). There is one limitation: this feature does not export package information (if any), so if the shipment requires multiple packages, you will need to address this manually within the FedEx Ship Manager.
QuickBooks: If you use the handy ProductCart Synchronizer for QuickBooks, then you can take advantage of the integration between QuickBooks and the FedEx Ship Manager. NOTE that starting in QuickBooks 2007, the QuickBooks Shipping Manager supports multi-package shipments.

Existing FedEx users and ProductCart v4.5
Note that if you are an existing FedEx user in your ProductCart-powered store (e.g. you are happily printing FedEx labels in ProductCart v4.1):

You can continue using the "old" FedEx API until May of 2012
Untill then, you will be able to obtain rates, process shipments, and print labels
You will be able to continue doing so in ProductCart v4.5: just make sure that you do not remove FedEx, as you will not be able to re-activate FedEx under the original API.

We hope this helps... and we look forward to releasing ProductCart v4.5 very soon!

The Early Impact Team

Learn more, sell more

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 23:58:00 +0000

Running a successful online business is no walk in the park, and sometimes it feels like you just don't have the time you need to keep on top of everything that's going on, from social media to search engine optimization. Reading books is too time consuming, and hiring consultants to train you might be out of budget.

Practical eCommerce - which over the years has become a reliable point of reference for small- and medium-sized online merchants - just launched an interesting new offering that might help.

For a relatively small amount of money ($149 per course), they are offering 2-hour long, instructor-led online courses on many ecommerce-related topics.

From SEO to how to write killer product description or how to promote your ecommerce store on Facebook, the online classes...

Are taught by experts in the field, like PeC's senior contributing editor Armando Roggio
Include a Q&A session at the end of the class
Allow attendees to download a video recording of the course so that they can watch it again
Include a certificate like the one shown below

A PDF overview of each course gives prospects a good idea of what they can expect out of the class. For example, here is the one for SEO 101 (click on it to see the actual PDF):

Considering that the cost is less than what you would pay a consultant for a couple of hours of training, it might be money well spent if it can help you improve important skills that are relevant to the success of your business.

Click here for a list of classes, and - if you end up taking any of them - let us know how it went.

The Early Impact Team

BTW: if the shopping cart looks familiar, that's because months ago the folks at Practical eCommerce selected ProductCart to build a custom store to sell online classes. Some of the features were customized by long-time Certified ProductCart Developer NetProfits to meet their special needs. Adobe Connect was chosen as the e-learning platform.

PayPal Payflow downtime: what to do

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:16:00 +0000

Lots of ProductCart stores use PayPal in one form or the other. If you are one of them, read on.

PayPal is in the process of moving to a new data center
They recently issued a notice about some planned downtime
In the notice it wasn't terribly clear that the downtime does not affect PayPal Express Checkout, Website Payments Pro, and Website Payments Standard. It does affect Payflow Pro (and Payflow Link... but it's very rarely used by ProductCart customers).

So, bottom line: if you use Payflow Pro, this downtime will affect you, and you should:

Turn that payment option off on your store around the downtime window.
Activate another payment option, such as PayPal Express Checkout - if not already active - so customers can still checkout :-)
Turn everything back on after the downtime window has passed, and test to make sure that customers can checkout.

If you don't use Payflow Pro or Payflow Link, then this does not affect you.

Getting ideas from the Target.com redesign

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 21:14:00 +0000

Target Brands, Inc. just relaunched their ecommerce store at target.com. I don't know about you, but when we see a $1.3 billion online store go for a full redesign, we like to take a good look and see what they've come up with.

Hey, they must have spent a fortune researching all kinds of customer behaviors and purchasing patterns, and our market research budget is a bit smaller. So, let's see if we can pick up a few tips here and there.

First off, the home page looks like one of those nice, colorful flyers that you find in the Sunday paper. It invites you to scroll down vertically with big graphics and large fonts. It seems to say: our store is easy to browse: scroll away!

Notice also how it gives the user a lot of different options as to how to browse different sections of the site, but without overwhelming the visitor with more than just a few links in each section.

By now, everyone knows that loads of research has been done indicating that free shipping is what online shoppers want, and Target makes sure you know they provide that, with a big graphic and large statement close to the top of the home page.

We started browsing the store, visited a few product details pages, and.... well, we had to include this for our development team: hey guys: regardless of the development budget, a little bug is always ready to sneak in!! Here's what we got when we added a harmless pair of pants to the cart.

OK, back to the store design. The overall graphical interface is very much a minimalist one, where product and category names and images really take center stage. The top is just a simple banner that includes a very visible search feature and category navigation.

The header changes at checkout, which is a good idea (this is pretty easy to do with ProductCart).

The search feature includes an auto-suggest feature (a ProductCart reseller recently published an add-on for ProductCart for this, called "Predictive Search"), and a product preview feature in the search results (which can be turned on and off in ProductCart).

