ShopSite Newsletter – June 2008

[AnonymousParticipant]

In this Month’s Newsletter:
* FedEx realtime rate server maintenance
* ShopSite search and logging
* Javascript for shipping options

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FedEx realtime rate server maintenance

FedEx will be conducting maintenance on their production rate servers starting on Saturday June 14th at 10 PM EDT until 6:00 AM EDT on Sunday June 15th. During this time realtime FedEx rates will not be returned.

If your ShopSite store uses FedEx realtime rates exclusively, you will want to enable a temporary shipping option so that customers can still place orders during this maintenance window.

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ShopSite search and logging

If you have more than a handful of products in your store, then adding a search feature to your website is crucial to allow potential customers to easily find their desired items. However, just adding a search and not monitoring how it’s used will not be the most effective way to improve your site’s usability.

If you’re running ShopSite 9, there is a built-in feature to enable logging of searches by customers. If you’re running ShopSite version 8, we have an add-on module to enable this ability. This tool is a great way to see what customers are searching for, and more importantly, what they are not finding at your store.

By analyzing searches that return no results, you can quickly see if people are entering typos for product names, or using plural or singular words that are not being found for your products. Or, maybe they’re looking for items you do not have (but might want to add in the future). This is a treasure chest of information you can use to make your online store more successful.

Once you know what people are finding and not finding, you can edit the “search keywords” for a product under “Edit Product Info” and add common typos, plural/singular words, etc… to make searches more effective (this field is only used by the internal ShopSite search database). With ShopSite 9, you can also go under Preferences -> Search Settings -> Search Indexing and tweak the relevance weighting for name, sku, etc… to allow for more relevant search results being at the top of the page.

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Javascript for shipping options

We have added a tutorial on our website for using javascript to restrict certain shipping options from being chosen by a customer. It’s a simple example, but lays the groundwork for more complex scenarios with regards to shipping options.

http://support.lexiconn.com/news/viewtopic.php?t=289

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As always, feel free to contact us with any questions you may have. Complete contact and support options can be found at:
http://www.lexiconn.com/support.html

Sincerely,
- The LexiConn Team

[Author]

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