If you’re an ecommerce merchant that offers real-time shipping rates in your shopping cart, you know the pain that comes with a shipper you use being down or not working correctly…

Lost sales, incorrect shipping rates, frustrated customers, and lots of time trying to untangle the mess afterwards.

What’s worse is this usually happens when you least expect it. The good news is…

There are a few simple ways to know when these issues arise.

As of June 1st, having regular FTP enabled on your website invalidates PCI. The Payment Card Industry (PCI) is what governs the rules and regulations for securing credit card data.

If you’re an ecommerce merchant and accept credit cards, you are required to be PCI compliant. Failure to be PCI compliant can subject your company to fees and fines.

ShopSite ® released version 11 of its flagship ecommerce software two weeks ago. We knew it would be a popular update, as the new version contains a number of highly requested features, and many cool add-ons as well.

A little late with the top posts of May, but we’ve been crazy busy with ShopSite 11 upgrades.

I love the month of May. Time to plant new grass for the lawn, a taste of summer, and golf gets into “full swing” (pun intended).

Of course May also has some great ecommerce pages and posts, so check them out on your iPad while you’re lounging next to the pool.

Sometimes you want to display a simple list of products, but break the products into different categories. While ShopSite provides for different sorting options and you can even order the products on the page manually, there is no stock feature to break them into categories. However, this can be easily accomplished with 2 custom templates and an extra product field.

In this article we’ll review the settings, sample templates, and a demo page where you can see a working example.

The latest version of ShopSite ®, our favorite ecommerce software application, has been released. Version 11 brings a number of new features to the table. We’re very excited about many of them, and we think ShopSite merchants will be as well.

I thought I’d highlight a few of the big changes and some that might fly under the radar…

Last Tuesday was an exciting time for one of our clients. It was exciting for us as well.

eShave, one of our ecommerce hosting clients, appeared on the Today Show segment “Jill’s Steals and Deals”. This news segment features a few select products that have extreme discounts. It is very popular throughout the country, and can result in 250,000 or more visitors to a featured website in a few short hours.

PCI – The 3 letter word that is a 4 letter word to most merchants.

PCI Compliance has become a mandatory event for any business that accepts credit cards. But even after years of refinement and streamlining, it’s still an arduous task for many merchants. Especially the small business owners.

It doesn’t have to be this way…

Practical Ecommerce had a great article a few days ago about How To Increase Page Speed to Help with SEO. It has a number of tips and ways to monitor page speed.

Of interest to me was the end of the article where they list a few other areas for site improvement. These mostly focus on a site’s web hosting company. And this is often overlooked by many online merchants.

Unfortunately, it is one of the largest factors in improving site performance.

Are you using email newsletters to promote your store, but you don’t know if they are generating sales? Both Google Analytics and Urchin support ecommerce tracking and provide reporting that show revenue generated by a “source” – such as a newsletter campaign.

In this article we’ll review how to use custom URLs to track visitors coming in from a newsletter and where to view the corresponding revenue report.