Ecommerce Forum & Blog

Magento developers who have just set up an SSL on their shop may find the following annoying message appear in Internet Explorer browsers:

“this page contains both secure and none secure information, do you want to secure the none secure information”

This occurs because the parts of your site that now appear under a secure ‘https’ domain, are probably still linking to parts of your site that are unsecure ‘http’. This is very likely to happen if you’ve just spent a while building a site and you’ve got to the point where it’s about to go live, therefore you want a security certificate to give customers confidence.

The solution I found was to rename all references to the ‘http://www.example.com‘ domain and simply change those references to look like this: ‘//www.example.com‘ .Items should still show up properly, but you’ve removed the part that tells the certificate is from an unsecure part of the site.If you’ve linked up JavaScript files, CSS, images or other items in thie old way it will cause the message to appear.

You don’t need to change links to use this format. This should still work fine: <a href=”http://www.example.com”>Example</a>

But, you do need to use it in this situation: <img src=”//www.example.com” />

Ecommerce giants Amazon and Play have recently decided to challenge Apple’s dominance in the MP3 market by offering MP3 downloads as part of its service. Amazon launched Amazon MP3 with the intention of reducing Apple’s markets share by undercutting it’s prices whilst maintaining the convenience of the iTunes store. As far as first year’s go, a 5-10% market share isn’t that bad, but Amazon is little more than inconvenience to Apple who still dominate the market share with over 70%.

It appears that any market share gained from Amazon was from other small MP3 download services, meaning iTunes has remained pretty much intact.

So why is iTunes so immovable from it’s perch as king of the MP3 downloads? Sure, nothing beats the convenience of simply pressing ‘buy’ and seeing it in your iTunes library seconds later as if it’s always been there, but you’d think that the more competitive prices of Amazon and Play would have made more of a dent than a scratch. Those with the knowledge will know that it only takes a second to import and Amazon download into iTunes.

I’m sure Amazon will continue as normal however with it’s MP3 download service - there’ really nothing to loose. A market with virtually no operating costs, no delivery charges, unlimited stock and clearly booming in comparison to traditional CD high street sales. It’s a division that all online music sellers should incorporate - but just don’t expect to loosen Apple’s grip on the market!

One of the most important aspects of an e-commerce website is the application of an SSL certificate, something which must be requested through a company’s hosting account. You are then provided with a Certificate Key and a Private Key which you must submit to a vendor who will verify your site and supply you with the rest of your details.You need to ensure that your website has a unique IP Address that the certificate can be assigned to.

Self-Signed Certificates

You can actually sign your own SSL certificate and save time and money without going through a certificate vendor. However using this method is not advised as you are technically just kidding your customers and yourselves. In the same way that signing your own driving license doesn’t make you a legal driver, signing your own SSL certificate doesn’t make your websitesafe for users - and this is a risky and dishonest way to treat your customers.

How much do they cost?

There are different certificates for different levels of encryption and varying server types. SSL certificates come in 40-bit, 128-bit and 256-bit  varieties, but as the 40-bit encryption has been hacked, be sure to get a higher bit certificate. For plesk users, you can find a good range of options by visting MyPlesk.com. You can find that subscriptions start at about £30 for a year up to about £500. You can also determine how many years you want it to last for - anything between 1 and 5 years.

An SSL Certificate is the way of proving you’re a legitimate, honest and open e-commerce business with nothing to hide. A proper SSL certificate may well be your key to ecommerce success.

I think it’s worth pointing out to all Magento developers that learning the intricacies of the dataflow is unquestionably worthwhile. It allows you to load the spreadsheet full of simple products, including those that make up the configurable products and this is a massive time saver. One thing to remember is to configure the inventory on the spreadsheet. 1 normally means yes and 0 equals no. Make sure that you set the column that suggests that the user configures the inventory at a later date is set to ‘0′ for no, otheriwse your products will all import out of stock.

I’ll be putting some Magento tutorials up in the next few weeks, including more about the dataflow.

Wordpress has been hailed in blogging platform circles for a number of years for it’s excellent open source contribution to the world of bloggers. Not only is it free and open source while being very simple to modify, it is also capable of executing impressive levels of functionality using it’s vast plugin library. E-commerce is not something you’d normally associate with this sort of platform - we already know that Magento is a very complex adaptation of open source code to create shopping cart software, so surely Wordpress is already the best at what it is?

http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/

The WP-Ecommerce plugin for Wordpress developed by New Zealand team Instinct is a ’state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. It is both free and priceless at the same time.’

It certainly picks up on the Wordpress focus towards simplicity, usability and multi-platform integration. My question as a new potential user is regarding the depth of the software. The lack of apparent support suggests that it is on the whole fairly easy to use. There has also been little said about the platform’s backend, which will be fundamental in its ease of use.

I’ll have a review of it once I make progress with its development.