Archive for February, 2009

We’re upgrading Storefront again!

February 20, 2009

Our Storefront product is undergoing another big upgrade.  Once again here’s Amr from Marketing to share some of the new highlights with you – Rochelle.

Hi everyone, we’re upgrading Intuit Homestead Storefront again to give you some extra features and improve a few things at the same time. Like last time, there’s a lot we’re adding and updating, like a streamlined checkout experience for your customers and more help with using PayPal.  We thought we ought to give you the whole long list of improvements, so here’s that list:

New Features

PayPal

  • Storefront Checkout: Provides a cleaner checkout path for your customer, as well as more details on the PayPal checkout pages.
  • Billing Preferences: In multi-page checkout, when PayPal Standard is the only payment option allowed, the billing page does not appear in the checkout flow.
  • Store Administration: Provides more guidance to help you set up your PayPal preferences.
  • Payment Wizard: Improved layout and default option selection. Credit cards and other payment methods appear in multi-column tables to reduce the need to scroll through the page.

Other Changes

  • Store Administration: Provides more guidance to help you set up your PayPal preferences.
  • Security: Improved Password Strength: Passwords must now meet more stringent security requirements. Passwords and authentication meet the following criteria:
    • Contain both alphabetic and numeric characters
    • Contain at least seven characters
    • Change every ninety (90) days
    • Cannot reuse the last four passwords
    • The account will be locked after six invalid password attempts for a period of 30 minutes or until reset by an administrator
    • Sessions will time out after being idle for 15 minutes

    {Update: Oops, sorry about that, I jumped the gun on the upgraded password elements. Those will not be part of this upgrade, sorry for the confusion — Amr}

Things that have been updated

  • Resolved an issue that could cause an error when attempting to split an invoice that has a product with sizes, with one of the sizes backordered and one or more of the other sizes considered in-stock.
  • Resolved an issue that could prevent comparison shopping information from updating.
  • Resolved an issue that could cause the Sales Manager page to display code instead of the sales manager’s first and last names.
  • Resolved an issue that could cause duplicate product promotions, one active and one inactive, to be created when creating a single product promotion.
  • Resolved an issue that could cause an error when selecting FedEx delivery to Canada for residential home delivery services.
  • Resolved an issue in which the Store Settings > General Preferences Grant permission to access your eBay seller account link remained enabled after the store locale was changed to other than English (United States). This option is only available for stores with the locale set to English (United States).
  • Resolved an issue that caused the Store Admin User Attributes to not be saved when adding a user.
  • Resolved an issue that could cause a promotion-related invoice to not appear in store administration even though the customer was billed for the invoice.
  • Resolved an issue that could permit cross-site scripting to appear in a search parameters cookie.
  • Resolved an issue that could cause a template to display incorrectly after selecting “Revert to Baseline”.
  • Resolved an issue that could cause the shipping section of an eBay Pending Listing to fail to expand when selecting “Flat” or “Calculated.”

We hope these improvements will result in an even better Storefront experience for you and for your customers.  Storefront users will be getting an email shortly with more information about when the upgrade will take place.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you like the new Storefront!

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Your New Year’s Resolutions

February 2, 2009

We recently invited a random sampling of Homestead members to take a short survey about their plans for their businesses in 2009.  Here’s Sharna with a summary of the results – Rochelle

Thank you to everybody who took part in our recent survey about members’ New Year’s resolutions for their businesses online. From the results I’ve summarized below, it looks like many of you are planning to explore new online strategies to grow your business in 2009, while still maintaining focus on what you know works. With the hope that some of these ideas may help others, here are the results of that survey:

Things you plan to start doing this year

  • Search Engine Optimization: Over 50 percent of you want to “Search Engine Optimize” your site, while only 16 percent have done it already.
  • Video: 46 percent of you plan to add video to your site, while only 14.6 percent currently have video on their sites.
  • Analyze Traffic: 45 percent of you want to start analyzing your site traffic and online advertising to improve sales; 19 percent do it already.
  • Online Directories: Over 45 percent of you are going to list your businesses in online directories, while 25 percent are already listed.
  • Email Campaigns: 50 percent of you want to start emailing your customers regularly with promotions, while only 16 percent of you are currently doing this.
  • Sell Online: 35 percent of you plan to start selling your products online; 37 percent already do it.
  • Advertise on Search Engines: 39 percent of you said that you wanted to advertise on search engines, and nearly the same percentage said it wasn’t a priority this year.
  • Gearing Website to New Customers Only: Over 20 percent of you will stop gearing your sites to new customers only, and will work to make them useful to your existing customers as well.

Things that are not a priority in 2009

  • Monitor Customer Reviews: 64 percent of you said that reading and/or responding to customer reviews on sites like Yelp.com is not a priority, and only 8 percent of you are currently doing this.
  • Start a Blog: Over 51 percent of you said you didn’t plan on starting a blog or commenting on forums related to your business, and only 16 percent do it already.
  • Advertising in Print Media: Only 24 percent of you will continue to advertise in print media like the yellow pages, 68 percent of you have never advertised in that kind of print media, and 8 percent of you said that you would stop.
  • Cleaning Up Website: 31 percent of you will continue to clean up your websites on a regular basis to make sure all links work and that your contact information is up to date, while 36 percent said that this is not a priority.
  • Targeting Global Customers: Only 5 percent of you will expand your customer targets to include global customers; 43 percent will continue to target local customers only.

That’s it for now; if you have any other ideas of your own, please let us know. And to those of you who participated, thanks!

Posted in Ecommerce, Search Engine Optimization, Tips and Tricks, Website Marketing | 7 Comments »