How will you be paid? Spotlight on Payment Methods

Shopping Carts are all about selling online, so how you will get paid is an important part of setting up an online business. If you’re an Australian business, then there are a number of obvious choices – the “big” providers – and a number of others too. All of them do the same basic job – process the credit card transactions you put to them, take the money from the purchaser and pay it to your merchant bank account. In the case of third party payment systems like Paymate and Paypal, they make that payment into their own account balance system that you then have to manually transfer to a bank account (subject to their fees and possibly bank fees too).

When you’re deciding what cart to use, think about what payment method you want to use as part of that decision. Here are some considerations:

  • Do you want a bank solution or third party solution? A third-party solution like Paypal is often cheaper but it may have restrictions such as issues processing certain types of cards or payments, or order management issues due to the way the payment provider physically presents the payment to the customer and how it tells the shopping cart software that the payment has been made. Look for an experience that is as integraetd as possible with your site.
  • What fees will you pay? Payment providers generally take a cut of your transactions and may also charge you a monthly fee. Know what you will pay before you start and whether there are any minimum charges or minimum transactions that you need to meeet.
  • Does the cart provider also take a cut of the transaction? Is the cart provider affiliated with any of the payment providers (e.g. owned by them) that could influence their ability to be impartial when recommending providers? If not, you may be able to ask the cart provider for guidance.
  • How long does it take to get paid? How do they process transactions on weekdays and public holidays?
  • What can you do if you are having trouble? Do they have a help desk and how do they operate it?
  • Does the shopping cart support Australian providers that are not the standard ones. e.g. does it support Sunscorp’s payment system, or St George’s Hosted Payment Pages? Does it support Payway?
  • What type of security does the cart provider use? What type of security does the payment gateway use? Do they meet Visa and MasterCard’s PCI DSS security stanards (which are mandatory), so that your business can meet them too?

There are a lot of questions to ask, but its worth it as a business without money isn’t going to get very far when you start trading!

Posted in Ecommerce General, Shopping Cart Software | Leave a comment

Paid v Free Shopping Carts : The low down

There is a lot of discussion about the ongoing battle between paid and free shopping carts – whether a free shopping cart is really free and whether a paid shopping cart is worth the money you spend on it. Then within paid shopping carts there are another two broad types: hosted shopping carts and self-hosted shopping carts. What do you choose and how?

The easiest way to decide what you want to do comes down to your experience and how much you want to get down to the day-to-day management of the shopping cart software. Even if you have the expertise to manage the shopping cart software you may not want to. A paid shopping cart would normally have the following advantages over a free one:

  • If there’s a problem, you’re paying them so they’ll fix it
  • When new features are available your provider may be able to upgrade you to them, and resolve any issues for you.
  • If you have trouble doing something and cant’ find help for it in the documentation, you have an expert you can ask.
  • New features will be added to the cart that you can purchase or obtain at no cost (depending on the cart and their terms). Free carts you can wait for years for an upgrade or a bug fix.
  • You don’t have to stress about things like security as much. A paid provider will usually go to the lengths of ensuring that they do their upmost to offer a secure cart, and plug any security holes as they become aware of them. Free software will usually be installed on a generic hosting provider whose server must cope with both the needs of shopping carts and other types of generic web applications. You’re always better off on an ecommerce optimised server.

Free shopping carts are free but you usually have to post problems on public community discussion boards or wait a long time for software authors to reply or resolve issues that you are having. Modules and plugins may or may not have been tested with the other modules and plugins that you have, wreaking all havoc on your system that you have to resolve by either fixing it yourself, or paying someone else to do them.

For an experienced ecommerce programmer, or someone who wants a high level of control over the day to day workings of your shopping cart software, then a free solution may work for you. But you’re generally better off with a paid or paid/hosted solution.

Posted in Ecommerce General, Shopping Cart Software | Leave a comment

Shopping Cart Australian Spotlight: Ozcart

Hosted shopping cart software allows you to focus on building your online shop while the shopping cart provider takes care of the technical aspects of the store behind the scenes. This includes configuring the website to meet the technical requirements for security compliance, configuring the website for the country it operates in and providing you with support for getting your store operating the way you want it to. Ozcart® is an example of a hosted shopping cart configured for the Australian market.