Overall, it's a store design that definitely focuses on simplicity: an uncluttered design that does feel fresh and less overwhelming than its giant competitor Amazon.com (whose technology Target used until recently).

We liked it. What do you think?

New, related vulnerability and consolidated patch

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 17:08:00 +0000

A new vulnerability directly related to this other security issue was discovered and addressed over the last 48 hours.To learn more and address this latest vulnerability:

Log into your store's Control Panel
Click on "Check for Updates" (regardless of whether you are enrolled in the Support & Updates Plan or not: security patches are always available to all users)
You will be prompted to download a ZIP archive that includes details on the vulnerability and updated files for your store. Please carefully read the document that describes the steps to take. We have included files to address just this vulnerability or all three recently reported vulnerabilities.

As we discussed in this post, vulnerabilities are part of software, but let us answer a few very legitimate questions that you may have about the events of the last several days.

Why so many vulnerabilities all of a sudden?
The first and this latest announcements actually pertain to the same problem. The vulnerability and the exploit are the same. The issue is that different areas of the application were found to be vulnerable. The second announcement pertained to completely unrelated security issues: the fact that the timing was the same was purely a coincidence.

Why two patches for the same vulnerability?
When a vulnerability is found, we are caught in a dilemma: (a) immediately issue a patch to address the problem, or (b) wait to research whether there are any other areas of the applications that might be affected by the same or similar issue.

If we go with (a), other issues could be found after a more in-depth review. If we go with (b), the security issue that we know exists remains unaddressed for a longer period of time.

That's what happened in this case. We went with option (a), but additional, related issues were found in the following days. That's why we had to release this latest patch, even if the vulnerability is the same one reported several days ago.

Do I have to apply the three security patches separately?
No, we have created a consolidated patch that includes updated files for all three issues. Log into your store's Control Panel and click on "Check for Updates" to retrieve the file. Carefully read the enclosed PDF instructions for detailed information on what to do.

While we remain on high alert for any other possible issue, we want to take a moment to give a heartfelt “Thank You!” to everyone in the ProductCart community that has been collaborating with us to research and address these vulnerabilities as quickly as possible.

Special thanks go to Greg Dinger and his team at Greybeard Design Group, who provided extremely useful information throughout the process.

Thanks again and make sure to review and apply this latest security patch, as described above.

The Early Impact Team

Two security vulnerabilities found: small patch available

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 07:06:00 +0000

A new patch was released to address two separate vulnerabilities that were recently found. We have no reports of successful exploits of these vulnerabilities. Download the patch now and follow the instructions in the ReadMe document to apply it to your store. This is a very small patch, and can be applied in just a few moments.

This has been a rough week for the ProductCart community, with the recent announcement of this other important security patch. The vulnerabilities are completely unrelated, and the fact that they were reported around the same time is simply a coincidence. A case of "when it rains, it pours".

Given the unusual circumstances of multiple vulnerabilities found within a relatively short amount of time, let us take a moment to share a few thoughts on software vulnerabilities, and on our commitment to address them.

Software vulnerabilities unfortunately can happen. On one side, there is no software development team that is 100% error free. On the other side, there are security issues that are unknown until they are actually found, and that therefore are hard to predict and prepare for. This helps explain why, for example, in a 2010 study, vulnerability intelligence solutions provider Secunia reported 96 vulnerabilities in Mozilla Firefox alone, and 380 vulnerabilities in the top-50 programs for just the first 6 months of 2010.

That said, we aim for software that is vulnerability free. We work as hard as we can to reach that goal. And you can rest assured that when a problem is found, we will fix it as soon as possible and let you know as soon as we can. Even if it means writing a blog post at 11:50 PM PST. Even if it means issuing a security patch shortly after another one.

Thanks for reading, and make sure to apply all of the recently announced security patches. You can find a full list here.

Security vulnerability: patch just posted

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 06:00:00 +0000

This is one of the least favorite parts of our jobs. A security vulnerability is found, and it could affect your ProductCart-powered store. It's the kind of think that makes us sick to our stomach.

This particular vulnerability is not specific to ProductCart. It takes advantage of a flaw in Microsoft Internet Information Service (IIS) version 6 (fixed in IIS v7 and above) to allow a hacker to run a script that has been uploaded to the store by disguising it as an image or other file.

To learn more and address the vulnerability:

Log into your store's Control Panel
Click on "Check for Updates" (regardless of whether you are enrolled in the Support & Updates Plan or not: security patches are always available to all users)
You will be prompted to download the a file that includes details on the vulnerability and updated files for your store. Please carefully read the document that describes the steps to take.

