osCommerce Blog - osCommerce solutions for business

It’s a bit too late to write about osCommerce this Friday evening, but it’s a not bad idea to finish this business day (and this week!) by reviewing a very common problem that some of our osCommerce customers face, and a solution to it.

I’m talking about the situation when Google indexes category pages and doesn’t index individual product pages because it considers them not so important. Hence end customers, even if they look for exact product name in Google, will most probably find links leading them to product listing pages (category pages) where it might be hard to find a particular product. Product listing pages are likely to change with time, so a product which was there one day isn’t necessarily going to be there another day.

The most obvious solution recommended by SEO specialists is to try to extract product pages from Supplemental index and put them into Google’s Main index. This is achieved by either re-writing content of the product page making it more unique and keyword rich, or by adding a link to the individual product page from another page of the web site which is well ranked by Google. The result is not guaranteed though.

We have come up with a solution, which is not exactly an alternative to the above. It rather attacks the problem from another angel. The idea behind it is really simple: to give the customer what he or she is looking for, even if Google doesn’t want to do it. So, if the customer is looking for a particular product, but Google has only noticed that product name on some product listing page and brings the link to the product listing page in search results - we are going to redirect the customer to the desired product page anyway!

To do this, we extract the referral URL and then extract the keyword used by the customer. Then we check osCommerce database to see if there exist 1-5 products there that match the desired keyword. We then either send the customer to the originally clicked URL or to the Advanced Search Results page where the customer can see all matching products listed.

This way, no matter which link of the web site is indexed by Google, if it comes up in Google’s search results when the customer is searching for a particular product - the customer will be always given the product(s) he or she wanted to find.

Hence the conversion rate from visitors to actual customers will improve.

This method works very well when prospect customers are likely to search products by their model number or commonly used product name.

If you try this method - please write us back as we are always keen to know how our ideas help you to improve your osCommerce online stores!

P.S. one important note for osCommerce web masters - please do not forget to always implement 301 redirects as otherwise Google and other search engines may identify this technique as a SPAM SEO one.

I was given a link to this article by a good friend of mine earlier today.

http://www.jrlenterprises.com/articles/better-conversion-rates.htm

I hope osCommerce store owners will find some of those tips useful to increase their sites’ conversion rates!

Good news - ‘ve just purchased a brand new MAC Mini box. The little thing will ensure new osCommerce online stores are designed and developed compatible with MAC browsers such as Safari, MS IE for MAC, and so on.

Our design team can’t wait to plug it in and start using it. Farewell MAC OS PC and Web based simulators, long live MAC Mini !

(Our osCommerce Development team will try to find out if the little white box can actually host an osCommerce site very soon!)

Site maps help the users to find information they are looking for on the web site, and also help search engines a lot to index all pages of the web site. A site map is usually represented as a tree starting from the main page. A site map is like a navigation help for visitors of online store.

osCommerce site map

A site map for an online store would include:

• main categories
• sub categories of main categories
• best selling / featured products in a separate branch of the tree
• information pages

There exists a contribution for osCommerce that generates site maps. It can be
downloaded from this page and can generate site maps automatically based on the product catalog tables.

In osCommerce a link to the site map can be put into the footer or into the Information box.

Google and Yahoo! site maps

Google and other search engines have introduced their own site maps to get more precise and up to date information about changes in the web site structure. Updates to the site maps are provided by web masters and store owners directly.

Since the site map is submitted into the search engine directly, it is processed promptly, and the pages it consists of are indexed promptly as well. Again, any changes in the product catalog structure will be known to the search engine once the latest version of the site map is submitted. Therefore the search engine site map needs to be regenerated (preferably automatically) each time anything changes in the product catalog.

Google site map is an XML file that should be submitted into Google Web Master’s account. In order to become an approved web master for a certain web site, Google usually requires the web master to either upload a file with certain name to the web site, or add a temporarily META tag to the web site pages. Once the ownership / editing rights are approved by Google, and web master can submit the XML site map of the following format for Google site map index file.

Of course the files generated by the script can be altered if needs to be in order to highlight certain products or categories that are likely to change more often than the others, or are far more important than the others.

A contribution is available on osCommerce that can generate site maps for Google. It is based on the product catalog. It can be downloaded from this page. It’s preferable to use a contribution like this than 3d party site map generation tools. Having this contribution installed the store owner receives control over the process of site map generation and flexibility for further modifications.

