a year in e-commerce

Just been investigating Barclays PingIt and to be honest am knocked out by the ease of use. As a result I reckoned it was something we wanted to offer at our Website which sells childrens party bags and Party Bag Fillers: Party Bag Kids.

This turned out to be a straightforward affair by assuming taht PingIt was a subclass of BigCommerce’s built in MoneyOrder payment method.

As the instructions allow HTML to be added this ends up with a instructions being available to allow funds to be “pinged”.

Next time you need pirate party bags give it a go.

As mentioned previously, I recently installed a livechat function on our Kids Party bags site using olark and bigcommerce.

This works great however it looks very wierd in our social shop in facebook, as a result I ended up modifying the text in the integration to disable olark in the social shop.

Before:

<!– begin olark code –><script type=’text/javascript’>/*{literal}<![CDATA[*/
window.olark||(function(c){var
...
olark.identify(...);/*]]>{/literal}*/</script>
<!– end olark code –>

After
<!– begin olark code –><script type=’text/javascript’>/*{literal}<![CDATA[*/if (window.location.href && window.location.href.indexOf("__socialshop")==-1) {window.olark||(function(c){var
...
olark.identify(...);}/*]]>{/literal}*/</script>
<!– end olark code –>

This diables olark in the soial shop.

… Enjoy

I recently installed a livechat function on our Kids Party bags site using olark and bigcommerce. love it!

One common technique that I have used in the past is using separate usbdomains for hosting larger static files. I recently ended up diong this with BigCommerce and Cloudflare to avoid pulling large content thru bigcommerce.

I did this recently with our Kids Party Bags site: PartyBagKids. This was done by creating a subdomain of partybagkids.co.uk and then using “rules” in cloudflare mapping certain elements to the subdomain via a 301. This means the page requests a resource but it is 301′ed to the image domain and is delivered locally. As I am running out of the UK this is worth doing for large assets. This also avoids pulling unrelated assets through cloudflare and lowers the TCO.

Just had a first look at Big Commerce API for accessing products.

This seems quite cool and appears to be a plain old xml API, I first came across this when I looked for a way of embedding products from partybagkids uk into blogs such as this one, and found a wordpress plug in that used this API unfortunately this appears a little buggy, and doesn’t handle nice Url’s such as http://www.partybagkids.co.uk/party-bag-fillers/

I’m guessing this because it uses version 1 API this means it can hook images up but not links. This looks straight forward enough to fix I may try given the time.

Just used Google Apps for the first time to get “real” email addresses for http://www.partybagkids.co.uk/

Very Cool

Using BigCommerce for Party bag Kids UK is great however there is one element which niggles me and others – namely the H1 issue that is dicussed here.

Basically BigCommerce generates nice H1 tags unless you have a image logo and then it disappears.

Others have suggested that this be fixed by chnage all H2′s to H1′s however this seems wrong as it is simply the H1 missing round the image.

as a result we modified the image logo fragment to deal with this and inserted the following:

BigCommerce redirects a non www. domain such as partybagkids.co.uk to the www version (www.partybagkids.co.uk) however this is done via a 302 (tempoary redirect).

According to google a 301 (perminent redirect) is what is needed.

To do this CloudFlare again came the rescue.

Using cloudflare, was able to set up 2 DNS records (www & @) to point at BigCommerce and our hosting respectively.

Then it was a matter of setting up a 301 on the hosting using apache.

Job Done.

Ok so having taken the decision to migrate The Little Treasure Box to Party Bag Kids UK the question is how do we do this without taking the store offline.

BigCommerce is sweet but the fly in the ointment is DNS this could take up to 48 hours to propagate.

The way we dd this was to utilize cloudflare – by the way Cloudflare you have a big fan here

To switch these domains I did the following – get things ready

• Hook Party Bag kids UK up to Cloudflare
• Leave that to propagate for 48 hours
• register partybagkids.co.uk and www.partybagkids.co.uk with google
• hook up some hosting for 301 redirects
• point www.partybagkids.co.uk to www.thelittletreasureboxcompany.co.uk using a 301 here I’m usiong virtual hosting on apache usin mod-redirect
• get a similar 301 ready for www.thelittletreasureboxcompany.co.uk
• export the current sitemap as xml

OK so no I have both domains on cloud flare and this ready to go as the cloudflare DNS is local I no longer have to worry about propagation – off to bed.

Kids wake me out the next day and Lucas has a swimming clas at 10am we have breakfast and decide to flip the sites.

• www.partybagkids.co.uk gets pointed at bigcommerce
• bigcommerce gets pointed at the new domain
• www.thelittletreasureboxcopmany.co.uk gets pointed at hosting

Test site – Job done off swimming.

So the searhc for a new domain took me to google insights for search which for the search term “party Bags” returned the following:

Crunching some number on this led us to the conclusion that the optimal domain would include Party Bags Kids UK in that order. As Google knows about pluralization then we plumped for Party Bag Kids UK (or www.partybagkids.co.uk) now comes the hard bit…

Wish us luck