Archive: ecommerce

So, 6am this morning (Wed 29 2012), a bunch of geeks eagerly awaiting the Raspberry Pi have killed the websites of both RS Components and Farnell Why, you ask? Because the servers were not prepared for the influx of visitors that such an announcement brings. Raspberry Pi themselves (a UK Foundation, like a Charity) were [...]

It may be obvious but after a discussion in the office we decided to put together a simple guideline for getting into e-commerce. This is a list of things that you need to do in order to start selling from your own web site. Get a Domain Name These are so cheap yet so fundamentally [...]

So now that everyone uses Google Shopping, Google are making life difficult for the merchants and they all have to jump through hoops. The current push from Google is enforcing some things that are very difficult for small companies to conform with :- * EAN Numbers – This is the BIG one, Google are making [...]

After the recent Sage Pay troubles, they offered a technical report which if requested they will send to you. Not sure why they created this extra step to get to this information so I thought I would post it here for general consumption: Sage Pay Technical Report — 3 & 4 March 2011 At 01:05 [...]

If you are testing out your SagePay integration, you need to be able to input some test card details that the test.sagepay.com system will accept. Here they are: or testing transactions on the Protx test server, use the following card numbers. NB: there are NO dummy cards to use on the Live server. Actual Live [...]

If you are struggling to understand the Batch Import file layout from the exceptionally sparse details supplied in the “Getting Started” document’s Appendix B which supposedly details the file layout, then this is the solution you need. It looks very much like there are simply some pages missing from this document. There is another document [...]

Amazon helpfully supply a java package called AMTU which does the grunt work of the XML integration for Amazon marketplace. With AMTU you can easily update products, stock levels, prices and also grab order info etc. Being based on Java, AMTU can run on pretty much any operating system. It uses a "hot folder" system [...]

If you are feeling lazy, or would like to build in some future proofness into your system, you can use the MySQL Desc query to get table column information and then use this information to create dynamic SQL insertion strings. For example: PLAIN TEXT PHP: $cols_query = db_query("desc table"); while($cq = mysql_fetch_assoc($cols_query)){     $cols[]=$cq; [...]

Check out this link for some handy little tools to help you get Google Checkout up and running properly. http://demo.globant.com/~brovagnati/tools/ More Reading:

The latest version (1.7) of Magento has been released and features native support of a real enterprise level ecommerce feature: A-B or Multivariate testing. This involves presenting slightly different versions of pages to portions of web traffic and then monitoring the effectiveness of each version. This method then allows you to fine tune your site [...]