Posts filed under 'Zen Cart'
The Zen Cart & OSCommerce AJAX POS System is getting close to having a release ready. For more information on the OSCommerce POS or the Zen Cart POS - click here.
It works as an add-on module that hooks your OSC or Zen Database and still allows you to control attributes and information from inside OSC and Zen cart respectively. The fact that it is AJAX means you can do speedy real time lookups of customer information and orders. We have several brick and mortor stores who do millions in sales using the BETA of our system.
September 17th, 2008
After a very long development cycle, we now have custom modules for Zen-cart and Oscommerce that can calculate destination-based sales tax. Using a combination of address verification and data made available by your State you can become compliant in no time flat.
The modules calculate based on Zip +4 to break down the sales tax by zip code and the 4 digit code as well. If you tax rates change quarterly like our state, you can upload and parse the CSV file they make available to you in order to update the rates in bulk. For more information, contact us here.
September 17th, 2008
We’ve recently completed a new modification to a West-Coast Satellite Radio retailer - JJIElectronics.com that is working really well for them. We’ve added the ability to define the specials and featured products on a per-category basis.
Example #1 -XM Satellite Radios
For the admin, it really is as easy as assigning special or featured products with a few selection boxes and both the design styling and information shows up within the design template. Your clients do not have to mess with the description box or define_mainpage - it is that easy.
Zen Cart Feature - Displaying Zen-Cart Sub-categories in the Main Menu.
We’ve also built a dynamic menu system that displays all the the categories & sub-categories on the same menu - this is great for providing customers the ability to see all of the types of products you offer rather than force them to search. You can see the Zen Cart Dynamic Menu examples here. This helps your main page get spidered for all top-level keywords (which for an ecommerce site should start with your categories of products that you sell at the very least.
Zen Cart Feature - Multiple Shopping Feeds and “Referral Network” Integration.
Feedburner, Yahoo Shopping, Google Base / Froogle and Bizrate. We set up this Zen Cart build so it would detect the inbound referral and pop the correct survey box based on whether they came from BizRate, Shopping.com, etc. Most of these services give you their code to integrate and it really does nothing except pop the survey after you have successfully checked out. If you are a business as large as this client - and make use of several networks - then you either have to dynamically detect the referral and trigger the appropriate code - or you are stuck with popping all of the various surveys and letting the user fill out whichever one is relevant. Since JJIElectronics.com cares about their user’s experiences - they went with the auto-detect.
Additional Zen-Cart Modules
In addition to the stock build, we also added:
- Custom Shipping Tables & Rules
- Google Checkout & PayPal Express (that conforms to the above - just try that… we dare you.)
- An AJAX Sidebar Manager - to allow the various advertising, banners, buttons and tables they display throughout their site (ala DeepDiscountDVD.com & TigerDirect)
- A Zen-Cart to QuickBooks Exporter
- An advanced order manager that allowed batching of functions and printing.
- An advanced reporting module that allowed for reports to be generated on keywords and stock control.
- A total Zen Cart SEO overhaul.
- and Special Holiday Headers for a nice friendly touch!
All in all - a very effective website and relationship. For more information on our custom Zen Cart Developers & Zen Cart Development Services - just visit our website. Whether you need a Seattle Zen Cart Developer
or just want to outsource your problems to us - we are ready to help you. [We do not outsource ourselves, the buck stop here.]
March 14th, 2008
We’ve recently launched JJIElectronics.com new ecommerce website.
About the client.
JJIElectronics is the #1 independent Internet retailer in the USA for sales of XM Satellite Radio, Sirius Satellite Radio & Garmin GPS.
About the project.
The project involved moving JJIElectronics.com off of a hosted ecommerce application and creating a new custom store. The client had grown large enough that they wanted more control over the features their ecommerce storefront would offer.
They also wanted a dynamic template-swapping feature which would allow the entire store to re-sort and re-filter all results by clicking on a tab. This would allow them to present an “XM-only” or “Garmin-only” storefront to their customers as well as aide them in any manufacturer-sponsored promotions or offers where they didn’t want competitive products to show up as well.
We deployed Zen Cart with a number of custom features we built. The template can an AJAX back-end that allows the client to edit each of the sidebars and place in advertising and special offers. A multiple offer-related shipping module takes the default Zen Cart build to a whole new level. We also create an advanced reporting and export feature to tie Zen Cart to Quickbooks better as well as manage sale tax.
The Zen Cart - “Specials by Category” module we designed allows for category-specific specials, featured and “what’s new” in each product channel.
If you would like to know more about our Zen Cart Developers or our custom services - contact us today.
December 12th, 2007
Symptom:
My client is using the new Google Checkout Module with Carrier Calculated Shipping, et al. (v1.4.5)
You can see the Google Checkout module for ZenCart here.
His freeoptions shipping module allows free shipping for orders greater than $50.00.
This is what his freeoptions shipping method options are:
Shipping Cost: 0.00
Handling Fee: 0
Total >= 50.00
Total <=
Weight >=
Weight <=
Item Count >=
Item Count <=
When you navigate to google checkout as a customer, it would not follow the pricing rules-- it would allow free shipping for any order regardless of price.
