We strongly recommend getting Google Analytics setup on your site today and with IntuitSolution’s Custom Ecommerce code you can be sure you are getting accurate and complete Ecommerce statistics in your Google Analytics panel.

Find out more about ProStores Google Analytics.

In the same way that ProStores is specialized shopping cart software, a shopping feed manager, such as GoDataFeed, will expand your business offering with greater control and far greater range. We have spent considerable time researching shopping feed software, evaluating the options based on a number of criteria such as, compatibility with ProStores, ability to optimize, category organization, ease of use, and pricing. From our research, it is clear that GoDataFeed is the best option available.

By moving shopping feed management to GoDataFeed you can submit to a wide array of shopping engines with greater control over how the feeds are generated. Additionally, there is a fully featured Amazon module for getting your product catalong into Amazon.com’s shopping engine. GoDataFeed also has extremely competitive pricing with a $0. 99 cent trial and starter packages, and monthly rates as low as $50.00 per month.

With additional features and reliable feed generation, GoDataFeed is a dedicated comparison shopping management solution is perfect for any Ecommerce store. Click here to find out more information and sign up for your GoDataFeed trial today!

As ProStores experts, running and maintaining hundreds of sites, we have noticed a problem with how images are named when they are added to a ProStore. On most of the sites we work on, the store owner will name the images randomly; the image name full of numbers and letters that have no discernible logic. Whether you have 10 products or 10000 products, naming your product and category images properly is key to keeping your site well organized.

For example, let’s say that we have a granola bar in our store with the SKU “GB-1001-Cinnamon”

The product’s photo is currently named: “cinn20algres0121.jpg”

A better way to name the product is by using the SKU: “GB_1001_Cinnamon_large01.jpg”

You’ve experienced it before, trying to find that one photo among the thousands of vacation photos, family photos, and work photos. By setting a naming convention and sticking to it you can reduce your future workload immensely. Not only will a naming convention save you time and energy but also but also save time and money for any image-based customizations that you install. We often set to work installing our Multi-Product image system or home page slideshow and encounter a whole catalog of randomly named images. In this situation, we now have double the work to do before the image-based system can be fully implemented on the ProStore. Last, but not least, search engines will index your product images, Google images being an example, having an image named logically will have additional SEO bonus over randomly named images.

Clear and logical product names have even more benefits than we’ve listed above. Image naming conventions are just one of many ways to setup ProStores properly to save time and money.

Our ProStores SEO clients will often ask, “Is the amount I’m paying for this Adwords or Pay-Per-Click campaign really worth it?” or “Which one of my Google, Yahoo! or Bing campaigns is really having an impact?” For the sake of efficiency, we’ve been helping our SEO clients customize Google Analytics to capture as much data from other services as possible. In this article we would like to feature a technique found here http://www.ppchero.com/the-secret-of-tracking-yahoo-keyword-data-in-google-analytics/ for tracking Yahoo! or non-Google PPC campaigns in the Google Analytics panel. Since Google and Yahoo! are in direct competition, the data isn’t automatically shared between the different services. By following the steps below, it’s possible to track your Yahoo! advertising campaigns right within your Google Analytics account. This is a huge time saver, not to mention that it makes it much easier to compare the effectiveness of all of your paid traffic.
Note: Before you can track your e-mail marketing campaigns, you must have Google Analytics installed on your website. If you need help with this, we offer advanced Google Analytics setup for ProStores.

1. The main step is to build custom links for analytics to track with. Google has a handy tool that will help you build these special links right here . This custom link will have all the information Google Analytics needs to full out the reporting in panel.

2. Rather than inputting fixed data into each one of the URL segments for reporting, identifiers originating from the PPC service are used to build out dynamic URLs. For instance Yahoo PPC, quote “{OVKEY} for the paid keyword, {OVRAW} for the actual search query, {OVADID} for the ad text ID number and {OVCAMPGID} for the campaign ID number.”

3. Now this URL can be inserted into the destination URL for your chosen PPC service (your campaign tells Google to track it, rather than you changing an option in Google Analytics.)

That’s it! Now you don’t have to look in half-a-dozen panels to see what traffic sources are working. All of your traffic sources can be analyzed and compared right from the intuitive Google Analytics panel. Keep in mind you must have Google Analytics installed and to take advantage of Google eCommerce tracking. Again, we’re happy to offer advanced Google Analytics setup for ProStores if you require assistance.

