ChaseSagum.com » shopping cart

A Look At OpenCart

Chase — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 21:48:14 +0000

OpenCart is an open source PHP based e-commerce platform for building an online store. It has many of the basic functions that other open source carts have, it’s search engine friendly, and it has a visually appealing backend interface. The community behind it is relatively small still so there are still only around 80 total extended contributions that you can add on too.

You can check out the demo and give it a test run yourself. You will notice that the backend has a really nice simple design and is very very easy to use. I did some research in their forums and looked through some of the site examples that were running OpenCart. I found 3 really good websites that give good examples of the abilities this cart system has.

1. Gorgeous George

2. Beautyspot

3. Lytmed.dk

After looking at these sites it made me even more interested in OpenCart and actually using it on my next shopping cart project. It’s something worth considering for sure! Check out OpenCart and let me know whaty YOU think!

Affiliate Program App for Magento

Chase — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:00:54 +0000

Are you looking to setup your own Affiliate Program for something that you are selling online? Well if you are willing to use the new and slick Magento open source shopping cart,Ã‚Â there is a free and open source solution for you for creating your own affiliate program. It’s a component for Magento called Affiliates For All and it’s completely free and open source.

Affiliates for All is highly configurable. You can set:

a fixed commission rate or a percentage,
the affiliate cookie lifetime,
the currency, and
whether commission is paid for the life of a customer or just for the first order.

Some other really cool features to take note of are:

Affiliates for All will (optionally) email affiliates with details of new orders and approved commissions.
Affiliates for All provides your affiliates with many reporting features. They can see graphs of orders and revenue over time. They can view and download lists of orders. If you want to, you can pass customer names and email addresses to the referring affiliates, allowing for further marketing efforts.
Affiliates for All has a user interface similar to Google Mail. Just like Google Mail, this is achieved with AJAX, but you can use Affiliates for All without understanding the details.

This is a really cool open source application, similar to which you will not find anywhere! There just is not really any good open source affiliate applications out there. And this one appears that it could eventually stand head and shoulders above the rest. Check it out.

Magento Version 1.1.3 Release

Chase — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 22:10:35 +0000

Magento has just released a new version of it’s open source e-commerce/shopping cart. The version is 1.1.3 and has fixed a few bugs from version 1.1. Here are a list of those fixed bugs:

Fixed PayPal direct/express/standard errors and shipping calculation when only virtual products are in cart
Fixed internal redirects validation for secure URLs
Fixed saving product with custom options in multiple stores (Bugs #5833 and #6269)
Added HTML escaping in search queries in admin dashboard
Added displaying maximum allowed Dataflow upload file size according to server settings
Fixed Configurable Products stock deduction
Fixed minimal MySQL version checking in installation wizard
Fixed admin order refund – base tax amount was not stored after refund
Fixed single page checkout issues in modern theme
Improvements to the iPhone theme for PayPal and Virtual Products support

PrestaShop Releases Version 1.0

Chase — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:26:20 +0000

Version 1.0 STABLE has been released officially by Prestashop – the open source ecommerce shopping cart solution. This is a big deal. It provides another open source competitor to the traditional Zencart and the up and coming Magento.

How You Can Contribute

The PrestaShop project has just opened up a Bug Tracker so that users can submit bugs that they find on the cart system and report them. The only way this becomes beneficial though is if people contribute bugs to it. So as you are using the system keep that in mind.

Magento Open Source 1.1 Released!

Chase — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:57:32 +0000

The Open Source Magento Ecommerce system has just come out with a new production version of 1.1! This new version has some new advacements/features that are very interesting. Check it out.

More product-types

With Magento 1.1 you can now create a few new product types. Bundles most commonly used in the “built to order” product model. And Virtual Products – products that don’t require shipping information.

More ways to configure products

Custom Product Options – allow merchants to designate a SKU to a base item and add attributes instead of having to create a unique SKU for every combination of options (simple products).
Personalized Products – a new product configuration feature in Magento 1.1 that allows customers to personalize products by adding images or text, such as embroideries, engravings, etc.

Integrate with any application via Web Services

Magento 1.1 features a new Webservices API with methods for easy integration between Magento’s Catalog, Customer and Sales modules and any third party application. This appears to be something similar to what Drupal has with their “Drupal API”.

Speeding up the process(ing)

One of the main goals for Magento 1.1 was to examine bottlenecks in the
platform and improve performance. In the production release of Magento
1.1 performance was improved by as much as 40% in the catalog and sales
modules, and by optimizing when and how data loads, responsiveness of
the Admin UI was also increased significantly. This is an important one. One of the downfalls of the previous versions of Magento were all the complaints about how slow it was. Hopefully this actually translates into some faster page loading.

If you’re not sure what Magento is you can read an article I wrote a few weeks back titled “What Open Source Shopping Cart Should I Use?” where I talked about Magento and some of it’s features and benefits.