Yahoo! site map submission service is a simpler solution that only accepts plain CSV files with only one column – web page URLs. The site map file can be uploaded to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Having had a plenty of customers recently switching from other Ecommerce solutions to osCommerce, or willing to switch from other versions of osCommerce to our TrueLoaded, we decided to publish some details of this mysterious (as referred by a customer) process to make it easier for our customers to understand what exactly is going with their online shop.

There may be many reasons why an online store owner would like to change Ecommerce platform and start using osCommerce. Most of the customers report the lack of features and not enough flexibility with their current solutions, others complain about not being able to support their sites, when with osCommerce you get support of the whole development community. And even though “plain” osCommerce is perhaps not the best solution for online retail business - it is the relatively big retailers who contact us to have their businesses backed by osCommerce solutions. As osCommerce can be enhanced with the features suitable for business management that not many other Ecommerce solutions have.

As it was easy to guess the switch usually consists of several steps. The main goal behind this process is to make it as smooth and seamless for online trading as possible.

And the first step is to ensure the Hosting Platform for the new web site is suitable to host osCommerce.

The second step would be to copy design of the existing web site and integrate it into osCommerce as close to the original as possible. Sometimes customers ask to improve design though.

The third step is to copy the database, products and images, customer accounts, orders and all current configurations and settings (taxes, currencies, design settings, everything…). Ideally end customers should be able to log into their accounts and check previously placed orders in the new osCommerce web site, same as they would do that in the old web site.

The fourth step is about copying payment and shipping methods, and all other specific features implemented in the current site.

Finally after all tests are passed the new web site can be launched. It all may sound a little bit too simple, but each project like that requires a lot of attention to details and concentration as customer’s online business should only benefit from the switch to osCommerce!

Quite often the customers would register in osCommerce, go to the checkout pages, pass the Shipping page, Payment page, find themselves on the Order Confirmation page, and …. would not complete the purchase. Any Ecommerce web site suffers from this. And every online store should try to get maximum from unfinished orders.

First of all lets see what can be done to monitor what’s happening during the purchase process. When using tools like Google Analytics, its possible to set certain “goals”. A goal is a customer reaching certain page, sometimes also coming from other specified pages. So, applying to osCommerce, the goals can be defined as:

1. Reaching the Shopping Cart page
2. Reaching the Checkout Shipping page
3. Reaching the Checkout Payment page
4. Reaching the Checkout Confirmation page
5. And finally - making the order, i.e. reaching the Checkout Success page

Some of our customers - osCommerce store owners - complain about the standard osCommerce Checkout process is a bit cumbersome. In such cases we recommend using our Easy Checkout module for osCommerce to simplify the checkout process, make it easier and less confusing for end customers.

But what if even a perfectly optimised osCommerce Checkout process fails and some customers still would not buy after reaching the Checkout Confirmation page? In such case we recommend getting as much of the situation as possible:

• we can create a report based on their shopping carts, or send an email notification to the store owner once there was an attempt to buy that has never succeeded
• we can send an automated email to the customer some days after the attempt and try to convince the customer to come back and buy
• we can send an automated email to the customer if we notice that the goods he or she wanted to order now cost less. So we compare the present day cost of the customer’s shopping cart / wish list with what the customer has in the cart, and if we see the price has dropped - we send an email to the client and tell him / her: “You thought about buying some products from our store, and it would cost you £2,000 in January 2007. But now we have special prices, and it would cost you only £1,850. So why not you come back and buy?”

Tomorrow we will be switching two osCommerce sites of our customers to our hosting servers. One in the USA and another in the UK. New servers are way faster and we count on making those osCommerce web sites also load faster after the move. Some articles say users don’t wait more than 4 seconds on the average, so we also expect to see more users becoming buyers.

What is usually included into the osCommerce site move? There are several things that should be taken into attention:

• database move - we will discuss this in details below
• site move - make sure all scripts, images, language files, and all other files are copied to the new location and all permissions are configured correctly
• domain name move - either the whole domain name should be moved to the new server, or only its part responsible for the web site should be pointed to the new server (the “A” part of the DNS Zone)

Now, the most tricky part of the whole process is not loosing the orders while the domain switches from old server to the new one. In the past we often would put the site down and wait until the domain name is propagated and until all users can see the site on the new server when they type in the site’s URL in their browsers. But this would cause the web sites of our clients to be offline for up to 1 day, which is obviously not acceptable.

