09
Oct
Show Us Your Ghoulish Products!
It’s time for the 3dcart Halloween product show & tell! We’re looking for the creepiest, scariest, & most-awesome Halloween products 3dcart merchants have for sale to be included in our Halloween round-up!
Think some of your products are ghoulish enough to be included? Leave a comment below with a link to some of your most festive products and check back to see if your product gets included!
04
Oct
New 3dcart Upsell Banners Just In Time For Fall!
Crisp air, warm sweaters, Starbucks’ holiday flavored coffees – what’s not to love about the fall! If you needed one more reason to embrace that nip in the air, 3dcart just released new Upsell banners in the spirit of season!
To see the banners in different versions, sizes and to get a full list of UpSell banners click here.
Haven’t heard of 3dcartUpsell?
Timing is everything in eCommerce. In fact on average, you have 20 seconds to grab a vistor’s attention before they press the back button. 3dcart Upsell helps make sure time is on your side by actively engaging visitors with unique, time-sensitive offers which increase conversions and reduces cart abandonment.
How does it work?
3dcart Upsell automatically presents time-senstive offers to the user during multiple scenarios:
• User Triggered: Initiate offers or promotions when the user’s cursor abandons your page.
• Time Based: Initiate offers after the user has been on a specific page for a certain amount of time.
• Persistent Offers: Set offers that appear on specific pages,categories or even sitewide.
How can I use it?
• Collect surveys & customer feedback
• Capture e-mails for your mailing list
• Offer additional or related products
• Give coupons for future purchases
For more information on the 3dcart UpSell program click here.
03
Oct
New & Improved – 3dcart 4.10.1 Is Here!
This last month the 3dcart Development Team has been working really hard, and it shows in the long list of release notes for 4.10.1.
Most of these come from the great feedback we received from 3dcart merchants in our Uservoice portal (3dcart.uservoice.com). So please keep submitting your ideas to help us improve 3dcart. Some great examples are the ability to Duplicate Promotions and to Preview Order Emails.
The most impressive improvement on 4.10.1 is about performance, the changes made to the cache of the application have shown an increase of 60% on the Website Speed of the Home Page and Category pages.
Payment Gateway:
MIGS VPC
New payment method available, the MasterCard Internet Gateway Service is now integrated with 3dcart.
MasterCard Strategic Processing Solutions*| MasterCard®
First Atlantic Commerce
New payment method available, The First Atlantic Commerce processor from Bermuda is now integrated with 3dcart.
Payment Processor – Online Payment Processing & Gateway | FAC)
App Store:
Rejoiner
New Third Party App for Abandoned Shopping Cart recovery
Rejoiner compatible Shopping Cart Software | 3dcart App Store
Bug Fixes
3DSI Payment Gateway
An error was being generated when an order contained multiple quantities of any item.
eProduct Download
The eproducts download was failing for any files over 31.5 MB, the issue has been corrected and the limit increased.
GoDataFeed
The Godatafeed XML feed was returning an error when a specific product had a hidden category as part of its breadcrumb.
Fedex Label Manager
The rate quotes in the Fedex Label Manager where previewing lower rates than the actual printed label.
Billing Information
When trying to preview new plan information (after upgrading) the page would create an overflow error.
Order Exports
The oweight field now registers the total order weight, before when the total weight exceeded the maximum box weight in Shipping Settings the weight was being saved as “WEIGHT/NUMBER OF BOXES”
DHL Tracking
Implemented new DHL tracking URL to allow tracking numbers from this carrier to link directly to DHL’s website and display the tracking information automatically.
Propay
The Autoship recurring orders module was charging amount/100 for orders when processing them using the ProPay payment method.
Front-end Reset Password
The reset password page was not loading when the store has the “login required” setting per product enabled. Customers were being redirected to myaccount.asp.
System Error Messages
An error caused in some isolated cases, that the system error messages in Settings > Design > System Messages would get duplicated. This caused errors when trying to edit/save messages.
Verify Tax
The Verify Tax link was missing on multiple ship-to orders.
Order Search
The filter dropdowns for shipping and payment methods were crashing the page if the number of orders was too high. From now, those 2 filters will be available only for instances of 25,000 orders or less.
Payments – CBA
The “Checkout by Amazon” Thank you Page was not replacing order variables needed for conversion scripts added manually to the checkout step 4 footer. (i.e. [invoicenum], [ordertotal], etc)
Quick Search
The Admin panel quick search now submits the searchwhen user presses the ENTER key.
