Archive for the ‘Ecommerce’ category

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UserFly Usability Checking via Screen Recording

March 9th, 2010

UserFlyI recently found UserFly.com, a service which will record videos of the visitors to your site, allowing you to play them back and watch where users go (and how they move their mouse around on the screen).

I was flabbergasted at how easy this was to use – I tried the free version and had recordings going in 2 minutes. It was that easy. It has to be seen to be believed.

As a techie, I’d tried to build something similar 4 years ago. Owing to my own limitations, as well as the much more fractured browser landscape 4 years ago, I never got this working to the level that I liked. Having attempted just a small portion of what userfly is doing, I can truly appreciate the engineering that went in to this service.

If you’re interested in testing it out, please follow my referral link (yes, it’s an affiliate link). They offer a free version to get going, and paid versions start at $25/month $10/month. The $50/month plan would be what I’d recommend if you have any ecommerce or security, as it will handle SSL pages. But the free or $25/month packages might be fine for basic sites.

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Posted in CSS, Design, Development, Ecommerce, Software, Testing, Web

Magento with Facebook Connect

August 6th, 2009

My brother wrote a Magento module recently – the Facebook Connect Module.  It’s pretty straightforward, and allows you to make it easier for shoppers to enter in their information in to your Magento store.  When checking out, they can connect their Facebook info, using the Facebook Connect process, and their information will be imported in to your Magento store.  It’s not free – there is a charge for this, but the source code is included, not obfuscated or encrypted, so if you need to extend it or make customizations, you can.

Possibly one of the more interesting things it does: “Alerts users via Facebook notifications to changes in their order.”  This sort of social networking integration with ecommerce sites will possibly be more common in the future – perhaps some other sites are doing it already that I don’t know about?

You can also just sign up for the mailing list to be notified about new features and such over at http://biz.metrofindings.com/main.page/facebook_connect_magento_module.html

What other sorts of Magento tie ins to social networks would you like to see?

9 comments »

Posted in Ecommerce, PHP, Software, Web

How do I get the attention of someone at QVC ?

February 17th, 2009

I’m really not sure how to get the attention of someone at QVC in their tech dept.  I’ve tried many things, and nothing has yet worked.  My problem – described earlier – is still not better.  My thinking has shifted slightly – I think this is more likely an Akamai problem, but it’s still affecting QVC customers.  How many?  Not sure, but multiple other people have bothered to register and comment over at HSN’s forums.  Logging problems for QVC over at HSN.  Brilliant!

So, do I need to write “QVC SUCKS!” on my blog to get someone to notice me?  Given all the social media tools out there, it’s not that hard to monitor mention of your company (but why didn’t they monitor and pick up my mention yesterday?).  I wasn’t that blatant before, so I guess “QVC SUCKS” may me the thing that gets me a call back.  Hopefully.

QVC has a Twitter account.  Someone yesterday from their “behindTheQ” twitter account *did* reply back to me saying they’d try to find someone to help.  That’s a start.  ‘course, me being used to twitter, I typically expect a response in minutes, not hours, but, again, it’s a start.

QVC doesn’t really suck.  If they sucked, I wouldn’t bother trying to log in, now, would I?  Actually, this is all for my wife’s benefit, not mine.  Given that whatever outage that’s caused this problem is affecting countless other people for days (weeks in some cases), I can think that this has likely cost QVC *at least* thousands, if not tens of thousands.  For a company that does millions in an hour, though, this probably isn’t even showing up on their radar.  And now I’m trying to make it show up there.

Blip blip blip.

QVC – I can be reached at mgkimsal@gmail.com or 919-827-4724.

UPDATE:

http://community.qvc.com/topic/Qreg-Did/Does-Problem/5800076325

Many other people who *can* log in are still reporting problems with pictures loading slow.  This seems more and more to point to an Akamai problem.

