Action codes for Miva Merchant

A Pulse user, trying to track down an issue they were having with customers creating accounts, asked us for a list of that Actions they were seeing in their logs. Here is a list of them and a brief explanation of what they refer to:

ALGI    affiliate login
UAFL    update affiliate’s information
IAFL    insert affiliate
AFPW  email forgotten affiliate password
LOGN    customer login
EMPW  email forgotten customer account password
UCST    udpate customer information (on account page)
ICST    insert customer (on account page)
ADPR    add product to basket
AUPR    add upsale product to basket
AUPM    add multiple upsale products to basket
QNTY    update quantity of product in basket
RPRD    remove product from basket
ORDR  add/udpate customer information (during checkout)
CTAX  calculate tax
SHIP  calculate shipping/generate shipping list
AUTH    authorize payment

The $300 Million Button

Hmm, time to take a look at your checkout process? As my brother said when forwarding me the link, this reminded him of Merchant:

It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It’s a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it?…

The $300 Million Button

They Funny

Zappos takes a humorous approach to getting visitors to their site: $50,000 cease and desist

…and I guess it just worked!

(via twitter)

SEO tools…so many, so little time

I had no idea there were so many search engine optmization tools around.

(Article from my brother’s boss–his newsletter and blog are regularly packed with good info).

Interesting shopping cart ideas

Smashing Magazine is a great resource for design ideas. Here is a collection on shopping cart examples and good practices

Find an Undervalued Asset. Fix It Up. Flip It. (Now It’s Web Sites, Not Houses)

The New York Times has an interesting article on buying fixer-upper web sites, including online stores.

The Efficacy of “Click Here”

The Efficacy of “Click Here”, Site Redesigns, Getting Physical and Whatever Happened to Urchin? 

Click here for an interesting post on the power of using “click here”.

Inc.com has a good analysis of two sites that were modified to improve conversion rates. And here’s an account of a popular online store that has gone brick-and-mortar.

Arstechnica looks at what happened to Urchin after it was bought out by Google.

Rule Breakers in the credit card processing industry

“The credit card processing industry is notorious for extreme complexity, hidden fees, unsavory providers, and generally considered by many to be one of the most painful parts of running a business, and rightfully so. Buying credit card processing is like getting your car repaired in that consumers usually do not know enough about what they’re buying to ensure that they’re being treated fairly.” [More]

Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design Revisited

The Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State has an interesting article in their Usability News journal entitled:  Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design Revisited:  A Survey of 500 Top E-Commerce Websites

It’s a follow up to their earlier report on the same subject. There’s a link to that within the article. Definitely worth reading.

Dreamhosts, Passwords and Security

Dreamhost, who do/did host a number of Miva Merchant stores, recently announced that some 3500 FTP passwords were leaked. Ouch!

And speaking of passwords, we get to see a lot of, er, interesting ones. Although many banks and other sites have instituted frustrating login systems, forcing you to change your password frequently, use a mix of numbers, letters and mixed case, remember a bunch of security questions and the like, there is a good middle ground for your own site and store passwords. Don’t use any of the most obvious passwords, your sitename for both the login and password, and, if you’re generating a password for temporary use, don’t use “temp” “support” or, one of the best that I’ve seen–login: “help”, password: “me”. Personally, I don’t like the auto-generated OpenUI passwords either, as they have the same format, only changing a few digits. And, of course, regardless of the quality of your password, you shouldn’t be storing credit card numbers on the server. A defaced site can be fixed, losing your customers’ card numbers cannot.