Ok, so I am the worst blogger in the history of the world, I admit it! But hey, if I was blogging all day and not working, that would not be good either right? So yes, we have been very busy here at Ryan Design Studio for the last few months. Lots of projects to update which I will do shortly.

We've started working with the 4.3.1 branch of X-Cart now. Not really any huge new features, but a number of my clients appreciate the dimensional shipping and pre-auth functionality for credit card payments (authorize first, charge when shipped). The mod vendors are pretty much caught up to converting their mods over, so we are now using this as our production version. We have of course rewritten the templates using clean CSS, as X-Cart out of the box is quite bloated and sloppy when it comes to the CSS/html. Nothing a few hours of cleanup can't fix!

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Thanks to all of the people we had the pleasure of working with this year, and we look forward to working with even more of you next year!

Big news today - X-Cart 4.3 was released:

http://www.x-cart.com/news/xcart-430-released.html

This represents a pretty big change from the 4.1 platform, and as soon as we have done some testing and let the bugs work themselves out we'll be switching to this platform for all new installs. Looks like they did a nice job on first glance though. If you are starting a new site in the next few weeks, I'd hold out for at least another release - the early ones usually have a few bugs that need to get fixed before it can be used for a live site, although they did a pretty good job with beta on this one.

Will post an update here once we have had a chance to play around with it a bit more.

Well, it has been a while - and a crazy summer. The big news is, Ryan Design Studio has moved into a new office! You can now find us in Branford, Connecticut - one town south of our old location. It is a great spot right downtown, and offers a whole lot more space for expansion - will hopefully have some news on that front in the very near future!

So what has been going on since May? The big news is that X-Cart's new v5 platform is on the horizon. We are all eagerly awaiting this release, and I'll be sure to post here as soon as we have a firm date. We all have our fingers crossed that this will live up to the huge expectations and won't just be yet another recycled version of X-Cart.

We've launched a number of sites in the past few months, including:

+ Top Gun Supply
+ Just 4 Birds
+ Custom Promise Rings
+ Coffee Shrine
+ Strider Sports
+ Lotioncrafter.com
+ Center Point Pond
+ Tutti Amici
+ The Brides Pendant
+ CEP Socks

Well, my New Year's resolution of updating the blog often didn't last long! I'll try to redeem myself in the coming months.

Just wanted to give an update on what is going on in the X-Cart world, as this year should be an interesting one. First, X-Cart has a very good running list put together by forum users on features that should be available in v5. We are all hopeful that this new flagship cart will be as good as promised.

With the impending PA-DSS compliance deadline fast approaching (a little over a year now) we finally got an answer out of Qualitaem as to how they will be handling this. The v5 cart will be PA-DSS compliant out of the box, meaning you won't have to do anything to be PA-DSS and thus PCI-Compliant. For those of you who are using 4.0.x or 4.1.x versions of X-Cart, Qualiteam will be releasing a plug-in module that will essentially act as its own independent payment gateway, operating outside of X-Cart, which will allow those older versions of carts to also be PA-DSS compliant. I'm a little nervous about how easy this will be, as I don't really look forward to updating 150 carts the day before the regulations kick in! Let's hope they release these modules with plenty of time to spare.

I have been getting a lot of questions lately about what version of X-Cart they should be using. Most of the X-Cart professionals, myself included, are recommending to stay with 4.1.12, at least until v5 comes out at the end of the year. 4.2 is still extremely buggy, and with the upcoming release of 4.3, it doesn't appear that Qualiteam is paying much attention to making 4.2 stable. 4.3 may be a little better, but 4.1.12 is still a much more stable platform and will be fine until it is time to try out v5.

I have a long list of site launches which I will post shortly in another entry.

For those of you who already own X-Cart and don't visit the forums that often, now is a good time to start. There is a thread in the 'Wish List' forum that is meant for suggestions for the v5 platform. At this point, everything is on the table, so if you have a feature you have always wanted in X-Cart, or something that has always driven you crazy about the system, now is the time to share it. They have instituted a 'thank you' system - if you see a suggestion you like, add your thanks to the post. The ones that get the most 'votes' will be seriously considered for the release. It is nice to see Qualiteam finally involving the community in their development.

In other news, we have launched our first Expression Engine project - www.apitherapy.org. This one is pretty highly customized, special thanks to Matt at Vector for all of his help.

After spending the last few months developing 15 different sites, they are slowly starting to go live:

Scuba Basics

Hapari Swimwear

Mane Depot

Welcome Bags

We'll have a few more to announce in the coming weeks.

X-Cart (Qualiteam) announced the other day that they will be completely re-engineering their shopping cart systems, combining their main product (X-Cart) with their 'Lite' product (LiteCommerce) into a brand new product called X-Cart v5. It looks as though they plan to involve the current client base in the development of this next-generation shopping cart, at least in providing feedback on what features/functions it should have.

