Archive for August, 2008

Announcing a new upgrade for Storefront!

August 7, 2008

Our Storefront product is undergoing a big upgrade.  Here’s Amr from Marketing to share some of the highlights with you – Rochelle.

Intuit’s top-level ecommerce offering, Homestead Storefront, is being upgraded to expand your options and make it even more useful to you and your customers.  We’re adding a lot, and updating even more, so rather than give you just a couple of the new features I thought I’d give you the whole list.

So, first off here’s what will be new:

  • One Page Checkout: One-Page checkout will give you a better way to guide your customers through the checkout process. This new checkout is streamlined compared to the old ‘Multi-Page Checkout’ which had many pages in the checkout flow. In One-Page checkout, your customers will remain on a single page with each step being completed on the left of the screen and then captured on the right of the screen in their invoice. As customers move through the checkout process, their invoice will be completed with each step.
  • Store Administration Home Page: The store administration home page will give a Quick Store Status view, and provide an easy access to your store-hosting account, resources and tools, tutorials, and more.
  • New Themes: Choose from ten new contemporary store themes.
  • New Home Page Layouts: Choose from two new home page layouts.
  • Logo Generator: If you don’t have a store logo, you’ll be able to create one in minutes using the logo generator! The logo generator will allow you to customize a clean, professional looking logo. You’ll be able to adjust the font size, color, and style, add a background, and add a tagline to your logo. Access this feature from Store Design > Logo.
  • Store Administration Product List Changes: The store administration product list will be modified with a new look and feel. Common actions such as Add Product and Search will be added to the list.
  • Unique Shipping Services for Each Product: A new shipping configuration option will be available that allows unique shipping services for each product. This option will allow you to configure up to three domestic and three international shipping services for each product. The configuration process will be very similar to shipping configuration options for eBay listings.
  • eBay Listing Templates Update: eBay Listing Templates are being updated to support new shipping fields. Important: Shipping values that were valid in the old version of Storefront may no longer be valid in the new (e.g. certain package types, shipping services, etc.), and Domestic and International will now have Insurance and Handling fields. Once the upgrade has occured, we recommend that you open each of your existing eBay Listing Templates to ensure that your shipping is configured properly.
  • Shopping Cart Cross-Sell/Up-Sell: This feature will allow you to show your customers other merchandise from your store by displaying up to six additional products on the shopping cart. Products will be displayed based on criteria that you can configure. Access this feature from Store Settings > General, under Shopping Cart and Checkout Options.
  • Product Image Resize Options: When you upload new product images, Storefront will now automatically resize them for optimal display on your Product Details and Search Results pages. Access the product image resize options from Product > List, under Product Settings.
  • Product Descriptions HTML Editor: You will now be able to enter your Product descriptions in an HTML editor while adding or updating a product.
  • New Marketing Section: You’ll be able to access all marketing tools in one convenient place. Store Promotions, E-Mail Marketing, Search Optimization, and Comparison Shopping will be located in the new Marketing section.
  • Automated Google Base Product Feed: Storefront will automatically submit your product feed to Google Base, so you can start driving traffic to your web store! No account will be needed. Access this feature from the new Marketing page.

Secondly, in addition to adding new features we’re also resolving some existing issues that may have impacted some Storefront users.  Here’s what’s being done in this area:

  • Resolving an issue that could cause an eBay Listing error if you attempted to list an item with Calculated International shipping with the Insurance option set to Optional, Required, or Included in Shipping and Handling, Domestic set to Flat, and International set to Calculated.
  • Resolving an issue that could cause an error when listing an item to eBay or when saving a Listing template, in which the Combined Shipping Discounts, Promotions and Shipping Surcharge values were not getting set or saved correctly.
  • Resolving an issue in Marketplaces in which an Image URL specified when configuring a Product would build incorrectly.
  • Resolving an issue that prevented the Shipper Number on the invoice display from allowing entry of 40 characters.
  • Resolving an issue that could cause LowInvNotifyInd to not reset to 0 after a Low Inventory notification had been sent for Attribute Products and the Attribute’s inventory was raised above the threshold.
  • Resolving a browser error that could appear on the Attributes step of the Add Product Wizard within Internet Explorer.
  • Resolving an issue that could cause Promotion Configuration errors.
  • Resolving an issue that occurred when the United States Postal Service changed the Service Description of the International delivery method of First Class Mail International to no longer include a dash (‘-’).
  • Resolving an issue that could cause omission of the index file when copying multi-file sitemaps to the content area.
  • Resolving an issue with Copy Store Version that could cause the go.gif image used in the keyword search form to be copied with a default image instead of the appropriate one for the Theme associated with the original store version.
  • The storefront registration, customer information, customer sign-in and member logon will now use SSL encryption when checkout security is enabled.
  • Calculated product level shipping will require a minimum weight of one ounce.
  • Resolving an issue that could cause incorrect calculation of shipping discount by omitting the first item packed from the calculated discount.

