We sometimes hear that ShopSite ® can take a long time to complete a full publish of web pages for large ecommerce stores. By large I mean stores that have 50,000 or 100,000+ products in ShopSite. By a long time, it’s usually one hour or more.

In fact, we recently received an email from a ShopSite store owner hosted somewhere else that said a publish was taking over 2 hours to finish! The store has around 100,000 products.

None of this gels with what we’ve seen…

It’s only a few days into the new year, and the US Postal Service (USPS) has managed to cause some major issues for many ecommerce merchants. What looked like a simple, straightforward update on January 2nd turned into a big mess for shopping carts that relied on real-time rates from USPS.

Many computer users are familiar with backing up their files, whether it’s photos on their home computer, or files on their website – but usually the urge to back up files occurs just after you lose something. It’s just like saving all the phone numbers on your cell phone – when does the thought about saving them come to mind? That’s right – just after your phone turns into a paperweight!

This article will touch on a few tips regarding how to easily back up and restore some of the most edited files on a ShopSite store – the templates.

When it comes to getting customers to review the products they ordered, there a few things to do, and a few things to definitely avoid. Here’s the 411 on getting this right the first time.

Google loves to make the web a faster place. They are obsessed with fast websites. So obsessed that they’ve made page speed one of the ranking factors for their search index (but remember there are over 200 ranking factors, so it’s not the end-all and be-all of search ranking).

And now Google has released an add-on for web servers (Apache) that aims to make websites even faster.

Ordoro, a new order management and fulfillment company, offers a web based service to ecommerce merchants to manage their orders and inventory. Ordoro integrates seamlessly with the ShopSite ® ecommerce platform.

I’ve been working closely with Ordoro’s team to fine tune their integration with ShopSite. We also have a number of ShopSite clients using their service right now to manage orders. I’ve been impressed with what Ordoro has to offer small and medium sized merchants. Jagath Narayan, who is one of the owners, took a few moments to answer three questions I had about order fulfillment. Here is the Q&A.

Sending email campaigns to existing customers is an excellent way to increase recurring business – whether you’re sending out news that you have a new product, you’re running a special, or you’re sending a discount coupon – emails to your customer base allow you to keep in touch and remind them of your business.

Obtaining that list of email address can be cumbersome or simple – and with ShopSite it’s quite simple. In this article we’ll review what settings you’ll turn on to provide your customers with an opt-in checkbox and how to export the details of those customers so you can use them in your mailing list program.

There are a number of ways to complete a test order in ShopSite. Here are a few options depending on how you process payments in ShopSite.

A recent Gomez study on website performance metrics found that 32% of consumers will abandon a website if it’s too slow. That’s almost one third of all shoppers!

A more alarming statistic: 37% of people surveyed said they would NOT return to a slow website. You could be losing more than a third of first time buyers if your site is not snappy.

Is your web host causing your site to be slow?

Ever wonder why the shipping zip/postal code is asked for on the initial shopping cart page in ShopSite? Here are the 7 reasons that would cause this to happen…