eCommerce Tools and Custom Programming Solutions
Our customer WTI (in association with Over The Top) has successfully re-launched their website using AspDotNetStorefront technology. WTI (aka Western Telematics, Incorporated) is a leading vendor of console servers and remote reboot devices. They pride themselves on providing “Industrial Strength Networking Hardware”.
I recently upgraded my development laptop from Vista (with a failing hard drive) to Windows 7 with a smoking fast Hitatchi 500Gb 7200k drive. I’ve been totally stoked with the perfomance increase (especially boot speeds) so far.
I’ve working through a number of issues getting IIS and VisualStudio playing nice together when I ran into a couple of problems that I didn’t find resolutions for easily online so I figured I should blog them out.
Our client Advanced Dental Designs (AD2USA.com) went live with their new AspDotNetStorefront website today. A hearty congratulations go out to the AD2USA team!
So you’ve gotten the keys to your eCommerce storefront from your designers and developers, but what comes next? Well, this question will depend largely upon how much work was done by the aforementioned boffins and artists but we’ll take a stab at outlining the required steps before you go live.
Just keep in mind that if you’ve found that some of this has already been taken care of for you, all the better. We will also be talking specifically about AspDotNetStorefront-based eCommerce sites but the principals are the same across just about any eCommerce storefront.
This may seem like a daunting task but it shouldn’t be. We are of the opinion that it is more important to get your site out there in a timely manner with a partial offering of your wares than to wait to launch while you meticulously craft every one of your product descriptions and other information. By launching early with a subset of your products and the bare minimum of content you
So, if you have categories that you haven’t added any products to (provided they aren’t direct linked from a non-dynamic navigation structure, unpublish them until you have product underneath them. If they are linked from your primary navigation structure AND that navigation structure isn’t generated automatically from the data base (there are many reasons to do this but that is fodder for a different post) you should craft the description for that category quite well with your keyword strategy in mind and update the standard “No Products Found message” to be something more witty so you don’t upset your customers when they see the message too often.
Similarly if you have products that don’t have images attached yet or you haven’t had time to write a good description of the product that works well with your keyword strategy, unpublish them until you have the time to correct these items.
In the coming days/weeks, I hope to follow this blog posting up with screencasts that will address many of these points specifically for AspDotNetStorefront to help customers learn some of the tips and tricks for moving around in the admin interface and complete these goals so they can concentrate more on making money and less on being a “content monkey.”
As always, if you have any LEGITIMATE questions or comment, please feel free to use the comments section below.
Many of my customers are having to ask themselves this same question. They know they want to have the best e-commerce platform out there (who doesn’t?) but the struggle in deciding which of the 4 platforms to choose from. perhaps I can help guide you through the decision process.
Are you planning on running your store inside of DotNetNuke? If the answer to this is yes, then you will for sure want the ML/DotNetNuke version of the software. If not, let’s move on.
Will your site be hosted on a 64-bit version of Windows Server in order to accommodate the volume of traffic your site is expected? If yes, keep in mind that the ML/64-bit version of ASPDNSF will not support certain payment gateways (Bank of America via Cybersource, CyberSource, IATS TicketMaster and PlugNPay). Also note that if are running your site on a 64-bit server, you can still run any of the other versions, you just won’t gain the speed that comes along with the full 64-bit system.
This narrows your search down to either ML/Express and ML version of AspDotNetStorefront. To make things easier, I’ll list a series of functions that if you can’t live without any ONE of them, then you should step up to the full ML version. We’ll start with what I think are the most important first.
To see the complete list you can see it at http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/t-features.aspx but we’ve found most of our customers can make a decision pretty quickly by working their way through the list shown above.
I got a Google Alert about an article posted recently by UK Developers over at WebOpius. The put together a nice little piece about how to get all three of these technologies up and running, and better yet, playing nicely together. This is the first of many posts by them on this subject. I very much look forward to seeing how the progress on this project as it may prove beneficial to my customers as well!
In case you aren’t familiar, ASPDotNetStorefront (ASPDNSF) is the leading e-commerce solution for the ASP.NET platform. Google Checkout is a competitor (of sorts) to PayPal while WebGains is an affiliate facilitator where merchants can create and manage an affiliate network to help sell more.
