Hole in the Helpdesk

Our helpdesk sprung a nasty leak and we’re handling support manually at the moment. We hope to have a new desk up today.

Free Shipping Add-on Module

We have just finished up a new module, Free Shipping 5, that makes it easier to display when you have free shipping in your store.

Free Shipping 5 is built on top of our suite of shipping modules - UPS Custom Integration, FedEx Advanced and USPS Advanced. The module reads the settings of any of those modules you have installed and allows you to place some simple SMT Code in any location where a product is displayed in your store. You can use the module on product, category, product listing, basket and other pages in your store.

An ancillary benefit of Free Shipping is the ability to quickly test whether or not free shipping is working in your store (without having to go through the checkout process). So, if you were to flag a product is set to ship for free and you are tinkering various override settings at the category and product level, you could easily test if shipping were working as you anticipated. (Note, however, Free Shipping 5 doesn’t take into account price point free shipping, e.g. if you set products to ship for free on orders greater than $50.)

Focus released into the wild!

Our new search module for Merchant 5.x (and eventually for 4.x if the market is there) is finally completed and available for sale.  You’ll find it in our store here:

Focus

Focus has been in the works for quite a while.  I started on it shortly after the last conference and since then I have had to re-write it a few times to change the overall approach.   I like very well how it turned out and I’m really looking forward to seeing what people can make it do.  The layout and functionality is “Template and Token” based (like most of our modules, and Search Manager before it)  and provides for a great deal of customization.   Being able to modify the search form any way you see fit provides for an amazing degree of flexibility.

You can find a partial list of the module’s features  here.   The documentation is “mostly done” and we’re updating it every day (and hope to have it completed early next week).  The documentation on the admin interface itself is done.  You can find the documentation here.

I love to talk about Focus (well, modules in general) so if you have any particular questions ask here and I’ll get a good detailed response into the mix.

Pulse: Updates and Direction

Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to dedicate to Pulse that I wanted, thus the prolonged beta release. However, I’m now back in the groove with it and am releasing an update with a few tweaks and bug fixes:

| Revision 5.010 2008/09/10
|    - fix live stats date range search defaulting to week
|    - whois opens in new window
|    - changed wording to “Excluded” for IPs and Referers
|
| Revision 5.009 2008/08/01
|    - add new module UI
|    - fix issue with zero orders
|    - fix blocked ip

I’ve gone back and forth on some pending issues, e.g. the referer field–should it only show the initial referer or should it show the referer for each subsequent screen? The initial referral is obviously the most important, as you want to know where your customers are coming from. However seeing how they navigate through your site is also informative so for now, I’ve left the referal trail active and may make it optional in a later update. Note that the referer reports will always be based only on the initial clickthrough to your site.

My primary focus will now be on purging. Although not the issue it was with the old DBASE backend, it’s understandable that some users will want to cleanout data. The challenge will be doing that without losing too much valuable information.

Other items on the to do list:

• hits/visits
• category reports
• individual product reports
• date range queries on all the existing reports that can allow for it, e.g. the basic products reports (viewed, added, removed, ordered)  should allow for date range restrictions
• a current baskets report

If there are other features, you’d like to see, please let us know.

Bret.

Our End of Summer Newsletter

:: The End of Summer Update ::

Greetings Viking friend! Our valuable try-annual newsletter has reached your retina with not a moment to spare. It’s been a busy summer for us–in between vacations, relocations and other life events, we have managed to develop a new batch of module goodness.

:: New Releases ::

Features

The new Features module brings our token expertise from our Merchant 4 template modules into the Merchant 5 arena. It allows you to generate templates that can be used throughout your store with much desired features such as best seller lists, random products, random products from lists, and more.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=VC_FEATURES5

Flyout

Flyouts are a common feature these days and we have brought them to Merchant. As you may have experienced on sites like netflix, Flyout allows your customers to preview your products more closely without needing to click through to the individual product page. So a customer can, for example, take a look at the product description while still on the category page, then mouseover the next product and read that without needing to click through, click back, click through again, etc. Saving clicks while still promoting products effectively is highly recommended.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=LC_FLYOUT5

Order Status Manager 5 Import / Export

This nifty extension module allows flat file imports of order statuses (stati?), and can trigger the sending of email notifications with the status update.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=LC_OSM_IMPORTEXPORT5

Pulse

ELM Stats and ELM2 were very popular modules for every version of Merchant. Pulse is their Merchant 5 equivalent. Taking advantage of the superior mysql database, Pulse provides a great platform for advanced queries and logging.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=VC_PULSE

Reveal

Another extension to one of our existing modules, Reveal is an add-on for Inventory Manager that uses AJAX (thus, no page reloads) to dynamically hide out of stock attributes.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=LC_REVEAL5

USPS Address Validation 5.x

The United States Postal Service offers online address validation and this module ties in to that server in order to verify your customer’s address. Reduce missing or returned shipments and follow-up calls to your customers by getting a valid address as they place their order.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=VC_USPS_ADDRESS5

