TerraNetwork

Christmas is the busiest and most important season for many online shops. So how you can ensure this Xmas turns out to be a good one?

Merchandising

Help your customers to buy online by guiding them to suitable presents and stocking fillers. Use your homepage to present your recommendations. Buying presents can be a tricky decision so ensure that you make it as easy as possible. Seasonal categories such as presents for her/him/kids etc will be appreciated by your customers.

[...]

Our latest server, named Pegasus, is now online.  Pegasus operates with the WHM/cPanel combination of control panels,;WHM for Reseller level and cPanel for Site Administrator level.  The server also has Fanstastico DeLuxe, for 1-click installs of many software programmes currently in use.

Pegasus, with 16 Gbs of RAM, 2 Dual Quad Core Intel Nehalem  chips (16 CPU’s), and two SAS hard drives (15k rpm) in RAID 1 is our fastest server yet.

We shall soon (but not yet) be offering Resellers the ability to have their own custom name servers.  And we will be offering dedicated ip addresses in blocks of 5, instead of singly as we do at present.  This will allow Resellers to purchase and install Full SSL Certificates without having to apply to us beforehand for the allocation of a dedicated ip address.

We’ve been asked how easy it is to upgrade Magento. So, there I was thinking, hey – they’ve got this Magento Connect Manager, a few clicks and we’re done. Wrong. Very wrong. Go on to read the tale of the dreaded “500 Internal Server Error” problem (= your permissions are wrong), a small issue with Url.php and why not taking backups is really bad for your health.

The upgrade test was carried out on a standard Magento v1.3.0 install on a Linux with PHP5.2.9. Note that Magento does not allow gradual upgrades, at least not via the Magento Connect Manager. If you use the Manager, it’s all or nothing.

[...]

In the last week of October, 2009, we shall bring online our newest server, named Pegasus.  This server will herald a major departure from our previous offerings, because it will use the WHM/cPanel combination of control panels in place of Parallels Ensim Pro which is used on all of our other servers.

With cPanel customers will have the use of the Fantastico DeLuxe add-on which allows for the 1-click  auto-install of a multitude of scripts.  [...]

After wasting hours yesterday trying to get Magento working on XAMPP, I finally hit a winning combination. So here’s the summary of how to get a local copy of Magento running on a PC. Tested on Windows Vista (32bit) with XAMPP v1.7.1 and Magento 1.3.2.4.

Quick tips

• Use XAMPP 1.7.1 – the version is important! v1.6.8 may also work.
• Enable curl in php.ini
• Install from http://127.0.01 and NOT localhost

[...]

It’s hard to believe but around the time of the Millenium there were only two types of shopping cart software available – Actinic or custom coded in-house software specifically tailored to the needs of that particular company selling online.  Neither option was cheap but the latter option was only available to big companies with big pockets.  Yes, there were also HTML websites with Pay Pal “Buy Now” buttons – but this is not “shopping cart software”.

  [...]

Sage Pay is a UK payment processing service (formerly known as ProtX). In short, they handle the credit/debit card collection and authorisation process on behalf on online businesses.

SagePay is used by many shops I’ve built and they provide a reliable service with realistic fees. They’re usually top of my list when customers ask for a recommendation. An additional benefit is that they’re developer-friendly (good integration guides and test environment).

www.sagepay.co.uk - the new home for ProtX

[...]

We’ve worked with many start-ups over the past years and it’s always great to see a new shop succeed and grow. But not all shops make it and this can be very tough on the owner. So before you empty your savings account, read our 5 tips & make sure your money is well spent.

[...]

Anybody selling online will need to settle one question: Which shopping cart system do I choose? Googling in this case will not help – for one simple reason: there’s no “one best cart” out there. But there is the right cart for you. And we’ve got 7 simple steps to get you there.

7 steps:
1. Have a business plan
2. Put together a list of requirements
3. Research payment systems
4. Decide on who does what
5. Look into the future
6. Make your choice
7. Test, test and test again

[...]

The following new osCommerce modules are available: Reports Package, Cross Sell Manager, and Attribute Manager including templates, sort order and bulk application. [...]