Quick Cart
When using the Quick Cart feature, the product page would open within the pop-up modal. Added ‘target=”_parent”‘ to fix.
Coupon
The Orders Export CSV file now contains a new column labeled as “Coupon” when a coupon is used in the order.
Improvements
Admin:
• Product Reviews
The Product Reviews section now allows you to specify the number of records per page and to sort the records by any column. Merchants can now easily view products with reviews pending approval by sorting on the NEW REVIEWS field.
• Preview Order Emails
New PREVIEW button available for ORDER EMAILS under Settings > Design > Emails. This allows to preview the order emails. Note: When an order is available in the same order status as the email being previewed then that order information will be used, if no information is available the HTML variables will be displayed.
• Navigation
The Admin panel navigation has been improved to eliminate the third level of navigation under the PLUGINS and Shopping Engines sections.
Frontend
• Jquery on Checkout and Product page
The default templates for Product page and Checkout have been updated to JQUERY 1.8.1 and the PROTOTYPE library is no longer used.
Blog:
• Title Tags -The TITLE tag for the Blog Categories and Blog Archive sections were just re-using the title from the main blog page. These now include unique page titles to prevent duplicated titles errors on Google Webmaster tools.
• Moderate Comments -A new Setting for AUTO-APPROVE comments under SocialCommerce > Blog > Settings, brings the ability to moderate comments before these are published to the website. This also includes the ability to EDIT comments after these have been submitted from the Admin Panel.
• Edit Comments - New section to EDIT the content of the Blog comments.
• Google Sitemap - The Blog posts are now included in the Google Sitemap.
• Search Posts- The blog posts are now included in the Search results, this requires the setting from General > Settings > Store Settings to be enabled for PAGE SEARCH.
• H1 Tag -The blog post titles now include an H1 tag around them for SEO purposes.
Performance
• Cache Setting: The previous “enable cache” setting is now automatically enabled by default and the setting to disable it is no longer available.
• Advanced Page Cache: A new setting called “Enable Adv Page Cache” has been added to the Store Settings section. This is in addition to the standard cache and it puts the Home page and the Category pages into the store’s cache, thus improving the performance of the site even more. The cache itself takes 2 hours to refresh, or it can be manually refreshed by clicking on the “”clear cache”" button.” This setting will be initially turned on by default.
Orders
• Invoice/Packing Slip:The default invoice and packing slip templates now include a variable that displays the Total Number of Items [numberofitems] in the order. This is the total of the individual quantities of each item in the order.
Products
• Extra Fields
Additional extra fields for products have been added; extra_field_11, extra_field_12 and extra_field_13 are now available as 3 new extended descriptions extra fields. These are available on Product Edit and will display automatically in product page. Can also be imported via CSV, pull via Advanced API and exported when doing a custom products export.
• Bundles
New setting for “Bundles – Add subitems weight” that will include the weight of each bundled item in the order when the main item is added to the cart. This weight will be used for the order and considered for shipping calculation.
Marketing
• Duplicate Promotions
New DUPLICATE Promotion button that allows to create a copy of an existing promotion with the same attributes.
SEO
• Products and Category URLs
Automatically do a 301 redirect on Products and Category pages when accessing the page via an URL that includes the product or category ID but the name does not match. This was usually an issue when renaming a product or category, where the URL would change but the previous URL would still work.
•Deleted Products and Categories
When accessing a product or category page that has been deleted, the system will generate a 404 and check if any PAGE REDIRECTS are in place to redirect the visitor to a different product or category page. This discontinues the ERROR message for the product or category are no longer available and will generate a browser 404 error instead.
• Recommend A Friend
The TITLE for recommend a friend page was using the one for the Waiting List. Changed this to use the correct TITLE and to include the product name.
• Shop By Price
Implemented a 301 redirect from empty pages to the first page of the section. So if page 16 had no products, previously it would display a blank page, now it redirects to page 1.
• Shop By Price Titles
The TITLE tag now includes the PAGE number to prevent duplicated titles errors on webmaster tools, so the page title is unique for each on of the pages.
• Google Sitemap
The Google sitemap now includes the 1st level of sub-categories, this was previously limited to just the main categories.
• Product Page
The default template for product page now includes a NOFOLLOW on the links to “Email A Friend” and “Write a Review”.
01
Oct
Happy New Store Monday!
