Our new e-commerce site, ImportCostumes.com, has gone live! Its been months since development began and after lots of blood, sweat, and tears (mostly over PayPal account setup and integration; more on that to come later), we’re ready to take orders. We have lots of cool men’s costumes and women’s costumes. We also have a large selection of boy’s and girl’s costumes, and not to mention awesome accessories! Come check it out and buy some stuff!
We found a weird IE6 bug in Fright Catalog and YumDrop today. Turns out, when in the checkout process, IE6 would display a message to the user that they were navigating from a secure page to an insecure page. Firefox, IE7, and Camino wouldn’t display any notification message at all. The IE6 warning was totally bogus, since the resulting page was definitely secure (little gold lock, no messages, etc.). For a while, I thought it was a bug in IE6, but the more I thought about it, that didn’t make much sense.
That’s when I discovered that the notification only came up on a PostBack on a checkout page, not when the page first loaded. So, knowing that we manage our secure pages using what we call a Redirect Manager, I took a look at that. After some digging, I realized I was kind of barking up the wrong tree, and the real issue was the lack of a trailing slash on the URL. This is something that we can either fix in our redirect or in the Secure Redirect module we use. What I found really interesting though, is that this wasn’t an issue in Firefox, Camino, or IE7.
The other day I was inadvertently referred to as a webmaster. It was via an email from one of the affiliates we use for our web sites, so it wasn’t on purpose or meant to offend. However, I can’t stand that name and honestly, I don’t know what it means. It really sounds to me like somebody that just baby sits web sites and makes some content changes from time to time. My degree is in Computer Science. By trade, I’m a Software Engineer. I just happen to work on web applications now and manage a couple of e-commerce web sites (not to mention all the other IT tasks in the office). Does that make me a so called webmaster (or like I coined the other day, web site weenie)? I don’t think so. It’s high time we deprecate this title and use something that fits the new “Web 2.0” days we live in, i.e. Web Developer, Web Applications Developer, etc. etc.
Dress By Design was featured in a USA Today article yesterday. This is great news for an up and coming site with huge potential. Of course I’m biased since I help to develop the site. Congrats to the Dress By Design ladies and Conor. Keep up the good work!
As I posted in a reply here I’m kind of annoyed that there is a lack of an affiliate data feed standard. I’d like to come up with a standard based on XML that could be adopted by the affiliate community (unless there’s one buried somewhere out there). Due to the lack of time, I haven’t done it yet but would be very interested in working with others to come up with some ideas. Drop me a line if this is of any interest to you so we can maybe start a discussion on it.
We’ve had the new version of FrightCatalog.com up for a week now. We’ve had lots of great comments and feedback, but success is never really gauged by that. To that end, its good to see that a lot of hard work has paid off and I think we’re starting to see that from the numbers in Google Analytics
The first half of the month (July 1 – July 18) we saw 83,796 uniques, 9.27 pages/visit, and a 0.33% conversion rate.
The last week (July 19 – July 25), with the re-launch, we’ve seen 41,673 uniques, 12.00 pages/visit, and a 0.75% conversion rate.
Almost half the uniques in a 1 week period than we had in the first 18 days of the month. Page visits are up by almost 3.5, and our conversion rate has more than doubled. Good initial numbers after week one.
This is starting to prove that our de-facto framework for our e-commerce sites is pretty solid (all software can always be improved and we’ll continue to do so), and has a lot of promise. It’ll be nice to see how we do through the entire Halloween season with some new marketing initiatives in place. I hope this is a sign of good things to come in the coming months.
Its been quite a long week. Late last night saw the coming of the latest edition of FrightCatalog.com. I think you’ll notice the more product centric slant its taken on this year. A little less glitz, a little more practicality. It should be MUCH faster too. Same framework as YumDrop.com and the soon to come ImportCostumes.com. Thanks for Kyle’s help, even though he’s moved on to a new venture.
It appears that testing PayPal’s Web Payments Pro in their Sandbox doesn’t work like it would in a live environment. It won’t return error codes for address verification failures out of the box unless you set it up to do so. I was lucky enough to get a response in the developer forum that showed me this blog post on how to test AVS failures.
Also, it doesn’t look like you can test Discover Card or American Express credit cards in the Sandbox either. If there are any PayPal developers out there that come across this blog post, that’s a feature I’d like to see! I need to know that my code works 100% before it goes live!
We’re integrating Paypal’s Web Payments Pro into a new e-commerce site we’re building. To test, we set up our Paypal Sandbox account and began the process of setting up the Web Payments Pro account that we’d need. Interestingly, when I got to the part when it asked for a social security number, it wouldn’t validate the number. Also, there was no business owner address displayed there, which I believe was the cause of the issue. After about an hour and change on the phone trying to talk to the right technical person at Paypal, I was finally told that I could put in a fake social security number, as long as it began with ‘111’. Wow, awesome. Off and running. Now wouldn’t that be useful information in the development docs or maybe even on the site?
Ever since we launched YumDrop, we’ve been trying to find a way to not only get more eyeballs, but to increase conversions. Our site is really slick and from what we can tell, very usable. But the conversions still aren’t there. We’ve known for a while that the issue is marketing, or a lack thereof. Because of that, I decided to do some quick research tonight (yeah, never stop working…go figure) and found some really good articles. Hopefully you find them as insightful (and in other was reaffirming things already working well) as I did.
Another blog I found while searching for e-commerce conversion rate was by Rick Whittington. The first post of his I read was here. But when reading through the latest posts of his from the last few months, I found a bunch of other useful stuff, including some of the links above.