The Best Free Ecommerce Template I Could Find

Chase — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:50:05 +0000

Many of you i’m sure are accustomed to dealing with many of the open source ecommerce/shopping cart applications and might understand what i’m about to explain to you. It’s so hard to find any good free templates/themes for any of these ecommerce applications. Most of them, especially OScommerce and Zen Cart are absolutely hideous looking right out of the box.

Free Ecommerce Theme from CSS Creme

CSS creme has put together a free CSS ecommerce template that looks pretty nice. It’s simple and coded together well so that you can customize it and use your imagination on top of what is already put together. If you are using an open source application like me, you will need to apply this template to your theme and make your customizations. But I know with me that this will save me some serious time on a few projects of mine.

Instead of recreating the wheel everytime I make a shopping cart website, I can build off an already CSS/XHTML built template and make my customizations after that. The free template comes with 3 pages:

Product Listing Template
Product Detail Template
Form Template (contact us)

That way you have enough to build off of with your Zen Cart theme or OScommerce theme or even Ubercart theme. This also could be a benefit if you are just putting together a quick shopping cart for a friend or relative for free, and you don’t have much time to put something elaborate together. Just throw this CSS template together with your theme and you are good to go.

How to collect credit card numbers securely online?

Chase — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:05:43 +0000

On the Webmasterworld.com forums I came across an interesting subject that I thought would be very helpful to many of you, since it was extremely helpful for me! A client of mine is interested in collecting credit card data from his customers through his website so that he can process orders offline. On the Webmasterworld.com forums in a thread titled “How to collect credit card numbers securely online?” a member of the community asked this:

I now accept customers’ credit card details by fax. I am wondering how to receive credit card info online and process them offline? how to store customers’ card info securely online? I do not use payment gateway, just collect and store creidt card details in a secure way online.
Can anybody give any suggestion.

The following is a response given back to a member of the community. THIS IS IMPORTANT INFO TO KNOW!

read up on PCI compliance – http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/pcicomplianceguide.html]PCI Compliance Guide. In a nutshell, this is a data security standard considered acceptable by credit card companies. It involves a rigorous auditing process that reviews your network security systems and methods of collection and storage of credit card information. This means your servers must be under your control, not on a shared or leased hosting, which is out of the reach for most merchants.

The second consideration is that you review your offline merchant account, you will likely be in violation of your contract if you use it for this purpose. This is why an online merchant account is structured differently and generally more expensive than an offline account.

The best option, really, is to relinquish yourself of this responsibility and set up an online merchant account, which places the responsibility of PCI compliance on them or the gateway that interfaces with the merchant account. You then only need to install an SSL cert on your web site and securely pass the info to them, without actually storing this data on your server.

Basically, don’t collect credit card data yourself. Make sure that it is being submitted securely to your Merchant Account Provider like Authorize.net. This puts the liability of holding credit card numbers in their hands.

But what if you don’t want the merchant account to bill the credit card right away? That’s what my client is asking for and that was a major question that I have. Here is another comment in the thread:

I do online processing and store ZERO credit card details, just the authorization information. What it sounds like you want to do since you post the sale later is to use AUTHONLY as a sales type online. With AUTHONLY it pre-authorizes the credit card which will Ã¢â‚¬Å“reserve” the amount specified, it will not actually bill the consumerÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s credit card. This process is used for Book and Ship sales transactions, where a merchant gets an order and at a later date, completes the transfer of funds.

Basically you go into the remote control panel for the credit card processor and complete and book the transaction later. 100% secure, NO sensitive credit card, NO details stored on your server or premises, nothing an employee or hacker can steal. Do anything less and you’re at risk and you don’t want to be at risk because fines from Visa can be nasty, like $50K or some other ugly amount to cover their costs of damage control, and you can lose your merchant account.

Summary
Do not store credit card numbers on your own server! If you need to collect credit card data from your customers, only to charge the card later use the AUTHONLY. That way you pass all credit card and personal information of your customer right on to your Merchant Account keeping your customers information safe and secure. You can then bill the credit card at a later date through your web based control panel for your merchant account.

Zencart: Checkout Without an Account

Chase — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:43:00 +0000

Are you looking to have your Zen Cart shopping cart give your customers the ability to purchase products without having to register for an account? Believe it or not, this is not currently an option with any default Zen Cart installation. It’s a beef that i’ve had with Zen Cart for quite some time! Why would you force people to create an account before making a purchase? What if the product you sell does not require such a thing?

There is a module I guess you can call it called COWOA which stands for “Checkout Without Account”. It gives the shopper another option to skip the account creation section and purchase anyway. The module requires the overwriting of some of the include files as well as an SQL injection. So you want to make sure someone with some technical expertise can help you out with it. Here’s what it looks like to the shopper:

I have actually used the COWOA for a Zen Cart shopping cart for a client of mine and it is working great. So if you are using Zen Cart, and need this type of functionality then use this. It will work great for you! Just make sure to follow the instructions carefully!