You know what time it is! Yep, it’s that time of the week again – New Store Monday! Give some new 3dcart stores a hello & a big eCommerce high-five!
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62gear.com: Six Deuce Gear was started in late 2005 with several goals in mind: We want to bring unique and original clothing designs to the world of mixed martial arts. Although we have always been fans of the common themes found in MMA clothing, we feel that we can offer a different perspective on the sport we love.
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Rockwithpassion.com: We are a full service lingerie shop. Our goal is to always make shopping online with us as easy, helpful and more enjoyable than a visit to your favorite store.
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Buildersengineer.com Our mission can be summed up with one word:Efficiency. Efficiency means doing things right the first time. Doing them quickly, without waste.
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Mojocouture.com: MOJO COUTURE combs the world over to find the best and newest styles in fashion accessories. Our trendy and unique merchandise separates us from our competitors.
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Magictricks.com: Magic Tricks, Inc. is one of the premier sources of magic for magicians- and everybody who wants to be a magician! We have thousands of satisfied customers worldwide. It’s our attention to detail and our emphasis on customer service that makes us the choice of professional magicians.
27
Sep
Introducing Community Alert: 3dcart’s Free Fraud Protection Service
The 3dcart team has been hard at work and is excited to announce the launch of ‘Community Alert’— a free service that calculates risk based on the experience of other 3dcart merchants in the community. Community Alert is the first service of its kind in the ecommerce industry and currently in beta to current merchants.
HOW IT WORKS: Each 3dcart merchant has the ability to contribute to the Community Alert by reporting fraudulent orders to a community database. Based on these reports, retailers taking part in the program receive a free Community Score that rates the risk of accepting the transaction. Scores are generated in real-time as orders enter the merchant’s system so retailers can make decisions on the fly.
SCORING: Scores are rated based on three color-coded levels of risk and a 10-point number scale, making them simple to read and react to quickly and efficiently. The score for each customer also lists the number of transactions associated with them across the community.
PRIVACY: 3dcart guarantees complete privacy for each merchant that takes part in the program. Even though fraud statuses and scores are shared with the community, no information from stores or shoppers is compromised, ensuring total anonymity and protection of other sensitive data.“Community Alert strengthens the bonds of 3dcart’s merchant community while offering a free way to improve security and minimize risk,” said 3dcart CEO Gonzalo Gil. “We added the feature based on two major differentiators: proactive recognition of potential fraud and the power of experienced human intervention to help measure the actual risk.”
24
Sep
Happy New Store Monday!
We are thrilled to announce the arrival of so many new 3dcart stores! Take a peak around at our newest little carts & give them a high five for us! If you would like your store featured in our next New Store Monday just post a link to your store on our Facebook page or send us a tweet!
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Spoiledpup.com: At Spoiled Pup, we promise to always search for unique enhance the life of your dog.
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Toocutebeads.com: Design. Create. Inspire
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AEbike.com - Our goal is to offer a wide variety of parts and accessories to customers all over the world, at discounted prices, and with small-shop service. Our catalog features nearly 30,000 parts, and virtually all can be shipped within two business days.
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Blackhatfirearms.com: BlackHat Consultants, LLC was formed by two former military officers with extensive backgrounds in Information Security and Counter Terrorism / Force Protection (CT/FP). Our vision is based on the core understanding of the necessity for businesses of all sizes and industries to adopt security practices to protect their interests, including their customers, their employees, and their partners.
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Rosarystuff.3dcartstores.com: We are an online, non-profit company offering a wonderful selection of quality, handmade traditional Catholic rosaries including Cancer, Liberty, and Fibromyalgia rosaries, hand rosaries starting at $5.50, car rosaries for $8.50, full sized rosaries starting at $14.50, as well as a great selection of wholesale silver and gold plate rosary parts (quantity discounts available on some), charms, and other charity items!
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Shoppingplus.lk: Shoppingplus.lk Established in the year 2012, we trade and supply an extensive range of products & services. we have collaborated with some of the authorized and reputed manufacturers, who support us to meet the exceeding demands of clients on time.
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Dandicreations.com: Our base ingredients for our soaps include olive oil, coconut oil, palm oil, and castor oil.
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Purpleclivour.com: Purple Clivour is all about affordable fashion for women’s apparel and accessories. Purple Clivour seeks to change the landscape of the women’s retail fashion world.
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Securitywaypoint.com: SecurityWaypoint.com is a division of BlackHat Consultants, LLC with its headquarters just outside Portland, Oregon.