Some of you may be saying, but wait, doesn’t ASPDNSF have an affiliate program built in? Yes Virginia, it does. However, it is really more of a framework upon which to build your own affiliate program. Not only will an affiliate program like WebGains help you manage your relationship with your affiliates, but you will also have access to a ready market of engaged affiliates rather than having to drum them up and vet them yourself.
Here’s a link to the original article: http://www.webopius.com/content/249/integrating-webgains-affiliate-network-with-aspdotnetstorefront/
Do you have experience working with affiliates with your e-commerce platform? If so, please feel free to share your experiences, good and bad!
Here’s what you need to know about Canada’s Anti-Spam Bill that was recently introduced. Three are some significant differences between this and the US CAN-SPAM legislation that businesses will want to keep in mind as they pursue their marketing plans involving email communications with customers and potential customers alike.
Canada’s Electronic Commerce Protection Act (ECPA) is expected to have rules regarding opt-in and opt-out procedures, consumer privacy and sender identification. Of course will all legislation, there is some ambiguity in the wording so you should use the links at bottom to make your own interpretation or contact counsel.
Permission is Required
The primary difference between ECPA and CAN-SPAM is inherit in the acronyms. The US version does not require advance permission to send the emails. Basically, you CAN SPAM provided you follow the rules that allow for opt-out mechanisms as well as real-world contact information. ECPA on the other hand prohibits the sending of commercial email without prior permission from the recipient. There are provisions however for implied consent so long as a relationship (business or non-business) can be established between the sender and the recipient.
SMS Messages Require Advance Permission
The ECPA lumps text and SMS messages into the same category so keep the elements of this law in mind for this type of communication as well.
Unsubscribes Must Stay Active for 60 days
You will be required to maintain active unsubscribe links in your outbound emails that are active for a minimum of 60 days. This is not a problem with EMM since the unsubscribe links are persistant.
Unsubscribes Must be Honored in Timely Manner
More importantly, they’ve set a deadline of 10 days in order to act on any unsubscribe requests. Note that CAN-SPAM allows for 10 business days while ECPA does not so you have less time under this proposed Candadian legislation. EMM will assist you in this manner in that the unsubscribe links embedded in the emails will automatically unsubscribe users when they click on it. This should be strong encouragement to also manage your bouncebacks to ensure that your customers don’t try and unsubscribe by replying to your mailing.
Individuals Can Sue Violators
ECPA contains provisions that allow for a “private right of action” that allows individuals to sue spammers up to $200 per item. This could have huge effects for businesses in violation as individuals could join together for class-action suits to create a substantial settlement. Of course, the government can also sue; in this case for up to $10 million!
How Do I Identify A Canadian Address?
Easiest way is to identify the addresses that end in .ca which is the Canadian Top Level Domain. You can easily target or exclude these addresses using our custom query feature if you wish to engage in a permission campaign on the external customer list. If you are collecting geographic information in your external mailing list, you can use Zip/Postal codes or state/province information to identify these addresses. Lastly, you can do IP address lookups on the site visitor’s IP address using a tool like ip2Location.com but again, if you are sending to your customers in ASPDNSF you should be fine as they have explicitly opted in.
Bottom Line
If you are working with our EMM product and working in your ASPDNSF customer base, you are covered. If you are using the external user base, you need to tread more carefully if the names were not collected on an opt-in basis. Between now and when the bill passes, you might wish to engage in a permission campaign to convert these addresses to a opt-in addresses.
We've been singing the praise of AspDotNetStorefront (ASPDNSF) for some time now on our blog and in discussions with potential and current customers. It is great to stumble across a few from another writer:
Give Your Online Business The Edge With The Best ASP Shopping Cart Software
These days, competition for those online dollars that consumers are increasingly reluctant to part with has gotten more ferocious than ever. That's why it's so important to give your online enterprise every advantage you can. There's only so much that any vendor can do to lower prices without cutting into their profits. Business owners, however, can increase their online business and make their site more effective in comparison to competitors by offering the best service that the Internet has to offer. Getting the right ASP shopping cart software, that is specifically customized for your site will prove to be a great investment.