UPDATE 2:

For what it’s worth, I think this might be some sort of SSL accelerator misconfiguration or blocking on their end (QVCs).  Can’t prove it of course, but just a hunch.  Or something else misconfigured in incoming routing on SSL traffic.  @behindTheQ replied to me and said they’d fwd info to IT.  Perhaps they’ll read this and help out!

8 comments »

Posted in Business, Ecommerce, Web

Why don’t ecommerce companies offer tinyurl-like services?

June 12th, 2008

I just saw someone tweet that they’d received something in the post, and linked to a URL shortener service.  It redirected to Amazon.  Now I realize that Twitter is a pretty new service, but with mobile rising, I think we’ll see a need for short URLs more and more.  Couple that with the slightly extra privacy you get with a shorter URL (someone needs to actually visit the link to know you’re pointing to furry handcuffs, for example), and the mindshare Amazon would keep by having “amazon.com/6hjw89eh9e7hds”, and the extra metrics they’d be able to capture with that (add a user key in the short URL) and this makes sense to me.  The top of every Amazon product page would have a “Short URL” property available to cut/paste/whatever.

Someone should embed this in their ecommerce system to acknowledge and emrace Twitter, Plurk and the coming wave of microblogging platforms.

9 comments »

Posted in Ecommerce, Web

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Magento book review found

June 8th, 2008

I found a review of my brother’s Magento book earlier today.  Starting off with “However, I’m not really the type of person to give accolades unless something is absolutely stellar. As such, this post will primarily be about the shortcomings of the book” I wasn’t particularly surprised that there was more of a focus on negatives rather than positives.

Bearing in mind that I’m not the author, but I did see the process of writing the book, and helped put Mark and php|a together in the first place, I’ll address a few of the issues that Brandon brings up.

First to market

This became a bigger issue than I thought it would be.  Varien promised last year that they’d have a 1.0 release in the first quarter of 2008.  Look when Magento 1.0 was released – March 31, 2008.  It doesn’t get any more ‘down to the wire’ than this.  From what I see, they shipped to hit a release date, and (for what it’s worth) QA seemed to take a back seat.

What does this have to do with the book?  php|a had committed to a certain ship date, which created a certain due date for Mark.  About 2 weeks before the final Magento release, there was a very large codebase change, which affected large parts of what Mark had written.  Having to go back and check/recheck the code, rewrite sections that were now technically ‘wrong’, and rewrite explanations about how some of the internals were working all took time which may have been better spent in other areas.  This is not to throw the whole thing on php|a, or to point the finger at any one person, it’s simply what happened.

Missing info

This was sort of a design decision, compounded by the time decision.  There was an effort to avoid rehashing a lot of what’s already been written in the online Magento guide.  This may have been taken too far, in that Brandon felt there were things missing from explanations.  There was likely an assumption that the reader would be reading the book in conjunction with having gone through online material as well.

Complexity

“However, the construction of a completely custom module seems so complex that Kismal either does not include all the finer nuances or simply cannot coherently describe its creation—a sign that does not particularly bode well.“  Doesn’t bode well for which party?  The book, or Magento itself?  I can tell you my own non-author impressions that Magento is likely far more complex than it needed to be for a 1.0 release.  The phrase “bit off more than they could chew” springs to mind.  I also understand that some of the complexity comes from rewrapping much of the ZendFramework with Magento’s code.

I fear I’m going to start to ramble, and I’m certainly not a Magento expert so I’ll leave some of the more specific issues to other people.

It may be hard to take what I say without a few grains of salt – Mark is my brother and we’ve worked together for a number of years.  Those two points alone probably disqualify me from any claim of ‘objectivity’ (I’m not try to say I’m 100% objective either).  There were certainly issues that, given more time, I know Mark would have wanted to delve in to.  Also, given the fairly rapid changes that were happening in Magento, the curse of technical books in general – being out of date before the book is published – is something I know Mark was aware of, and I think tried to deal with as best as possible.

Having said all that, it was still good to find this first book review.  I’m looking forward to reading more, and eventually reading some of my own book, the PHP Job Hunter’s Handbook.