Continue Shopping 5

This handy module provides a continue shopping button or link, allowing the customer to easily return to their last shopping page.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=LC_CSHOP5

:: Coming Soon ::

Focus

Focus is our uber-search module for Miva Merchant 5. While Search Manager was a hugely popular module for Merchant 4, we are taking search to the next level. Focus, currently in beta on a large retail web site, offers the high-end functionality you’d expect to find on all leading ecommerce sites–weighted results, “sounds like”, price range searches and much more. More details to come. Sign up to our wait list to be informed when it is released:

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=VC_FOCUS

Vision

As many of you know, our Merchant 4 template modules were the backbone of any store that needed to look good and function well. With the release of 5.5, we saw that Miva Merchant had become stable–and powerful–and that we could now respond to the requests from our customers for advanced template options. Watch this space. And join the wait list to be notified when it is available:

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=VC_VISION5

Dispatch

Soft Goods 5 has been renamed as Dispatch. The forthcoming release addresses the issues many store owners had when selling digital goods–high hosting or bandwidth fees for large files, timeouts, etc. Join the wait list to be notified:

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=DISPATCH

:: Sale ::

With the release of these new modules, it’s only fitting that we offer you a discount on them. Some are already discounted as early releases, but you can still use the coupon code NEWVIKING for 15% off all currently available new modules.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=NEWMODS

The coupon is valid till the end of September. One per customer.

Thanks and Ves heill!

A new module release and, finally, a post from Brock!

It started out as a module for Merchant 5.x to display randomly selected products on the storefront page but it turned into quite  bit more than that.

The new Features (yes, that’s the name) module provides additional Features for your Merchant 5.x store. With the placement of the module’s item tokens you can display, anywhere in your store, products randomly selected from your store, products randomly selected from particular categories, your store’s best sellers, and more! The module accomplishes this by tying particular tokens to templates configured from within the module’s admin. You can specify the exact layout of the template and display it anywhere in your store with a single item token. Particular details about the items are configured with separate tokens in the templates (for example, you can separately arrange where to display a product’s thumbnail and name).

The module comes with the follow templates but you can add as many as you want:

• Random Products
• Random Products from Category
• Best Sellers
• Images from List
• Random Images from List
• Products from List
• Random Products from List

You can find the details on what each of these templates does in the module’s documentation here and you’ll find it in our store here.

Those among you familiar with our Storefront Template module will recognize some of the functionality in the new module as it uses the same sorts of tokens (many are identical) and functionality. But instead of focusing only on the storefront page this module will let you display the templates just about anywhere.

The module went through the development process pretty quickly but has a few major features, such as the ability to preview templates in your store before making them live, that will be showing up very soon in a number of other new modules.

Speaking of new modules, the Focus module (it’s been a long time but I vaguely recall having posted here about it before), our uber-search module for Merchant has undergone a re-working to provide for the hosting of the search indexes on our own server rather than locally on the store’s servers. This has greatly improved the installation process and has moved us quite close to a final release. Don’t hold me to it but I’m hoping to have it in the store within the next two weeks.

-Brock

As an interesting aside, when we formed VikingCoders we each searched around for monikers from Norse mythology to “add to the mystique” so to speak. I stumbled upon “Brok”, one of two dwarves that worked together to create Thor’s hammer. Seemed like quite a remarkable coincidence so it stuck….perhaps too well. It wasn’t long before I was the only one with a “Norse moniker” and “Brok” is close enough to “Brock” the line is often blurred as to which is correct.

A Chip Off the Viking Block

…or should that be Brock?

OT: Politics is local

Chuck Lasker makes it into the NY Times.

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.

Import for Affiliate Manager 5.x is finally done!

I had been going about writing the imports for Affiliate Manger 5.x rather piece meal. I had started an import module for the product data, had started on a module to import data from Affiliate Manager 4.x, and had completed a module to import affiliate data from Merchant’s affiliate feature when I finally came to my senses. I bundled all of that into a single module, with our new spiffy css based admin, and it’s finally ready to go!

It is bundled with Affiliate Manager 5.x (and you’ll need the latest version of that module to go along with the import module) and is capable of importing:

• affiliates from Affiliate Manager 4.x
• affiliates from Merchant’s 5.x affiliate feature
• category and product configuration data from flat files

At this point it does not import the payouts, orders, or hits data from Affiliate Manager 4.x (or Merchant’s affiliate feature) but if the demand is there I’ll likely update it later to import that to a separate sets of databases which can be viewed from inside of Affiliate Manager’s admin. You can view the new module’s documentation here

The only way to get the module right now is by downloading the latest version of Affiliate Manager 5.x (it’s included in the download zip). Once it’s installed, new versions can be obtained, when available, from the “check for upgrades” link in the module’s admin.

Now that’s done I’ll be focusing all of my non-tech support time on “Focus” our new search module. I’m looking forward to getting back into that groove as it’s been a great pleasure to work on (but then that’s generally true about all coding…and definitely NOT true about writing documentation).