One of the most obvious things that you can do to improve your business immediately is by streamlining the ordering process on your website. Face it; one of the biggest drawing cards that any Internet business has to offer is convenience.
However, if you have a clunky, ugly to look at, hard to use website that makes searching your inventory and ordering products a cumbersome chore, then there's no telling just how many potential customers you'll drive off.
Personally, I can't tell you how many times I've gotten frustrated and refused to use some online vendor because of how time-consuming and badly organized that company's ordering process was. What you need if you have an online business is the best software you can get. This will make ordering from your website a breeze. The easier your site is to use, the more word will get around.
I'm a firm believer in the old adage that word of mouth is the best advertising, even in the Age of the Internet and other electronic media. With money as tight as it is, and the futures of so many different businesses held in doubt, it may seem counter-intuitive to be spending money on something like new shopping cart software, but trust me, right now, it will be money that's well-spent and will continue to benefit your company and your bottom line for decades to come.
When you finally come to the realization that you really need that new software, here are some things to bear in mind:
- Expense: The most expensive software isn't necessarily going to be the best. Even if it advertises that it's got all the latest bells and whistles, cost in the software industry isn't necessarily related to the best of the best. Sure, you want software that's flexible to use and rich in features, but it's also got to be easy for your IT staff to install and maintain. Plus, you don't want installation that's going to be a system hog, either. Even though servers and peripherals have gotten less expensive, it's still important to get the biggest bang for the buck when you're buying software products for your enterprise.
- Adaptability: Aside from being economical to purchase and run, I think the next most important thing about shopping cart software is that it's got to be adaptable to many uses, both for your enterprise, and for your customers. For instance, does the software you're currently considering buying enable you to control your shopping carts, your content management, and your customer accounts? It's not enough that you can help your customers place their orders, it's essential that you can track their orders, your own inventories, and every step of the transaction until your product arrives at your customer's front door.
There's no point in buying ASP shopping cart software that doesn't do everything you need it to. Don't wind up piecing together a system from different vendors that may have compatibility and licensing issues. That will prevent your cobbled-together system from functioning at peak efficiency. It makes much more sense to buy one product that satisfies all of your needs and is expandable for the future growth of your company.
About the Author
Andy West is a writer for ASP Dot Net Storefront, an online resource for all your ecommerce software needs.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
And yes, ASPDNSF answers all those needs for you. Of course, your results will be best if you partner with a developer and hosting company that has a great deal of implementation experience with developing for AspDotNetStoreFront as well as hosting ASPDNSF.
One of our clients was facing a desire to move torwards placing videos or other flash objects into the product display pages of ASPDNSF. The introduction of a Tabbed UI provided a great framework for this but the same concept could apply to any of the product display XMLConfig package.
One of the first criteria was that it needed to be seamless to site visitors; when a video was available, it had to show but they didn?t want any thing ?trumpetting? the lack of video for a particular product. It also needed an easy to administer interface on the product edit pages. They didn?t want to jump through hoops to embed the javascript/flash code into a product description field since the WYSIWYG editor is not always kind to this type of content. More importantly, I didn?t want to have to create a new administrative interface to edit this new data.
Luckily, the product data store has a number of suitable fields that are currently available for custom use. One of these is the MiscText field. Thankfully, the stored procedure used by this XMLPackage uses the aspdnsf_ProductInfo stored procedure already retrieves this value so we won?t have to make a change to the stored procedure. Making a small change like adding another field to the stored procedure?s SELECT statement is very easy to do but we always try and keep an eye towards ease of upgrades. When a newer version of ASPDNSF comes out, the fewer changes we have to make to stored procedures the better.
So, if you look at the XMLConfig package for the Tabbed UI, you?ll see that each of the tabs is defined by a list item in an unordered list (for the tab iteslf) and a div for the page that is presented when the tab is clicked. Below you?ll find the additional LI that we added to get the tab to show up. You?ll notice that the LI is wrapped up in a conditional xsl:if statement that checks to make sure we have any content in the MiscText field. If it is empty, the tab isn?t shown.