This is good news for everyone, as the tech behind their current cart is starting to look a bit out of date, particular when so many other carts are embracing AJAX and other user-friendly, time saving techniques. We can only hope that things like real-time form error checking, dragging and dropping and a CMS will be part of this new X-Cart, but I will be lobbying hard for exactly this type of technology. I'll post updates here as things start to take shape, and we hear more about it from X-Cart.

Even though many of us are hopeful that the new President and his administration will eventually turn the economy around, the current recession will be here for a while. For online store owners, the simple fact is that if you do not stay competitive and keep the traffic flowing to your site, chances are you won't last the year. I can't tell you how many e-mails I have received from existing site owners asking what they can to do improve their traffic and sales. So, I thought I would put together a quick post on some simple things you can do to help boost your rankings, keep the customers coming to your store and convert the traffic that does come to your store into sales.

Pricing/Free Shipping - The first thing you can do is make sure your pricing is competitive. Now more than ever people are bargain shopping, and if they can find the same product you are selling elsewhere for less, that is where they are going to buy it. One way to 'one up' your competition is to always offer free shipping of some sort. Even if your prices are a bit higher than the competition, the psychological effect of free shipping tends to win people over. If you have a threshold of a certain dollar amount to get to free shipping, the benefit is often a higher average order. People will spend an extra $10 to get $5 of free shipping. A crazy as it sounds, it is all in the psychology.

Add a Blog - Google in particular eats this stuff up and it is an easy way to add weekly/daily fresh content to your site. Write articles about new products, ways to use your products, or just general articles about your industry. Use keywords freely, and try to update it at least once a week. WordPress is the blog we use most often, as it is free and very easy to alter to match the design of your site. The only catch is that you need to install it on your domain (i.e. yourdomain.com/blog) and not a hosted solution like yoursite.wordpress.com, as the benefit to the search engine only works if it is ON your domain.

Build your backlinks - now is a perfect time really focus on getting inbound links to your site. These can't just be random links on random sites, they need to have a decent PageRank (4 or above) and need to be related to your industry. Forums and blogs are great places to add links to your site, as are manufacturer's web sites, local chambers of commerce and trade organizations or groups.

Make your customers feel comfortable ordering from you - sometimes when it comes down to buying from site A or site B (and pricing is the same) the customer will simply choose which one they feel more comfortable with. There are a number of things that contribute to a customer's comfort level:

- A clearly defined set of policies (returns, shipping, privacy, etc)
- An 'About Us' page that lets the customer know there are real people taking their money. A nice friendly photo of yourself/your family also goes a long way to building customer confidence
- Make sure your site is secure, and let them know it is secure by adding trust icons and an SSL icon
- A professional design. Nothing throws up a red flag more than a cookie cutter, generic design

Explore new ways to advertise/promote your products - there are lots of ways to promote your products these days that you may not have considered:

- Push your products out to 'shopping' sites such as Google Base, Shopzilla, etc
- Create a channel on Youtube and publish videos about your products
- Create a Facebook and MySpace page for your site
- Advertise with AdWords
- Send out a monthly newsletter with current promotions/specials. An easy way to remind customers to come back and visit you again

Hire an SEO specialist - even if you think you are promoting the correct keywords in your site, having a professional analysis done may lead to the discovery of 'niche' keywords that could drive a whole new batch of traffic to your site. Many SEO firms offer an entry-level 'report' that gives you a detailed breakdown of your competitors and keywords/potential traffic.

That should give you plenty of things to work on in the coming months. The good news is, an economy like this tends to weed out the stores that aren't 100% serious about their business. This can result in increased traffic and sales for you if you take the time to do things right.

Just want to take a moment to wish our clients, friends and colleagues a Happy, Healthy New Year! Lots to look forward to in 2009, including a new version of X-Cart!

Qualiteam released X-Cart 4.2 today, and I have already received about 10 e-mails asking how to go about upgrading. Unfortunately, there will not be an upgrade kit available from 4.1 to 4.2, as the template and shipping systems are so drastically different, it would be nearly impossible. There will be a database patch released, which will allow you to upgrade your 4.1.x database to 4.2, but that still means you'd need to start with a fresh install of 4.2. So for those of you who are running a 4.1.x store, I would recommend sticking with it.

If you are about to build a new store, I'd still give it a few months for the third party developers to catch up, as they will most likely need to completely rebuild their modules to accommodate the new template system. It does look like a nice clean layout, something we have been asking for forever. The dimensional shipping and pre-auth/capture functionality for some payment gateways is also a nice touch.

All of the other 'new' features have existed for quite a while in the third party market, so there is really nothing earth shattering here. Still, always nice to see Qualiteam making progress and keeping their cart updated. The CSS-based template is essential, as it renders much cleaner than tables, and is a lot easier to modify. It is also much more search engine friendly and cross-browser compatible, so a welcome change indeed.

Wishing you all a Happy Holiday season!