23 comments »

Posted in Book, Ecommerce, Software, Web

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New PHP book – Guide to Programming with Magento upcoming releaes

May 15th, 2008

So, tomorrow (technically *today* in Australia!) is the date for PDF delivery of my brother’s new book – the PHP Architect’s Guide to Programming with Magento (I think that’s the full title).  More details here.  I’m really excited for him, as I know he put a lot of work over the past several months learning Magento and writing the book.  The biggest challenege was dealing with the underlying architecture changes that the Magento team applied in various versions leading up to (and including after!) the 1.0 release.  In some cases, there’s no actual behavioural change, but in describing the functionality, Mark would necessarily describe what was giong on under the hood.   Sometimes those descriptions needed to change to reflect the new functionality, even if to the end user nothing changed.  That’s life when dealing with software, especially writing about beta software – it’s quite a moving target.  If you’re deailng with Magento, I’m sure the book will save you some time getting up to speed with the various aspects of Magento which might seem a bit overwhelming at first.

On a related note, php|a got back to me regarding my book.  I had it turned in to them about 2 months ago now, and it’s been ‘on hold’ while some other projects (like the Magento book) took precedence.  My “PHP Job Hunter’s Handbook” should be out some time in the next month, assuming no major changes.  I wish I’d known about this change in schedule, as I’d probably have gone back and done some more revisions.  Having said that, there always has to be *some* cut off point, and then was probably as good a time as any.  I’ll post more when my book is available too.

3 comments »

Posted in Book, Development, Ecommerce, PHP, Software

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facebook or linkedin app I’d like to see

April 25th, 2008

TechCrunch has a story on a recently funded Facebook app which, frankly, seems stupid.  Buying and selling ‘friends’ as ‘pets’.  People have already sold me somehow on Facebook, and I just ignore it.  I don’t get it.  I thought MySpace was the place for stupid/flitty ideas, but it seems Facebook is moving in that direction, having grown their network to towering heights.

So, perhaps LinkedIn is the place to turn for apps with some sense, but I don’t see that you can write your own apps for LinkedIn, yet, anyway.  Can you?

What I’d like to see is a time tracking/project tool with invoicing capabilities.  This would turn LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever into a social business portal.  Guru and ODesk and others seem to be doing OK with this, but you’re relying on people you’ve never met, with a race to the bottom in terms of price competition from overseas.  If LinkedIn had a job/work type thing which would allow people to put out small chunks of work, the ability to find quality, recommended people from inside your own network would be huge.  They already have a ‘jobs’ thing, but it’s pretty limited.  Extending it to allow project tracking would rock.  However, it’s probably outside of their core focus, and it may never happen.

Will someone be able to build something like this on top of Facebook instead of more stupid ‘zombie’ apps?  Technically, probably yes, but I fear Facebook has devolved so much in to a place where professional stuff won’t ever take place on any real scale.  Am I wrong?

2 comments »

Posted in Blogging, Business, Design, Development, Ecommerce, Ideas, Society, Software, Web

New Magento module for manufacturers

April 16th, 2008

A new module for Magento was put out in to early release today.  The module provides “made to order” functionality for ecommerce shops which need to provide custom ordering capabilities for ‘just in time’ manufacturing. From the module author:

The MTO module allows users to enter in specific dimensions in for any product and that information is saved to the line item in the order. Highlighted features include:

  • Ranged dimensions
  • Fractional inch support (1/4, 1/8, 1/16, etc.)
  • Height, width and depth

Check it out, test it out if you can, and please provide some feedback.