Unfortunately cybercrime is part of cyperspace just like crime is part of our daily life. At Early Impact, we do our best to write software that is as secure as possible, and to react to any vulnerability as soon as one is found.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Best Regards,

The Early Impact Team

ProductCart, Peachtree, and an outsider's thoughts on our shopping cart

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 19:56:00 +0000

Scott Wheeler at CartSpan recently worked on an integration between ProductCart and Peachtree, which makes it easy for users of our shopping cart software to automatically import Web orders into their Peachtree accounting system.

This type of integration can really make a difference in your business' daily routine, saving a tremendous amount of time and money, reducing errors, and removing a lot of the headaches that go with transferring data from an online store to the accounting system.

Scott was impressed with the functionality he found in ProductCart and sent us this guest blog post, which we are publishing unedited (except for a couple minor syntax changes). For more information on the integration between ProductCart and Peachtree, please visit the CartSpan Web site.

Guest Blog Post by Scott Wheeler, CartSpan

There are many value-added features within ProductCart that distinguish it from other carts, but it has specific features, from an accounting integration perspective, that make it very attractive. Here are a few that CartSpan has capitalized upon with its integration to Peachtree accounting:

Build-To-Order (BTO) capability – The more advanced carts in the market have some type of standard kitting functionality, but not the dynamic kitting functionality provided by ProductCart. It is impractical to attempt pre-configuration of all possible Bills-Of-Material (BOM) in the accounting system and present them within the shopping cart. An overwhelming number of these BOM’s would never be ordered, and those that did are likely ‘one-off’ configurations. Use of ProductCart’s BTO functionality essentially eliminates this administrative ‘bloat’ in the accounting system.

ProductCart’s BTO functionality conveniently writes BTO item components to a table in the database where they are picked-up by the CartSpan API. These components are then imported individually into a Peachtree invoice with correct pricing and an appended description clearly indicating the associated parent configuration. If the ‘Peachtree/CartSpan/ProductCart’ user is importing the Web order as an ‘Invoice’, the inventory is relieved immediately, thus supporting the real-time view of inventory that business owners so greatly desire.

Order Handling Charge – A common business requirement - yet often overlooked feature in many shopping cart offerings - is the ability to apply some type of handling fee on the order level. ProductCart offers this functionality and CartSpan supports the import of handling fees against a targeted General Ledger account. This feature eliminates one more instance where the Customer Service Rep must ‘touch’ the order or invoice to ‘get it right’. Elimination of as many of these ‘tweaks’ as possible is the goal of a good integration.

Rule-Based Data Acquisition – ‘Hang’ with me here while I explain this powerful aspect of ProductCart as an open-source offering. Similar to the handling charge problem a lot of businesses face, is the issue of capturing a Purchase Order (PO) number for Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions. Most shopping carts are geared to conduct Business-to-Consumer (B2C) transactions and the common method of PO-based invoicing is ignored. While ProductCart itself does not handle PO capture out-of-the-box, it has, with great foresight, instituted well-organized data-structures to support the capture of this and any other customer-specific data.

The CartSpan API for ProductCart has been designed to retrieve the PO (or any other value) from these data-structures by referencing a customer-defined rule. Granted, you will still have to code modifications to capture/store the desired information, but this option for easy extensibility is simply not available in other proprietary hosted systems. You are at the mercy of the host when dealing with proprietary systems; not so with ProductCart.

Affiliate Association – ProductCart supports the assignment of an Affiliate ID and an associated commission rate on the order level. This functionality is generally used to reward people for promoting your product. This could be a sales representative that actually works for you or someone just loosely associated with your organization. CartSpan has been developed to map to this field and potentially create a payable in the accounting system to a vendor setup with an ID corresponding to the Affiliate ID. The commission rate currently applies to the entire order, regardless of which products are ordered. What would make this even more powerful is to recognize rates by affiliate and item. If one chose not to extend the order tables beyond what they are, some type of weighted average commission rate could be employed to properly represent an overall commission payable.

Product Attributes – Any product attributes configured against an ordered-item are automatically appended to the item description upon import into the Peachtree accounting system. This is a great help if fulfillment is actually managed from within the accounting system. Because most small business accounting systems don’t handle the potentially lengthy attribute descriptions that can be generated, CartSpan offers a rule-based substitution of abbreviations to ensure that the whole description properly fits on the order line description.

Overall, ProductCart is a very capable cart with features and data-management that supports good accounting integration. As we move forward in our partnership, we are excited to work with ProductCart users to further exploit yet-to-be-determined opportunities for saving time and better serving their customers.

Scott Wheeler, CartSpan

Update on the release of ProductCart v4.5

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:02:00 +0000

At Early Impact we set many goals for ourselves and work very hard to meet them. When we discussed ProductCart v4.5 with our developers we set a preliminary release date base on the facts that were laid out before us at that time. Which features we wanted to incorporate as well as fixing bugs & security issues. If everything went as planned, ProductCart v4.5 would be available for download today; however does anything ever go as planned in the software development world? Due to many different circumstances and the importance of releasing a stable version, we have revised the release date to the first week in September. This is a date that we feel confident version 4.5 will be a stable release.