<xsl:if test="aspdnsf:GetMLValue(MiscText) != ''"> <li> <a href="#" rel="video"> Video </a> </li> </xsl:if>
Of course we could created the word video as a string resource and called it using aspdnsf:StringResource(‘product.tabUI.videotab’) but the client assured me that they had no intention of changing their mind on the text (we?ll see).
Next we?ll need to define the tab to contain the video. Again, we?ll be creating this div conditionally:
<xsl:if test="aspdnsf:GetMLValue(MiscText) != ''"> <div id ="video" class="tabcontent"> <xsl:value-of select="aspdnsf:GetMLValue(MiscText)" disable-output-escaping="yes" /> </div> </xsl:if>
And that is all you need to do really. With minimal effort and only 12 lines of code, you?ve added added a new container for ?difficult to present and edit? data in your product pages.
If you?ve got any thoughts about this or questions, please use the Comments below to carry on this conversation.
I received an email from an EMM customer today asking about how best to advise HIS client when it came time to talk about the value of Enhanced Mail Manager for ASPDotNetStorefront versus hosted services like Constant Contact. Aside from the obvious cost discussion (a HUGE factor for many small businesses) here is the rest of what we discussed via email:
Thanks Jonathan for your continued support of EMM.
Has your client done side by side testing of open counts with their mailing list in Constant Contact and in EMM? Seems to me this would be the best possible comparison. It would give them a solid foundation for a discussion about where they are getting the most bang for the buck.
I’ve done everything in software that I can to minimize the likelihood of filtering based on common information (ie : it is better to NOT encode graphics as attachments, always have a text and HTML version done as multi-part, include proper CAN-SPAM support, etc).
However, there is much about filtration that cannot be addressed in software and must be addressed by either a service bureau (like CC) or by the organization doing the mailing. The following items will all contribute to mail getting through:
- Ensuring that the IP address of the sending mail server is not on any real-time blacklists or shared by any spammers if in a shared hosting environment. IF your website is hosted in an environment that has strikes against it for clients who spam, you would want to use the mail settings in ASPDNSF to ensure that your mail is going out through that mail server rather than through the web server’s SMTP server. This is one of the services I?ve used in the past to check up on this: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
- Ensure that your mail server can be matched forwards and reverse DNS to eliminate "No Reverse DNS Pointers Found" type of bounces.
- Setting up proper SPF and SenderID DNS records for the sending email domain. SenderID and SPF are becoming more and more critical for acceptance of email at ISPs and corporate email hosts. You can learn more about it here: http://www.openspf.org/SPF_vs_Sender_ID
- Keep your mailing list clean. This means immediately remove not only manual unsubscribe requests, but probably more important is to process bounce backs immediately.
- While EMM will accept one-click unsubscribe requests (as required by CAN-SPAM requirements) it doesn’t automate processing of bounce backs or manual unsubscribes. We do, however make it easy by accepting a list of email addresses to unsubscribe as well as attributing the type of unsubscribe to a specific mailing for reporting purposes.
- By running a "dirty" list, you will find that your emails are much more likely to get bounced since ISPs have been known to "shut the door" temporarily or permanently to mail servers who consistently attempt mail delivery to large numbers of old or invalid mailboxes. This helps protect not only against dictionary spam attacks but also against old data lists.
- Consider subscribing to reputation system/service. While I’m not certain if these actually work or not, there are a number of people who swear by their effectiveness. An example of this is GoodMail: http://www.goodmailsystems.com/. Nothing against the quality of their service, I?d have to have a pretty darn good reason to subscribe to a service like this as I feel that just contributing to a system that could tier email deliverability based on how much money you want to spend is just plain wrong.
Some of these items are set once and forget it kind of things while others will require a little bit of work on the part of merchant to keep their reputation clean. That is why it is always good to immediately monitor the results of each mailing (true for in-house or outsourced). You can spot trends in your bounce backs as well as in your open rates using EMM’s reporting features.
I hope you find this information helpful. If I can help in any other way, please feel free to shout!
MJG