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Imjustlovely.com: As women we wear many hats. I’m Just Lovely is full of things that we use to pamper ourselves and to make us feel Just Lovely.
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Bodyshapewear.com: Our business is unique because our products increase the confidence women have on their image which affects all other areas of their well-being. Our main concern is to help women love themselves, accept themselves and increase their self-esteem.
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20
Sep
3dcart Shares Fulfillment Expertise With SoftwareAdvice.com
3dcart’s CTO and co-founder Jimmy Rodriguez recently shared eCommerce fulfillment expertise with the writers of softwareadvice.com in the article “The Starter’s Guide to Effective eCommerce Fulfillment.”
“Retailers who wish to maintain their own online storefront can often directly integrate their shopping cart software with Amazon and other fulfillment operations. Jimmy Rodriguez, co-founder and CTO of shopping cart software 3dcart, says approximately 30 percent of their 16,000 customers utilize one of its 13 fulfillment integrations.”
Check out the full article here!
18
Sep
Ordoro Partners with eBay to Streamline Ecommerce Operations
3dcart partner Ordoro recently announced that they have also joined forces with eBay to help online retailers streamline their back office operations.
Ordoro’s web-based software solves multiple ecommerce pain points at once, including order and inventory management across multiple storefronts, printing shipping labels, and dropshipping. By bringing these solutions together in a single app, Ordoro helps merchants save time and streamline operations so they can focus on growing their businesses.
Now, 3dcart customers can integrate their eBay stores into Ordoro’s powerful order and inventory management application.
To get a sense of how this works, how it could help you and what it means for your business, check out the video or keep reading below!
What does this mean for 3dcart customers?
Simple. Full, two-way inventory syncing between your 3dcart store and eBay. Plus, a whole lot of other cool stuff like printing shipping labels to help you save time and get products out the door faster.
Let’s say you’ve got a 3dcart store and also sell products on eBay. Right now, if you sell a product on your 3dcart store, your 3dcart inventory will reduce by one. Your eBay inventory, however, will remain unchanged unless you update it manually. Vice versa, if you sell a product on eBay, the sale won’t be reflected in your 3dcart inventory.
Even at modest sales volumes, keeping your inventory in sync between 3dcart and eBay can be taxing.
Going in and manually updating your order takes time and opens up the possibility of human error. What’s more, unsynced inventories can lead to stockouts that can lower your eBay seller rating and have ripple effects far beyond one missed sale.
That’s where Ordoro comes in. Our advanced inventory management software automatically syncs your inventory between your 3dcart and eBay…and anywhere else you sell online!
How?
By pulling your products into a unified inventory that lives within Ordoro and can talk to all of your storefronts.
Let’s say you have five items to sell. Someone places an order through your 3dcart store, reducing your 3dcart inventory to four. Ordoro sees this, reduces the unified inventory to four, and updates eBay. When an order comes in from eBay, it again goes through Ordoro, which updates inventory in 3dcart.
On top of syncing inventory between multiple storefronts, Ordoro also aggregates all your orders from all of your stores into a single stream, lets you route dropshipments with a single click, and streamlines your shipping with quick and easy shipping label printing.
Visit ordoro.com to learn more about how you can save time with their inventory management, shipping and dropshipping capabilities, or give them a try with a free, no-commitment 15-day trail.
23
Aug
Join 3dcart At The Fort Lauderdale Gift Show
If you’re a Florida ecommerce entrepreneur, join 3dcart at the fourth annual Fort Lauderdale Gift Show August 25-28, 2012. And come say hi to the 3dcart team at booth 424!
About The Show: Now entering its fourth year, the Fort Lauderdale Gift Show returns bring everything together for retailers from South Florida and the Caribbean – easy accessibility, cost-effective location, state-of-the-art facility, and a solid exhibitor base representing all product categories.
Set to return with more than 500 booths, the Fort Lauderdale Gift Show will showcase products in virtually every category, including: general giftware; greeting cards; paper goods and social stationery; destination, resort and tourist merchandise; shell items; jewelry and fashion accessories; toys and games; decorative accessories; tabletop; logo products; gourmet products; garden gifts and much more. The show will also feature a special section of jewelry and fashion accessories for immediate delivery to the trade.
18
Jul
Google Trusted Stores, MailChimp, FedEx SmartPost and More Goodies in 3dcart 4.7 Launch
It’s already Q3 of 2012. Where has the time gone? Here at 3dcart, it’s gone into constant product development. We’ve spent time forming new relationships, honing old ones and developing new built-in features to help you run a more efficient store.