Here’s the Zen Cart Google Checkout Solution:
In the googlecheckout/gcheckout.php file, find these two lines: (line numbers 533 & 534)
$price = $quote[’methods’][0][’cost’];
$shipping_price = $currencies->get_value(DEFAULT_CURRENCY) * ($price>=0?$price:0);
replace them with:
if ($quote) {
$price = $quote[’methods’][0][’cost’];
$shipping_price = $currencies->get_value(DEFAULT_CURRENCY) * ($price>=0?$price:0);
}else{
unset($googlepayment->mc_shipping_methods[$key]) ;
continue ;
}
This should fix the other options in freeshipper as well - items, and weight, since it performs the same way (though I haven’t fully tested it in every possible combination or onfiguration). It should also fix any other shipping methods that just don’t show up based on some sort of option configuration.
Hope this helps someone else!
Kevin
November 27th, 2007
We get this a lot when talking to customers, namely they bring up an example of a web hosting outfit who is offering a cheaper rate or more bandwidth for a lower price.
Example. We have a client who pushes about 620 gigs of data a month on one of our dedicated servers. They stream a large amount of videos (no, it is not what you think).
Now the way we work, being a specialty web host and all - is we do not employ limiting software for our clients as far as how much of the “pipe” they can use. So, that means their customers get to access that data up to 100 MBPS if they can download that fast. The bottom line is that if you suddenly get national attention and a rush of traffic because you were mentioned on Oprah - we want you to be able to withstand that and not have your website go down. We’d rather come back and talk if it continues rather than have some cost-saving software on our end cut you off at the knees.
It is all about the server’s connection to the Internet (the “pipe” if you will), so to put it into perspective – here’s what you get with different hosts.
——————————————————-
Typical Shared Hosting Account = as low as 256k/sec
Typical VPS / Virtual Private Server = 1.5mps
Typical Basic Dedicated Server = 10mps
Typical High-end Dedicated Server (Like Us) = 100mps
——————————————————-
That’s why the question “How much Bandwidth do I get?” is such a loaded one. It’s quality –vs- quantity.
Your shared web hosting account may offer “unlimited” data transfer a month – but to move that 620 gigs of data would take exactly:
264 Days 2 Hours 3 Minutes 33.76 Seconds on a share hosted –vs- 19 hours on our servers.
If you run a Point of Sale System ( POS ) & or Store on the same server, then performance is impacted by everything going on on that server.
July 26th, 2007
Securing your servers & applications is always at the forefront of any “good” development group’s conscience.
If it is not, then heck, you are amateurs and your company deserves to whither and die because this is not a business where the”Fisher Price - My First Web Company” type of stuff cuts it.
This applies to the following people or companies:
- Web Freelancers who deploy open source or use community-grown contributions and freeware code for their clients.
- Companies & Developers who deploy or base customer-applications or tools off of open source or other frameworks.
- Companies and Freelancers who DO NOT watch to see if what they are deploying for their clients and customers later develops security flaws, exploits or other nasties.
- Web Hosts who run VPS or Dedicated Servers for their clients.
- Probably YOU - if you are still reading this.
Bottom line is that it is often a “company-ending” event when a server gets hacked and you are not prepared both legally (read that as you have strong contracts in place to protect you from these events) - and defensively to limit the damage.
IMPORTANT - If you are hosting web sites for your clients and letting them install any number of applications like Bulletin Boards (PHPBB), CMS’s (Mambo / Joomla), Shopping Carts (OSCommerce, Zen-Cart) or even Blogs like this one - AND - you do not understand any of what we are about to list off - then you should call us TODAY (877-239-3083) because you definitely need some quick and inexpensive help to secure your business.
For anyone who has even watched a company, client or server burn because a “guestbook” compromised their entire server - this is for you.
For anyone who lets their clients install applications via Fantastico or PLESK Application Vault - then this is for you.
For anyone who does not know what scripts & applications their clients are currently running on servers you are responsible for - then this is for you.
Kevin Huisman, our Development Manager and “server watchdog” recently posted the following:
For everyone interested in server security stuff, we thought we’d pass on a bit of info.
We had been using some home-grown rules to combat hack attempts, and decided to really do some research into finding a more comprehensive rule set. Sort-of a “why reinvent the wheel”…
There is a great site to become familiar with — http://www.gotroot.com that has a really comprehensive set of rules for multiple issues - IP and proxy black lists, known bad useragents, comment spam, etc.
Some of the rule sets make sense to use verbatim:
- Rule Exclusions
- Comment spam blacklist
- Compromised/Hacker boxes blacklist
- Anti-Proxy protection
- Bad UserAgents blocking
- Anti-Proxy protection
- “Google Hacks” signatures
- Known rootkits/worms
And so on…
There’s also a badips.conf file found in the “All in one” downloads that isn’t directly linked to from their list. It’s another set of IPs to ban, and it’s specifically for Apache 1.x / ModSecurity 1.9x, which usually fits the bill on most older versions. They retired it in Mod Security 2.x. rules, since there seems to be a better way of doing it in that version.
