Running an eCommerce website comes with its toll of responsibilities. One of the most important ones is website security.
Not taking all the necessary steps to keep your eCommerce website as secure as possible can have very serious consequences on your business.
As a general rule, there are 3 main elements to eCommerce website security. You should make sure you’re on top of them: (more…)
For those of you who are following us and keeping up with our company history, you know that we’ve setup a remote work environment and that we don’t have a physical office space any more. We mostly work virtually.
We’re using technology to communicate, collaborate, and achieve a lot! In particular, we use a bunch of web applications to do what we need to do and share what we want to share – some of them we’ve developed ourselves, some we’ve bought, and some are free. Project management, task management, time tracking, file sharing, chat, are just a few examples of what we handle through web apps.
But sometimes all these tools and technology just defeat the purpose. It kinda gets in the way. When you have a bunch of things you need done, but you don’t necessarily need to cooperate on these things, or track the time you spend on them, or be particularly organized, then there’s nothing better than a good old quick text document you use temporarily and discard when you’re done. As an example, here’s my to-do list from last Sunday (08/07): (more…)
In the United States, Post Office employees have a bad reputation. They’re notoriously unfriendly, cold, hostile and unhelpful. It’s hard to avoid feeling frustrated when you have to deal with arrogant staff – be it an employee of the Post Office, an abusive police officer, or a flight attendant who’s running his own little power trip on the passengers.
But then I ask myself – wouldn’t you also become angry, frustrated and bitter if you had a crappy job at a crappy organization? The work environment and the context you create within your company plays a major role in your staff’s happiness and professional satisfaction, which in turn is crucial to make your customers happy.
The Post Office doesn’t have a good context that would allow its employees and agents to thrive and be happy. And the atmosphere of bitterness spreads to the customers who don’t receive friendly customer service. If only you could be nice to people, they would put up with long waiting lines, complicated rules, and even expensive service! If the clerk apologizes for the wait and take the time to provide good customer service, that would make all the difference.
It’s so important to create a great company context where the members of your organization can strive and be happy. (more…)
When displaying new products in Magento (either on your store’s home page or anywhere else) the default number of new products that will display is 5.
To display more than 5 new products without modifying any core files, you can use the following method (here I display 8 new products):
{{block type="catalog/product_new" name="home.catalog.product.new" alias="product_homepage" template="catalog/product/new.phtml" _productsCount="8"}}
Where the “productsCount” number will determine how many new products will be displayed.
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When you go to a restaurant, what makes you enjoy the food is not just how good the food is. It’s the whole experience. What makes you come back again and recommend the place to others depends on much more than the quality of the food.
Tasty food and good wine will surely help. But the food is not enough to create great customer experience and to build a successful restaurant. The design of the place, the decoration, the tables and chairs, the music, the wait (or lack thereof), and in general all the elements that create a special atmosphere will have a significant impact.
Most of all, the restaurant’s staff will affect the success of the business more than any other factor. But for whatever reason this is the one thing so many restaurants don’t pay enough attention to. And that’s too bad. Often staff hiring and training is done too quickly in the restaurant industry.
The food tastes that much better when the staff is friendly, knowledgeable, and personal. What you want from your waiters is to be passionate and proud about the food they serve.
The same goes for most products and services. It’s not enough to have the best product in the world – you have to provide a great experience for your customers. Awesome customer service, flexible return/refund policy, and easy shopping experience is as important as the product itself. (more…)
“User success rates on e-commerce sites are only 56%, and most sites comply with only a third of documented usability guidelines. Given this, improving a site’s usability can substantially increase both sales and a site’s odds of survival.” From Did Poor Usability Kill E-Commerce? by Jakob Nielsen.
He also writes that “E-commerce sites lose almost half of their potential sales because users cannot use the site. In other words, with better usability, the average site could increase its current sales by 79% (calculated as the 44% of potential sales relative to the 56% of cases in which users currently succeed).”
Many people don’t know there is an official Magento user guide that is accessible online for free!
The thing is that the link to it is hidden very deep inside the Magento official website and it’s almost impossible to find it! If you search for it on Google you’ll only get links to the (paid) Magento User Guide ebook or some other pdf, or to some random wiki pages that belong to the online user guide but from which you will not be able to navigate to the other pages of the online user guide.
I don’t know if this was made on purpose to push people to buy the ebook, or if this is just some sort of navigation and SEO mess, but here is the link to the official (and free) online Magento user guide for you to enjoy:
Dear Content Thieves,
I recently stumbled upon one of the recent articles I’ve written here posted on one of your sites. There was no mention whatsoever of the original author. My content was posted on your site as if it was your own. Like if you had written it yourself.
At first I felt pretty angry – couldn’t you at the very least link back to the source?
I started thinking… how much of our content are you guys stealing and publishing as if it was your own? So I searched on Google for short extracts from some of our latest posts. The results were pretty astonishing! There are tons of content thieves like you out there! Much more than I’d expected.
Now it’s one thing if you quote someone and link back to the original source. That’s totally fine with me. But steal my content and publish it like if it was your own? That’s ugly, ain’t it?
If you think about it though, you’ll realize that being a content thief doesn’t really benefit you. When you steal content, or in general when you use someone else’s work like if it was your own (content, design, code, etc), you position yourself one step behind your competition.
By always copying and looking for other people’s stuff, you’re constantly trying to catch up with your competition. You’ll always stay a step behind.
If you want to make someone else’s content available on your site – just include a link to the source! Your readers will appreciate you more for it. You’ll gain credibility and your audience will widen. People like transparency and appreciate being exposed to new sources. They’ll come back to you for more, hoping they’ll discover some new sites and authors.
It just pays more to be honest.
Cheers!
Noam.
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This is another popular question. Often you want to show items on a CMS page rather than a regular category page. But you still want to have the layered navigation to filter results like it appears by default with Magento at the category level (when listing products).
To add Magento’s layered navigation to a CMS page where you’re showing items simply edit your CMS page in the admin – under the “Design” tab put this code:
<reference name="left">
<block type="catalog/layer_view" name="catalog.leftnav" before="-" template="catalog/layer/view.phtml"/>
</reference>
That will show the layered navigation at the very top of the left column on your CMS page. Of course make sure your CMS page layout is “2column with left bar” (under “layout” in the “Design” tab). (more…)
While building Noam Design and helping other businesses take off, I’ve learned a thing or two about entrepreneurship and about developing a business. Here are 6 mistakes I find particularly hard for entrepreneurs to avoid: (more…)