To highlight recent feature launches, we’re celebrating the release of 3dcart version 4.7. In the new version, we’ve included features that help merchants build brand trust, diversify payment options, save time and money, increase business efficiency and enhance marketing.
You can take advantage of each of the features below immediately. Join us in a tour of the new developments we’ve included in 3dcart 4.7!
Google Trusted Stores helps you gain a better reputation with shoppers. 3dcart merchants can now sign up for Google Trusted Stores directly through their shopping cart software. The new service lends the Google name to build trust, inspiring more conversions and larger average orders.
3dcart merchants taking part in the program brandish the official Google Trusted Stores badge, complete with letter grades for shipping and customer service. Google also offers purchase protection, helping to resolve issues between customers and merchants.
Integrating GTS is simple. 3dcart merchants can find it under PLUGINS > SECURITY & PRIVACY > Google Trusted Stores.
MailChimp & Mandrill integrations encourage more insightful email marketing. New integrations with MailChimp and Mandrill help merchants gain more insights on email campaigns. MailChimp users now have direct access to Ecommerce Segmentation and Ecommerce360 tracking.
With MailChimp, 3dcart merchants now have the ability to dynamically segment email lists based on customer designations. That means its simple to send different types of campaigns to different types of customers.
Ecommerce360 tracking is another bonus feature included with the integration. It helps you monitor which of your email campaigns are actually driving sales. The analytics platform helps you understand the path from opening the email to the sale and where customers may get lost in between.
Mandrill is a similar service offered by MailChimp. The service enables apps to send transactional email.
Sign up with the services first. Then, login to your 3dcart Admin Panel to enable the integration.
Google Analytics extends to include dynamic web & ecommerce tracking. Now, online retailers can track ecommerce transactions using Google Analytics. For instance, Google Analytics in its regular iteration tracks your shopping cart pages as one page. If you have multiple steps in the purchase process, you don’t get the benefit of
visibility into how customers are interacting with your store during checkout. No need to manually insert the scripts in your HTML, just add your Google Analytics Account ID and you’re ready to go.
PayPal Payments Advanced is a new way to pay. PayPal Payments Advanced is now a part of 3dcart’s 100+ ways to pay. The options include influential services like Checkout by Amazon and Google Wallet.
Rather than sending customers away from your site, PayPal Payments Advanced gives you the distinct advantage of embedding credit card processing through PayPal right on the page. That means fewer redirects and more control for after-purchase marketing.
Check out PayPal Payments Advanced and other supported payment gateways here.
FedEx Certification adds SmartPost to your ecommerce weapon collection. 3dcart is now FedEx Certified, extending the popular shipping company’s suite of tools to include SmartPost real-time rates and labels.
We accomplished FedEx certification after a rigorous development and testing process. You still get access to the benefits of direct FedEx access—only now, you can use SmartPost, too. The SmartPost service uses the USPS to ship low-weight residential packages anywhere in the country at a lower cost to retailers.
For more information on SmartPost, visit the FedEx website.
Aviary Image enhances how you upload and edit photos. To ease image uploading and editing, merchants now have access to Aviary Image Editor, built directly into the backend.
For 3dcart merchants, Aviary enhances photo organization by centralizing image storage, organization and editing. Simply upload photos and use Aviary’s suite of tools to create brilliant product images that help shoppers visualize their purchases, increasing the chances they’ll buy.
Aviary offers great features like photo enhancement, image adjustments and other effects and customizations. Check out our Aviary announcement for more details on what to expect.
Facebook Connect & 3dupsell help ease the customer experience. Facebook Connect gives shoppers the ability to sign into stores using their Facebook accounts.
The add-on displays a button on the “My Account” and “Checkout” pages. If your customer clicks the button, they automatically sign in using their Facebook account. First-time customers and return customers who chose not to save their personal information fill out their payment information separately, ensuring no privacy issues.
3dupsell is a shopping cart feature that engages visitors with unique, time-sensitive offers automatically presented to the customer based on their behavior. It helps retailers by reducing bounce rates, increasing conversions, minimizing abandoned carts and increasing the buyer’s sense of urgency. With 3dupsell, retailers can recover up to 30 percent of lost sales.
We’re really excited about 3dupsell. It’s a great tool that we think will give savvy merchants a leg up on the competition.