ShopSite Newsletter – August 2007

[AnonymousParticipant]

In this Month’s Newsletter:
* Cart Abandonment rates
* PCI Compliance
* Media folder permissions

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Cart Abandonment rates

Cart Abandonment is often a metric that many merchants use to determine the success of their online store. However, this measure of the percentage of visitors that purchase is quite an involved calculation, and is not a straightforward indicator of success or failure.

You might be surprised to hear that conversion experts consider a 6 to 9 percent conversion rate to be a success. The industry average is between 1 to 2 percent. These numbers may appear to be low, but when you consider what customers might be doing, the numbers make more sense.

Many customers are merely “window shopping”, putting things in the cart to see shipping rates, product options, or are just clicking around. Some want to see if there are any coupons, how the process might work, or may be slow to actually complete an order.

LexiConn offers a cart abandonment module for ShopSite Pro stores that can help analyze this metric, and provide insight into how customers are interacting with the shopping cart process:

http://www.lexiconn.com/ecommerce/shopsite/cart_abandonment.html

Next month we’ll look at ways you can help boost your conversion rate.

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PCI Compliance

Credit card companies have developed the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard, which they are now making a requirement for all merchants who sell products and services online. This program verifies that your company and your website/cart meet the standards set by Visa/Mastercard for securely handling credit card transactions. If you do not meet these standards, and have an incident involving the insecure handling of a credit card, you could face fines and the loss of your merchant account.

LexiConn is partnered with ScanAlert to offer a free PCI compliance service. This service offers a quarterly scan of your website, an easy to complete questionnaire on PCI compliance, and offers the reports and documentation showing your company to be fully PCI compliant. After the first year, the service is only $19 per year to maintain (normally $149 per year).

You may signup for the service online at:

http://www.lexiconn.com/pci/

In addition to PCI compliance, ScanAlert also offers a comprehensive “Hacker Safe” program that verifies your site is a secure place to shop. It allows you to display the well known “Hacker Safe” dynamic seal that is seen on over 60% of the leading e-commerce sites in operation today.

LexiConn’s partnership with ScanAlert allows us to help you resolve any issues that arise, and our partnership program offers a large discount off the regular price of the service. For more details, please visit:

http://www.lexiconn.com/hackersafe/

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Media folder permissions

If you use the ShopSite backoffice to upload and manage your images, then you will not run into any permission issues in the media folder. However, if you also use FTP to create sub-folders in the media folder, and use a combination of FTP and the ShopSite backoffice for uploading, you may run into a conflict with respect to file and folder permissions.

The ShopSite software runs with the permission of the web server. This permission set is different from your FTP user. In order for ShopSite to manage all your images, every folder in the media folder must be writable by ShopSite. If you create a folder via FTP, you will need to set the permissions on this folder to be world writable. This command is referred to as “CHMOD”.

Depending on which FTP program you’re using, you can often right click on a folder you created, and there will be a CHMOD or “Change permissions/attributes” option you can select. Then you set the world/everyone permissions to be writable (chmod a+w or chmod 777).

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