You should also look at what they call “Just in Time” protection, a set of rules that combat known vulnerabilities in specific open source web apps.
They have rules for squirrel mail, phpbb, formmail.cgi/pl, Coppermine, and a whole host of others.. You may not really need the bulk of the rules if you do not specifically run those web apps. You can just use those you need on each server.
It is recommended that rather than a wholesale deployment of all possible rules - you merely go through and whittle the list of rules down and remove those that do not apply to the web app versions you are using. Many times you simply find that even with these rulesets some of them maye .conf files are actually behind the versions of the web apps you’re using such as when specific files with specific known vulnerabilities that have been fixed since the rules were created. This is a bit of a lower priority at this time, since it probably doesn’t save much in the way of speed or processor.
As far as processing/speed goes, it’s a fairly big set of rules when you combine them all together, and we noticed that it takes a few beats longer to restart apache, but once it’s running, we haven’t seen any significant slowdowns.
Individual results may vary based on how many domains and traffic each of your servers or VPSs have.
July 13th, 2007
- Also know as - OSC POS, OSCommerce POS, POS Plugin for OSC
- POS System for OSCommerce
- Point of sale for OSCommerce
Figure 1 - posshot1.png - Creating POS Orders in OSCommerce.
This screenshot demonstrates the standard three-part sales order view. The very top bar indicates where in the system you currently are. You are logged in as a sales-rep - “Dan” and you are processing a new sale. Next will come the individual line items.
Basic product lines in this OSC Point of Sale (POS) example, including kilt types and belt types, are specified in the first dropdown. Each has a two-letter code. Once these codes are learned, you can enter them without having to click the drop-down.
There are two types of order as specified in “Product”. A stock item is usually scanned, which populates the entire line with the relevant data. But it can still be manipulated manually. Grabbing the drop downs in a Stock Order will indicate what options are available, based on what you have already chosen. Choosing added-cost options will cause the drop down to change color and an extra cost amount to appear in the Attributes pane.
Figure 2 - posshot2.png - Using SKUs in OSCommerce & access your OSC Database via the Point of Sale System.
The SKU field is what the scanner will populate. Each combination of options has a unique SKU, so scanning a tag will cause all of the dropdowns to automatically update. When manually configuring an order, the SKU field is not normally touched. Clicking “Clear” will clear the entire line.
Putting more than a few line items in this view will give the Items pane a scrollbar, but in the top right corner of the pane, you’ll see an Expand button. This will expand the Items pane to the entire visible browser window, moving the Customer and Payment elements below the fold. The scrollbar will transfer to the browser window itself, as is depicted in the next screenshot.
Figure 3 – posshot3.png - Accessing customer data (OSC) via the POS.
When the Customer field is visible, it can be used to enter a new customer as depicted in Figure 1, to search for customers as depicted in Figure 2, or to display or edit existing customers as depicted below.
Figure 4 – posshot4.png - POS & Payment information. Using a POS in OSC to fullfill payment and transaction.
This also showcases some of the Payment field functionality. Since this functionality is usually tied to your preferred Gateway / Payment processor, we will not go into detail on it. It serves to indicate at a glance what the payment method and details are.
This POS System for OScommerce & ZenCart is VERY robust and is not one of those things that just comes off the shelf. It is a custom install service we’re happy to offer. For more information - call us at 877-239-3063 or 425-482-7941 if you are in the Seattle-area.
Email us questions about our OSC POS!
October 10th, 2006
Rollin’ Old School Lunch
Today’s staff meeting required that you bring a sack lunch. Seriously, we all gathered in the conference room with our sack lunches, Kevin had “hot” lunch because he’s all upper-class. The rest of us peons all dumped our lunches on the table.
I had a PB -n- J, chips that I ate earlier - leaving me with less food (Deja-Vu from Elementary School.) and a Pudding Cup. If I only had a fruit roll-up it would have been perfect.
So, we really didn’t get much done except debate the merits of how all women are crazy and the true path to happiness is really just finding that one person who is less crazy than the rest and you can both live with each other’s neurosis’[sp?].
Have you guessed that our company is pretty much all men?
So, after 40 minutes of chit-chat we suddenly crystalized an idea in the last 5 minutes for a very cool, very suave, million-dollar making, viral web marketing game on par with MySpace-type junk you see all the time.
Ok, maybe we’re exagerating about it being suave..but that’s about it.
The point is.. you can force brainstorming all you want. You can have deadlines and chase after other people’s ideas all the time.
But sometimes, just sometimes if you relax and sit with friends .. and “chat” you can come up with all sorts of good, positive things.
No one in that board room was jockeying for position.
No one was playing stupid office political games with each other.
No one covets or is dibilitatingly envious of one another.
Is it any wonder why I am completely unemployable in a corporate environment anymore?
I am so damn proud of the people I work with.
July 27th, 2006