Ecommerce Features

There are a lot of considerations when setting up an online shop – how will you accept payments and how will you charge for delivery are two of the main ones. Another major consideration is how to get cusotmers through the checkout process as quickly as possible. If it is too hard to check out, customers will abandon the shopping cart and buy elsewhere. Customers are just a click away from competitors online, and in many industries the competition is cut-throat. Some of the popular ecommerce features that store owners will look for are:

  • Quick checkout – with as few pages as possible for customers to go through
  • Security – if customers can’t put confidence in the security of the website, they will not buy
  • Design – who wants a website that doesn’t look professional? With many of the major offline brands now heading online in a tough retail environment, competition is heating up and design will make a huge difference in the years to come
  • Australian live postage calculators – end customers want accurate postage estimates, and not everyone uses Australia Post. But shipping calculators for other Australian shipping providers is something that other cart providers often overlook
  • Payment options for credit cards – including support for Australian payment methods

Design customisation

One thing that makes Ozcart™ a popular shopping cart is that design customisation is built-in to the setup price. That means there’s nothing extra charged to customise the graphics and colours of the store to suit your business. That applies whether you’re talking about a drop down menu, rotating gallery slider with graphics, changing the background colour scheme or inserting your logo and business name.

Generous Bandwidth and Disk Space Allowances

Disk space limits are set on Ozcart website packages to be generous. There’s no “unlimited” bandwidth and disk space options, because just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, the reality of unlimited disk and bandwidth usage is that the provider is usually taking a gamble that not every person can use their allocated disk space and bandwidth allocations. Ultimately web servers are just computers and have physical limits on the amount of traffic and disk space that they have. Everything is finite and nothing is ever unlimited.

Australian features

Focusing on website features for Australian business is a big part of Ozcart. There’s built in support for an Australia Post calculator, with support for satchels, platinum and express network delivery time calculations, as well as support for the live calculators of other Australian shipping providers: Trans Direct, Fastway, eGo, and Smartsend. When it comes to payment providers, many Australian providers are also covered: Westpac Payway, Suncorp Virtual POS, Bendigo Bank (MIGS), ANZ eGate, St George Hosted Payment Pages, Camtech, DirectOne (SecurePay), NAB Transact, CommWeb, SCNet iPay, e-path, Paymate and Paypal are amongst them.

Ozcart™ shopping carts are affordably priced

Posted in Ecommerce General, Shopping Cart Software | Leave a comment

PHP: A quick way to remove trailing slashes when working with url strings

If you’re working on an ecommerce shop, you may be frequently working with your site name as a string. For example, you might be building a custom url for a sitemap or building a url link for a specific function of your cart. Here’s a quick reference guide for some of the string manipulations you might need to do frequently.

Remove the trailing slash from a domain name

Use rtrim. Here’s how:

rtrim($url_string,’/');

Remove the http or https from the start of a string

Use preg_replace. Here’s how:

preg_replace(“/^https?:\/\/(.+)$/i”,”\\1″, $url_string);

So combining the two above, to get just www.ecommerceaustralia.net.au from http://www.ecommereaustralia.net.au/ would be:

rtrim(preg_replace(“/^https?:\/\/(.+)$/i”,”\\1″,”http://ecommerceaustralia.net.au/”),’/');

Get the domain name from a string

You might want to get the domain name from a string, without any subfolders on it. For example, you might want to know what the domain name for the string http://www.ecommerceaustralia.net.au/blog/general (or if you had a subdomain http://subdomain.yourdomain.com.au for example). Here’s how.

preg_replace(‘/^www\./i’,”,$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);

Posted in Ecommerce General | Leave a comment

How to reset file permissions and clear the cache on Magento

Most Magento installations will be on a VPS or Dedicated server with access to the command line, via a tool like putty. This is the easiest and fastest way to both clear the cache and reset file permissions in Magento.

Warning: Be careful when using these tools. If you run them on the wrong folder you can Internal Server Error your whole server!

If you don’t have putty access to the server where Magento is installed:

  1. Download the Magento Cleanup Tool from Magento’s website
  2. Unzip the file to your local computer and then using FTP access to your website, upload the file magento-cleanup.php to the root folder where your Magento installation is located.
  3. In a browser type: http://www.yourdomain.com.au/magento-cleanup.php

If your Magento installation is in a subfolder of your website you will need to put this in to the above url as well as appropriate.

The rest of these instructions assume you have command line access to your server.

Reset file permissions

Log into your server using putty. Change to the directory where your Magento installation is located (to make sure you don’t run this command on the wrong folder!)

Run these commands, one at a time:


find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
chmod 550 pear

Quick clear of the cache

After following the above commands you will already be in the folder where your Magento installation is located. Then run the following command


rm -rf var/cache/*

Make sure you ahve changed to the right directory first or you could delete mass parts of your Magento installation rendering your whole install useless!