The issue is that Comparison Shopping Feeds are not submitting on an accurate schedule.  The problem is not predictable in that it may happen at any given time on any given site using any of the four types of built-in feeds – or it may not happen at all.  On some sites we’ve seen the issue pop up daily for a few days in a row and then not at all for weeks.

While the problem itself is ongoing, we have been given an interim solution that we will implement once a week on each of our servers in order to “unstick” “stuck” feeds.  This will keep your feeds up to date on at least a weekly basis.  As described above, the random factor could mean that your feeds are never behind, but at least with this temporary solution the oldest they will be is 7 days.  If you change your product prices on a daily basis you would be much better suited using a piece of shopping engine software to manage your feeds as it is a much more robust solution.   If you’d like our recommendations for shopping engine management software please open a support ticket and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

If you are not changing prices and descriptions for your products on a daily basis it is actually frowned upon by most shopping feed systems to submit unchanged data too frequently.

This issue will hopefully be corrected in the near future.  We appreciate your patience and understanding until that time.

What I’m talking about is that in ProStores you have the ability to use the File Type option under Support > Upload Images in your ProStores administration panel.  In the image below I’ve clicked on the dropdown to show the second option: Multi-Image Zip Archive

This is where it gets tricky.  The system accepts zip files, but only if that file contains images and nothing else. Nothing.  Not a folder, not several folders, not a “thumbs.db” file (generated automatically by Windows in image directories), nothing at all other than the images themselves.

Click Here to download Example #1.  This example shows a properly constructed zip file that ProStores will accept

Click Here to download Example #2.  This example shows a file which will be rejected – it contains a folder with the images inside.

This may take a little practice depending on what program you are used to using to create zip files.  If you have never created one before, there’s no time like the present!  WinZip and WinRar are both free programs that can produce ProStores-compatible zip files.  Regardless of the program you use, the main idea to take away from this article is that you are zipping the images themselves only.  If you’re adding a whole directory to the zip file it’s adding extra overhead and information to the file that ProStores can’t understand.

One last very important point I should make here is that this article as well as the Multi-Image Zip Archive functionality itself is only intended for PC users running Windows.  Mac users running any version of OS X will not be able to produce zip files that are compatible with ProStores using any known software as the end result will always include structural files ProStores cannot handle due to the way the OS X file system is setup.

Well here’s what’s happening: you are allowing what is called Anonymous Checkout on your site.  When a client chooses to checkout anonymously, they are not making an account on your site.  Period.  I get people all the time asking how they accept anonymous orders but force everyone to make an account and the answer is simple – you can’t.  The entire point of allowing anonymous checkout is to target the demographic of internet users that are just a bit too paranoid and feel that creating an account will always lead to spam or identity theft.  It’s a substantial demographic so it can sometimes be a hard decision as to whether or not you will accept their orders.

Go to Store Settings > General in your ProStores administration panel and expand the Shopping Car and Checkout Options and you should be looking at something like this:

What matters here is the last section, Checkout Options.  Notice you can require an account, not allow accounts, or allow both.  If your site is allowing both options, then you are allowing people to checkout without creating accounts.  While in many cases this isn’t an issue, if you are considering allowing this option there are a few things you should consider first:

• Anonymous customers cannot purchase downloadable products
• Anonymous customers cannot purchase subscription products
• You cannot issue a credit to an anonymous customer
• You cannot perform order entry for an anonymous customer
• You cannot look up customer information for an anonymous customer

While these may seem trivial to most stores out there, these are important things to keep in mind for certain types of stores – most importantly stores that offer only downloadable products.  If a store like that allows both, they’re simply going to be losing sales whenever someone attempts to checkout and leaves thanks to getting an error message.  If the option wasn’t there in the first place the idea of checking out without an account may not even occur to them.

My point is not that there’s anything wrong with accepting anonymous orders, it’s that the decision to do so should be an informed decision and hopefully this information will help you decide what’s best for your site.

