I’m sure you know the old saying: “If you make something idiot-proof, the world will just build a better idiot”. Unfortunately it’s downright, 100% true, and I’d bet $5 that your store isn’t as idiot-proof as you think it is.
Last time I wrote about optimizing your e-commerce site for performance, and I focused on the front-end: the HTML, images, and other elements delivered to the browser. Today I want to talk about back-end optimization, or optimizing how data is processed on your server before it’s sent to your customer’s browser.
Your website’s performance and speed are a huge factor in your online success. Customers hate to wait for slow-loading pages, and slow sites also get a hit in their search engine rankings since Google started using page speed as a ranking factor last spring.
Many of you who know me or regularly read this blog probably know that last December, my husband and I sold our online toy store so that we could focus entirely on our e-commerce practice. The new owners seem to be doing really well with the site, and I’m glad to not have to focus [...]
Internet users have always been wary of providing personal and financial information online, but as the web has grown, so has the number of transactions, as well as the number of sites seeking orders for products or services. Customers have grown more accustomed to providing their information to many kinds of businesses, but privacy concerns [...]
Many Miva Merchant users are familiar with Chuck Lasker and the various ways he’s been involved in the Miva community over the past several years. We caught up with him at the 2009 Miva Merchant conference to ask him ten questions about his new endeavor, MerchantTutorials.com. Find out how he got started with Miva Merchant, [...]
Because we do a lot of redesigns and offline development, our customers usually have at least two stores operational at one time – the live store and a development platform. Sometimes that makes it hard to test, though, if links from the development site link back to the live site half of the time. You [...]
The great thing about having a blog for your business is that it gives customers and search engines new content to view. It can increase sales by convincing customers of your product’s benefits, or teaching them how to use it, or giving them ideas for incorporating the product into the lives.
Nothing looks less professional than an ecommerce site full of broken images! However, if you’re running a site with a lot of products, it’s bound to happen every now and then. Here’s how to stop it from happening.
Many e-commerce packages available today provide some search capability out of the box. These out-of-the-box search utilities typically are good for searching through product names and description. Some even provide advanced capabilities to search other fields or order the data in some unified fashion – like showing you categories of interest, related products, and more.