One of main factors of this delay is the FedEx Web Services Migration. FedEx is retiring their FedEx API and transitioning to FedEx Web Services. This is not a minor change for ProductCart and we are working closely with FedEx so that we can complete “Phase 1” of our integration with the new FedEx Web Services in the v4.5 release. This phase will be the new integration with FedEx Shipping Rates (that customers see during checkout). After the release of v4.5 we will then continue to work on “Phase 2”, which will add the ability to print FedEx Shipping labels under the FedEx Web Services.

We do have a bit of good news for our resellers though! We should have a pre-release version of 4.5 the last week of July. This will allow ample time to work with the new code while we are still running quality assurance testing and fixing bugs that we run into.

Google Product Search data feed generator update

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 07:13:00 +0000

Google recently updated requirements and guidelines for submitting products to Google Shopping (Google Product Search). Specifically, they now require that merchants include unique product identifiers in their data feed (this applies to most products). They also require that merchants specify tax and shipping settings in their Google Merchant account.

Read the original announcement about the changes to Google Product Search
This policy goes into full effect on June 20th (see Enforcement of our Unique Identifier Policy)

After June 20th, your data feed might get rejected if the required information is not included.

As you know, submitting products to Google Product Search is important not just because potential customers might be shopping on Google Shopping, but also because Product Search listing are often included among organic search results (top 3 listings for a specific keyword phrase).

For example, our Early Impact Web site does not appear in the top 10 results on Google for "ecommerce software", but the "ProductCart Shopping Cart Software" listing is in the the top 3 results in Google Product Search on that same keyword phrase, and therefore gets us into the top 10 organic search results (see screen shot below) ... at least when we checked tonight :-)

Since ProductCart v4.5 (our next release), is still a couple of weeks out (as we finalize the Sales Manager feature for which you have provided a lot of good feedback), we wanted to make available an updated version of our Google Product Search data feed generator (previously referred to as the Google Base data feed generator) so that you can submit properly formatted data feeds.

This updated version of the Google Product Search data feed generator (get the updated file):

Allows you to submit unique product identifiers by leveraging Custom Search Fields
If unique identifiers do not apply to your products, it allows you to indicate that you have received an exemption (learn more about asking for an exemption)
Allows you to specify the shipping weight (which is another, new requirement)
Allows you to include the featured product attribute
Delivers much faster performance

Links and additional information:

Unique Product Identifiers (Google Merchant center)
Google Product Search data feed generator (ProductCart documentation)
Download the update Google Product Search data feed generator

Please note: this is a BETA release. Let us know if you have any problems with this new version of the Google Product Search data feed generator.

Professional e-commerce, easier and quicker

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Mon, 23 May 2011 23:36:00 +0000

Setting up a professional, ProductCart-powered e-commerce store is now easier than ever. In partnership with The Small Business Authority (TheSBA.com), we are launching a promotion that includes:

Free E-commerce Hosting
3 months of free, ProductCart-optimized hosting, and no setup fees.
Free Installation
We'll setup ProductCart for you, free of charge. You'll be up and running in no time.
Free Consultation
Interested in how to best use electronic coupons, or how to setup a Gift Registry? We're including a 30-minute phone consultation at no extra charge.

Learn more about this promotion >>

ProductCart-optimized ecommerce hosting

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Thu, 19 May 2011 01:20:00 +0000

At Early Impact we like to focus on what we do best, which is developing quality e-commerce software (this year we are celebrating 10 years of e-commerce development!).

Among the things that we don't provide directly is Web hosting services. Yet, many customers ask us about suggestions on where to host their ProductCart-powered store. So, finally... here is a list of Web hosting companies that provide ecommerce hosting services to lots of ProductCart customers, and that might be good fit for you too.

We didn't "certify" these companies (we don't have an official Web hosting certification program, which would be pretty hard to implement), but we can tell you that:

They host a bunch of stores that use our shopping carts (10 or more stores)
They've being doing so for quite some time
They are committed to providing you with a ProductCart-optimized hosting environment

BTW: if you are a Web host, meet the requirements above, and we forgot you, contact us!

Mobile Commerce at work!

noreply@blogger.com (Early Impact, Inc.) — Wed, 18 May 2011 08:27:00 +0000

In the latest ProductCart case study, we took a look at Sigler Music Center, an online music store that is leveraging the ProductCart Mobile Commerce Add-on to reach musicians on the go.

When we interviewed the company in preparation for the case study, they indicated that around 2% of orders are now being placed through their mobile storefront (ProductCart allows you to run reports to see where orders were placed: regular vs. mobile storefront).

Read the case study and take a look at some screen shots of the mobile-optimized ecommerce storefront used by Sigler Music.