5 comments »

Posted in Ecommerce, PHP

Latest Magento released

March 12th, 2008

Magento has a new release today, and there’s a lot of features/fixes in there.  The neatest one to me was

Added zend cache backends for apc and memcached by Mark_Kimsal

cause that same Mark Kimsal is my brother.  :)

The link above points to the full announcement, but here’s a sample of some features in this release:

  • Add simple products while editing super products
  • Create attributes during adding/editing product
  • Product images multiple upload and management tool
  • Placeholders, watermarks and dynamic image resizing with GD
  • New implementation of catalog category tree for increased performance
  • Improved attributes & attributes editing
  • Inline Translations
  • Packing slips & invoices PDF print-outs with control over logo and address
  • Catalog models and collections has been rewritten
  • New admin dashboard implementation
  • RSS alerts & notifications admin and customer
  • Product price and stock status alerts subscription
  • Improved price rules management
  • Price and tax displaying configuration
  • Localizable transactional emails
  • Full order comment history in admin
  • Added a number of reports, including sales report, newsletter subscribers export

3 comments »

Posted in Ecommerce, PHP

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Ecommerce system ideas

January 2nd, 2008

So Magento has the hot buzz in the PHP community right now as the next big ecommerce system.  I’ve not done much with it beyond poke around in the code.  My brother Mark has been doing a long term project based on Magento doing a lot of custom work on top of it, and has told me many points, both good and bad, about it.  Biggest drawback I see right now, in general, is speed, but there are some pipeline processing decisions that didn’t make much sense either.  Those may be changed, as it’s still a beta product, so nothing is quite set in stone yet.

While chatting this evening about Magento and ecommerce in general, we started trying to think of ways to somehow tie ecommerce systems in with the power of, for lack of a better term, the ‘blogosphere’.  I’m not crazy about the term, but I mean more than just ‘blogs’ as journal entries.  With the advent of trackbacks, pinging services and other automated systems, publishing via blogs has the ability to get your content automatically spread around to a number of search indexing systems *very* quickly.  I occasionally have done a Google search (not a blog search, just a regular web search) on a topic I blogged about just one hour earlier and it can be found at the top of the Google results.  Putting content into a parseable RSS format, and coupling that with trackback and ping processing, gives you an easy pipeline in to many search indexes.

So, given that, how can ecommerce systems use the current ecosystem to their advantage?  Two ideas evolved during our discussion earlier this evening, and I’ll outline them here briefly.

Publish a store blog feed of user feedback

There can be multiple ways this works, but simply generating RSS feeds of customer feedback on products (perhaps even leaving in BAD feedback!) would be a simple way of helping get the word out about your site.  By way of keeping the reviews flowing, automatically sending reminder followups to customers 1 week after their purchase would be a nice touch.  Offering 5% off their next purchase to fill out the review would likely help keep reviews coming in.  Ping the blog aggregator services regularly to get the feed out, but also let users subscribe to the feed.  “The feed” could be broken up multiple ways – a feed of all feedback, all product reviews, only reviews of certain products, etc.  I’m actually a little surprised that Amazon doesn’t already offer per-item RSS feeds, so I can watch the item for new reviews.

Accept incoming trackbacks from external blog reviews on product pages

My limited understanding of the whole trackback process is that a blog engine will send a specific HTTP request to a ‘trackback’ link to let that original link know the new blog entry is ‘backtracking’ to it.  This might be a little harder to do, but I don’t think it’d be impossible.  Any blog could link to a product page, and that product page would then hold links to externally-hosted product reviews.  Given that the data is in an easily parseable format, the external reviews could potentially even be included directly in the product page, if a reuse-friendly blog content license was used.  The obvious reason people might not want to allow this is because of potentially negative reviews.  However, I think the overall benefits would still favor allowing this sort of thing.  Long term, you’d be encouraging more inbound links, which is nearly always a good thing, no?

These were the first two ideas that came up, and we may chat more tonight about how to implement one or both of these in Magento.  Are there already similar features in other ecommerce systems I’m simply not aware of?   Wouldn’t surprise me, but at the same time, I try to keep an ear to the ground in this field, and I don’t recall seeing this sort of functionality.

6 comments »

Posted in Development, Ecommerce, PHP, Personal, Software, Web