So we came up with a simple and very straight forward approach that doesn’t require the web site to be put down during the move to another server. It may seem obvious, even though here it goes:

1. we take the database of the currently existing osCommerce online store, and copy it to the new server
2. we connect both current web site and its copy on the new server to the same database (which already resides on the new server)
3. when the domain switches to the new server, not dependently on if the user deals with the current or new web site, the order will go into the database that is already installed on the new server

This way we ensure no orders are lost while moving osCommerce to another server, and downtime of the web site is minimised or avoided completely.

A client has asked today if they needed an SSL certificate installed on their web site. They use WorldPay, so for secure payment processing they do not actually need SSL that much. One of their web masters suggested they didn’t need an SSL certificate at all.

No surprise though some of the end customers emailed them from time to time asking about if it was secure to buy from them, and telling they (the customers) would not buy a thing from a web site which is not secure.

Our advise to the client was: get an SSL certificate installed as soon as possible, secure User Account pages and the Checkout pages, and put a seal explaining the end customers the site is a safe place to buy products online and their account and payment information is secure.

The SSL seal may appear under the Shopping Cart box in one of the columns of osCommerce web site, on the Registration / Login page, and on the Checkout Payment and Checkout Confirmation pages. It may also appear in the User Account pages.

The end customers always expect their online purchase experience to be safe and their data to be secure.

That is why an osCommerce store owner first has to “buy” customer’s confidence to sell the goods.

SSL certificates not only secure customer’s data, but also help osCommerce store owners to improve online sales.

A customer pointed out today that a switch to our hosting platform (we host European customers in Germany) may negatively affect their position in Google.co.uk search results. At the moment Google generates a lot of business and obviously they would not want to loose it.

Our understanding of how it works is since the web site is a .co.uk domain name, and doesn’t operate .com, it will be performing in Google same good after the move to our hosting platform as before it.

The customer also worried about some users enabling the “pages from the UK” filter. Would a .co.uk web site hosted in Germany appear or not appear in the search results if such a filter was applied?

But if it was the case, then, for example, many of our Australian customers with their web sites hosted in USA would suffer from the same issue with their .com.au domains -but they do not!

Also, it’s quite easy to run an experiment on one of our own web sites - by searching for, for example, “osCommerce services” in google.co.uk with and without that filter.

We can see our Holbi web site on the first position in both cases, even though it’s hosted in Germany as well.

Would be interested in hearing opinions of osCommerce Developers and SEO experts on this.

Many of our customers complain about the speed of their osCommerce web sites. Often their own customers bring it to their attention, sometimes the slow down is even noticeable in the Administration panel of osCommerce.

osCommerce online store that was started several years ago and was working fast all this time has suddenly become slow - how is it possible? Or why would a very new osCommerce site demonstrate bad performance?

Customers prefer not to wait while the product page is loading, or until the order is created - if the site is slow customers would leave it. Some researches say customers would not usually wait more than 4 seconds to see the page loaded!

There could be a number of issues with both the hardware and software that affect the performance of osCommerce. Here is the list of what needs to be checked to make sure your osCommerce-powered business doesn’t loose customers because of poor performance:

• web server average load and hardware configuration - maybe the web server needs an upgrade (extra memory or new CPU for example) or maybe its hard drive is full and needs cleaning
• database server configuration - MySQL needs to be optimised to work in the most efficient way. Mostly this relates to using cached queries. More on MySQL server optimisation can be found at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/optimizing-the-server.html
• database structure optimisation - in older osCommerce versions not all database indices were properly implemented. For example, almost any osCommerce web site requires database indices for tables that are used for Best Selling and Customers Who Bought This Product Also Bought features, and these indices were often missing in old installations of osCommerce. Here one can find more information on how to build and use indices: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/optimizing-database-structure.html
• number of database queries per page - osCommerce allows for monitoring not only page loading time, but also the number of database queries used per page. Corresponding contribution can be found here. Obviously the more queries are run against the database - the slower the page will load. So caching parts of the pages that do not change too often can help to improve page loading speed and overall osCommerce performance a lot.
• product images - usage of thumbnails can improve the product listing page loading speed dramatically. And also the loading speed of other pages, where image thumbnails can be used instead of full sized images.
• PHP scripts - PHP scripts can be optimised with tools like PHP Accelerator. As it stays on the PHP Accelerator web site, it
  

  …provides a PHP cache, and is capable of delivering a substantial acceleration of PHP scripts without requiring any script changes, loss of dynamic content, or other application compromises

Holbi has come up with its osCommerce Speed Up / Acceleration service, that includes all of the updates and modifications mentioned above to improve online businesses of its customers.