Some Info I Missed on Ubercart – Andy Lowe

Chase — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:42:08 +0000

Andy Lowe, a Ubercart Developer read my post I wrote recently on Ecommerce – which cart should I use? and had some comments on it. His comments and insight were very helpful and he provides some great information about Ubercart that many might not understand (including myself!). So I thought I would just repost his comment that he made on the article for your information:

Disclaimer: I am an Ubercart developer:

Chase, This is a great analysis! I have used, or at least tested all of these e-commerce systems and, for the most part, you are spot on. If it were me, I would recommend Zen Cart over OScommerce in almost every situation. For those people who donÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t know, Zen Cart is a fork of OScommerce. Zen Cart was forked for all the right reasons which I wonÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t go into, but the result is better code and a better community around Zen Cart IMHO.

Magento is a great stand alone cart. You are correct, it is a little resource intensive, but that is the price you pay for a flexible feature rich cart.

WP E-Commerce is a good solution for sites which are mainly blogging with a little e-commerce on the side. Not exactly feature rich, but easy to use and well suited to what most Word Press users need.

Warning: Ubercart sales pitch follows:
After years of looking at e-commerce solutions and running multiple e-commerce sites for a living, I arrived at one basic truth. A successful E-commerce site includes a good CMS. Her is how I arrived at this. Anyone can put up an e-commerce site. The hard part is getting sales. You wonÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t get sales without visitors. You wonÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t get visitors without search engine (Google) placement. You wontÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ get search engine placement without good, fresh content. You wonÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t be able to create good, fresh content without a Content Management System to manage it. Therefore a successful e-commerce needs good CMS integration. This is why we designed Ubercart to be fully integrated into Drupal. Not only does Ubercart gain good content from Drupal, but we also get all the great features, modules, and themes of Drupal.

Here are a few features Ubercart supports which Chase didnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t list:
Paypal & Google Checkout
Linkpoint API
Purchase with / without an account
Order / product import and export
Terms of service tool – (force accept)
Control redirection after adding product to cart
Newsletter Feature
Polls
Manufactures Block
Google Sitemap tool
A good rating and review system
Authorize.net integration
And many more.
For more information on Ubercart, go to http://www.ubercart.org

Peace
Andy

What Open Source Shopping Cart Should I Use?

Chase — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:41:37 +0000

There are many different variations of needs when it comes to your shopping cart! And there are a few good Open Source shopping cart systems, but depending on your needs will depend on what open source cart will suite you best. I have spent the last 7 days installing, configuring, testing, and researching each of these following open source cart systems. What you will read in this blog are some of my main findings in bullet points:

WP Ecommerce

Ecommerce plugin for WordPress
Best for a simple shopping cart – where a website is centered around something else and needs a shopping cart attached
Paypal & Google Checkout capabilities
Has option for shoppers to purchase without an account
Upgrade to Gold plan for Authorize.net gateway and multiple images for each product
Very very easy to use and train others on how to use

Prestashop

Great looking cart system right “out of the box”
Import mass products with a .csv file
great multi lingual capabilities
Terms of service tool – (force accept)
control redirection after adding product to cart
Suppliers Block
Great Newsletter Feature
Manufactures Block
Top Sellers Feature
PayPal Integration
Send to Friend tool
Feature Products tool for homepage
Google Sitemap tool
SMS Notifications Feature
Easy management for product features, attributes, and groups

OScommerce

Large community for modules and themes
Attributes more difficult to manage than other systems
Default display is not very good
A good rating and review system
Authorize.net integration
Lighter than Zen Cart
Paypal Payments Pro capabilities
Banner Manager

Magento

Only the Default, Modern, & Telescope themes available
Large file and database size
Very professional looking application
Great newsletter tool
Polls
Great related products tool
Up sells and cross sells
Multiple store management
Importing Wizard
Paypal
Authorize.net
Google Checkout
Best looking shopping cart right “out of the box”

Ubercart

For the Drupal content management system
Drupal themes apply
Best for sites that sell access to premium content
Great for sites that sell paid downloads
Anything where there is a community around a product

Zen Cart

Many Premium themes available to purchase
Linkpoint API
Authorize.net
Ugly out of the box
Horrible template structure
Group Pricing feature
Backend is very busy and difficult to train others on
Customer HAS to create account before purchasing a product

All of these highlighted things I mention here are of course excluding the very basics an Open Source shopping cart should have. Category and product manageability, Add to cart, checkout, SSL etc. My purpose in this research was to find out in what situation do I use one open source cart over the other. I think so far I have a pretty good idea!