That’s a lot to digest I know, but what it all boils down to is a better Storefront product for you and your customers.  We’ll be sending Storefront users an email with more information about when the upgrade will take place.

Hope you like the changes!

Posted in Advanced Features, Ecommerce | 22 Comments »

Making a mailing list, checking it twice…

August 5, 2008

After writing about the form elements a couple of weeks ago, a few people at the office suggested that I write about the mailing list elements as well. If you have a domain with email service, creating a mailing list is an excellent and easy way to keep your visitors informed about your business, club or group, and is a good tool to get them more involved as well.

Mailing List Overview

It’s easy to set up a mailing list for your website. In fact, you can set up as many mailing lists as you like. Basically, a mailing list is a collection of names which you can use to send information to multiple recipients at the same time.

I like to think about using mailing lists in two different ways: external and internal. As an example, let’s use a site that my friend uses to manage their Japanese drum group, San Francisco Taiko Dojo http://www.sftaiko.com/contact_booking.html.

First, the more traditional, external way to use a mailing list is as a consolidation of your customers or people who might be interested in your business. In my example, we’ve created a mailing list for people who are interested in finding out about upcoming performances or concerts that San Francisco Taiko might be doing.

using a mailing list when building your website

Another way to use a mailing list is as an internal tool. If you have several people in your organization who might be responsible for the same job (e.g. answering general questions about your business or responding to sales inquiries), you might want to set up a mailing list that includes that group of people (e.g. sales@yourbusiness.com or info@yourbusiness.com) That way, if a customer sends an email to that address it will automatically go to everyone on the mailing list, and anyone would be able to answer it.

website building - contact list

Setting Up Your Mailing List

Before you add any mailing list elements to your website, you’ll need to set up your mailing list. Note that you MUST have a domain in order to set up a mailing list!

  1. Login to your account at www.homestead.com.
  2. Click the domains & email link in the left-hand menu.
  3. Click the email services link. If you have multiple domains, you may be prompted to choose the appropriate domain name. The Email Manager page will appear.
  4. Click the Create Mailing List button.
  5. Select an email address for your mailing list. This will be the address you use to send messages to your mailing list.
  6. Enter email addresses for anyone you want to receive messages you send to your mailing list. Separate the addresses with a comma, or by pressing Enter or Return on your keyboard.
  7. Click the Save button to save your mailing list.

website building - set up mailing list

Once your mailing list is saved, you can send mail to your mailing list at any time by simply entering the mailing list address (the one you created in step # 5) into your email program.

The Mailing List Elements

Now you’re ready to use the Mailing List elements that are in SiteBuilder!

website building - mailing list elements

There are three elements for you to choose from:

website building - mailing list element choices

  • Join the mailing list – this element lets users automatically submit their email address to the mailing list of your choice.
  • Remove me from the mailing list – this element gives your visitors the ability to opt out of your mailing list by simply entering their email address. Keep your visitors happy by allowing them to choose the amount of e-mail they receive.
  • Mail the mailing list – use this element in conjunction with the Join the Mailing List element. That way, visitors who are interested can join and then email something to your website’s mailing list quickly and easily. Note that you may NOT want to let people email something to your mailing list so easily! This is the kind of element that might be better for a club or organization that has a password-protected page.

As with all elements, there are a bunch of things that you can customize on them including font, color, image used and custom messages. Just check out the Properties Editor to see what you can change:

website building - Properties Editor

Note that you can also use text links to let people email your mailing list. Just highlight the text that you want to use as your link and use the “Email Address” option.

website building - adding a link

Hopefully you’ve found this post useful, and you can now unleash the power of Mailing Lists on your site!

Oh, one final word of caution – there’s a limit of 1500 characters for each mailing list. This roughly translates to a limit of 60 to 80 email addresses.

If you hit this limit, here’s a little trick that I use which I like to call “embedding mailing lists”. When I get near the limit I create a new mailing list that I name something like “MailingList2″ or “MailingList3″ (depending on how many mailing lists I have), that will hold any new addresses I want to add.

website building - embedding mailing lists

Then I just add that new mailing list to the original one, so that whenever I address something to the original mailing list it will include everyone on the new mailing list too!

website building - multiple mailing lists

It sounds kind of crazy, but it works!

Posted in Advanced Features, Good Design, SiteBuilder, Tips and Tricks | 4 Comments »