There are plenty of reasons to end up in this position, and while deleting the order will get it off of the Ready For Shipping page, it will also mean that the order’s data is permanently gone and will not be included in any of the reports you can generate in your store.  First lets run through a few scenarios that would end with a stuck order and what to do in each case:

A) The order is old. Nearly all payment processors have a 30 day processing limitation, meaning a session is created when the customer checks out and the purchase is authorized.  That session remains valid for 30 days, but once 30 days have come and gone the session expires and you will not be able to charge that customer.  This is an instance of a stuck order that needs more than just getting unstuck.  In this instance the best bet is to contact the customer.  You could use your Order Entry tool to send them a new invoice (there is an option to create an outstanding invoice to be paid online – in that instance a link is sent to the customer that they can follow to checkout) or you could ask them to checkout themselves.  Either case is somewhat risky as the customer may no longer want to order from you, but no online business should be accepting credit card information more than 30 days before sending out the item.  That goes far beyond what most would consider an acceptable amount of time to wait, even for something marked as being on backorder.

B) Your payment processor has changed in between the time the order was placed and when you tried to mark it as shipped. This can be a tricky situation depending on whether or not you still have access to your previous payment gateway account.  For instance if your payment processor was LinkPoint, but you’ve decided to switch toAuthorize.net , then orders placed when LinkPoint was the gateway will not be able to be marked as shipped normally now that Authorize.net is in place.  If you no longer have access to the LinkPoint account you simply cannot collect this payment and should not ship the order until you’ve contacted the customer (like in scenario A above).   If you still have access to the LinkPoint account then you can process the order in ProStores following these steps:

1. Close your Store.  You are going to be changing the payment processor so you don’t want anyone to be checking out while you’re doing that.  You could end up in the same position again when it’s time to ship orders placed while you were fixing this one!
2. Go To Store Settings > Payment Prefs.  On this page you should see your current payment processor selected.  Change the processor back to what you were using before (if you were setup like my example above you would see Authorize.net as the current processor and would change the dropdown menu to LinkPoint) and then click the Submit button at the bottom of the page.  Depending on your processor you may be taken to the Configure page next, but if that happens all you need to do is click Submit on that page as well.
3. Ship The Stuck Order.  As long as it’s been less than 30 days you should now be able to simply mark the offending order(s) as shipped.  The system will charge the client through your old processor and the order will be moved to Completed Orders
4. Go Back To Payment Prefs. Now you’re just going to do the reverse of step 2.  Put your current processor back in place and click Submit.
5. Open The Store.  You’ve finished processing the stuck orders and have reset your payment processor so get the store open again as soon as you can to avoid losing any business unnecessarily!

C) You’ve processed the payment elsewhere. Just about everyone has to do this every now and then for one reason or another.  The order came in through ProStores but you needed to process the payment through your gateway’s website (usually called a Virtual Terminal) and now it’s stuck in ProStores and can’t be marked as shipped.  As long as you’re certain you’ve been paid, follow steps 1 through 5 above with one exception.  You will be changing the processor to None.  With no processor in place when you mark the order as shipped it will not attempt to collect payment.

Google has been steadily working on their checkout system in order to make it as useful as possible for their merchants, and one of the recent developments has been the addition of a promotion system!  The system still cannot accept outside promotions (and I doubt it ever will – that goes way beyond the scope of what a system like this is capable of), but now you have to option to setup duplicates of your ProStores promotions within the Google Checkout account itself.  At the moment it’s still a somewhat limited system in that you can only setup a sitewide sale, but hopefully they will add the ability to do shipping or manufacturer based discounts in the future.

Ok, so step one is to sign in to your Google Checkout account and make sure you are looking at the sales manager section.  If when you sign in you see a list of orders you have placed with other merchants then you will need to click the My Sales link in the upper-right.  Now, click on the tools tab and click on Coupons (not promotions – the promotions section handles automatic discounts, which is something that is already being handled by your ProStores site – if you put the same automatic sale in Google that exists in your ProStores site then you’ll be giving the client the discount twice) like in this screenshot:

Next, you will want to click the link to create a new coupon:

Finally, enter your promotion code exactly as you entered it in ProStores, set your discount amount (and type – whether it’s a percentage off or flat amount off), any requirements, and then submit:

That’s it!  Simple right?  If you follow these easy steps you’ll be able to offer promotion-code-based sales and still accept Google Checkout!  For those of you still not accepting this method of payment, what are you waiting for?  Click here and get started today!