Posted in Ecommerce General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Opencart thumbnails: remove white borders

If you are using Opencart and have both images with a coloured background and a template with a coloured background, you may notice white borders around your thumbnails that you cannot remove using any CSS tricks you can think of. Inspecting the images in Firebug you may discover that the thumbnails have a white border within them even if the original images did not. How do you get rid of this?

This is caused by the fact that thumbnail sizes are set in admin for images, and if images are not in the correct proportion to scale to these limits opencart canvases the image with a white background before scaling them.

It is easily fixed. On the latest version of opencart at the time of writing 1.4.9.3, open the file system/library/image.php and navigate to approxmiately line 81. Here you will find a piece of code that looks like this:

$background = imagecolorallocate($this->image, 255, 255, 255);

The 255, 255, 255 bit represents the red, green and blue values for the colour that you want. So to change this to black for example, set them to 0,0,0.

Then go into your image/cache folder and clear out the files so that opencart regenerates the thumbnails. And you’re all done!

Posted in Ecommerce General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Put Magento into Maintenance mode before turning on the Developer Tools

The Magento Developer tools are a great resource, but when they are turned on anyone visiting your site can use them! This could cause havoc in your website because one of the great features of the Developer Toolbar is the ability to change language defines by just clicking on them and editing them. Imagine if your competitors or a bot came along and edited all of your language defines on your behalf. Who knows what they could end up saying, especially if they chose less obvious defines to edit.

Another way that havoc could be caused is if a search engine bot comes to your site when the toolbar is turned on. A bot like Googlebot follows all links and becuause the developer front end is a series of links on the bottom of your Magento screen, the bot will follow them – causing very unpredictable results. Your search engine URL settings could be changed or the settings for template hints turned on without your knowledge. Causing the situation where you have template hints turned off in Magento’s admin but they won’t disappear.

The best thing to do is turn on Magento’s down for maintenance mode. Then in a separate browser window log into Admin. This makes the front of your site visible to your browser, but down for maintenance for everyone else. A safe environment to use the developer tools.

Posted in Ecommerce General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Can’t remove template hints in Magento?

Template hints are the red boxes that appear on the front of your website, and can be turned on by the Magento Developer tools. This is an incredibly helpful tool, and can save you hours of searching through endless Magento files searching for the one you are looking for. But if you turn off these template hints and they don’t go away, how do you make them go away?

The first things to check are the standard and obvious things: like clearing the Magento cache, and your browser cache too.

If that doesn’t work, here is something to check that you may not have thought of: turn the Developer Tools back on, turn off the template hints there, and then turn the Developer Tools off again.

This method might work because if you turn off the developer tools with the template hints still turned on, you can’t turn them off in Magento’s admin – even if they’re set to off they stay turned on. It’s a little gotcha and something to check before you turn off the developer tools.

Tip Tested with Magento 1.3 and 1.4

Posted in Ecommerce General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Welcome to Ecommerce Australia: a new look and focus for 2011

Welcome to the new look Ecommerce, Australia. We were previously set up as a directory of ecommerce providers and suppliers in Australia, with a dollop of relevant ecommerce news and help thrown in, but over the Christmas break we have decided to change our focus for 2011. We are now focussed on ecommerce help for carts relevant to users in Australia.

This includes help for tricky topics that aren’t well covered on forums, ecommerce trends and links to resources that we do not provide ourselves. It will be helpful to web designers and developers, as well as to businesses building their own or managing their own shopping carts.

We will accept comments on our posts but all comments will be moderated and subject to either change or rejection without notice. This is because we do not want to be another website that exists purely to help others improve their SEO rankings. It’s for genuine businesses trying to research the ecommerce market in Australia before setting up a shop, for web hosting support staffo or developers looking for the answer to a tricky problem that’s not covered on the forums, or those building their own cart for their business.

We have no current plans to clutter our site with ugly Google ads scattered everywhere like is common in this industry. Nor will we have the site hijacked as a means for ecommerce providers to boost their search engine rankings. We fully intend to create a website that people can genuinely find relevant help. This said, we will accept genuinely helpful content from ecommerce providers (as long as its relevant to customers in Australia) and to those people give credit and do follow links. And for the right business, we would consider paid advertising – but you’d need to contact us to discuss it.

Please contact us if you have something to contribute.

Posted in Ecommerce General | Leave a comment