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Security is an ever increasing concern in this day and age.  As home computers get more and more powerful, password hacking is becoming more and more of an issue.  The more varied the contents of your password, the less likely it is that someone can hack it.  To undetstand this, it helps to understand some techniques people use to attempt to compromise your passwords.

Generally, password thieves will try to break into sites en masse using either unchanged dictionairy words, or combinations therof.  Another technique is to try a set of standards (like admin, password, pass, etc) or something based on the domain (eg. if your domain is bobbleheads.com they might try bobble, bobblehead, etc).

What you need to do is add more to the mix.  Take for example, an average password length: six characters.  With just lowercase letters, your set is 26^6, or just about 309 million possibilities.  That may seem like a very large number, but modern systems are capable of trying millions if not hundreds of millions of possibilities per second.  Now, if you double that set by adding uppercase letters the number jumps to closer to 20 billion possibilities (52^6).  Go one step further and add numbers to the mix and you’re looking at almost 57 billion possibilities.  Again, these are all for just a six character long password.  Increasing the length is another great way to increase the security.

Choosing a password using these secure options can come down to two basic methods.

• Completely Random: Use something to generate a password for you (such as http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/)
• Word Based: Start with a word you can remember, and replace a few characters with numbers and/or symbols.  For example, if you think you’d have an easier time remembering a password if it was close to the word bagels, then maybe B@g3lS would be something that you could learn to remember without too much time/effort.  That password is somewhere in the neighborhood of 280 trillion possibilities so for the most part no one would ever come close to compromising it.

Over the years, I’ve been asked many times what exactly PayPal Standard offers and how it works.  Basically, once you’ve gone to Store Settings > Payment Prefs in your Administration Panel and setup PayPal Standard (by at least adding your payment email address and checking the box accepting PayPal Standard Payments before clicking Submit at the bottom of the page) your store will be accepting payments through a slightly different process than your normal payment processor.  What happens is as follows:

Until the Billing Options portion of checkout, the process is the same as normal (the user adds item(s) to their cart, clicks checkout, either signs in, creates an account or progresses as an anonymous client if you have that option).  The user selects PayPal as the payment option and proceeds, again as normal, until the invoice summary page.  Here it splits again.  The user will be take from that page directly to PayPal’s website where they normally would have been taken to a final page saying the order was complete.  At this moment, an order is created in ProStores in order to preserve accurate inventory in the event that someone else attempts to checkout with the same item (assuming the user checking out through PayPal is buying the last of something) before the PayPal user has completed their purchase.  This order is placed in Orders > Pending Orders > Auth - Other in your ProStores Administration Panel.  It is considered pending because of the different outcomes that could result from here forward.

The first possibility is that the user completes the order.  If this occurs, the user is directed back to your site where they see your standard Order Confirmation page.  Then, depending on whether the product is physical or downloadable, the order is either moved to Orders > Ready For Shipping or Orders > Completed Orders respectively.  This is because a fully paid downloadable order (if you sell online products that do not require physical inventory) does not need to be shipped and can thus be considered fully complete.  The final shipping email is automatically sent at this time as well (shipping emails and downloadable products are both part of an Avanced Edition store or above only).

The second possibility is that the order is abandoned at this point.  This causes confusion with some merchants because there appears to have been a problem.  They have an order in Orders > Pending Orders > Auth - Other, but have never been paid for it.  Generally you should delete these orders about a week after they’ve been created (sooner if you need to keep that inventory available because you would otherwise sell out) because that means the user has either put it on hold or abandoned it entirely.  This can happen for many reasons, the most popular being that the user did not realize that they did not have the funds available through their PayPal account that they were expecting.

The final possibility is that the user can actually cancel the order entirely.  There is a link in the lower left of every screen once the user has been transferred to PayPal that states “Cancel and return to STORENAME” where STORENAME is the name you’ve setup as your store’s name under Store Settings > General.  This will send the user back to your store where they get a message informing them that the order has been canceled.  This will automatically delete the order from your store (permanently).  This also causes confusion with merchants because they see the initial invoice email (if they have their store set to copy staff on order confirmation emails), but then can never find the order in their store so they assume something went wrong.  Again this is most often caused by the client realizing once they get to PayPal’s website that they cannot afford the purchase at the time so they will manually cancel the order (instead of abandoning it as in the second example).

While some things may be out of your hands (like the speed of the internet connection your web server uses), there are always plenty of small changes you can make that are sure to increase the performance of your site no matter where you are hosted!  In this post I’m going to cover one of the most important things you can do: produce optimized images.

When making your site, be sure to determine an exact image size that will end up on your site for your product thumbnail images and detail images.  There is no sense having an image that is 1000 pixels wide being scaled down to 300 pixels wide.  It will make your page take more time to load and will leave you with a grainy image on the site (when a browser resizes an image for you it does so without using anti-aliasing so the end result will become pixelated).  The better tactic would be to take that original 1000 pixel wide image and optimize it.  There are many programs out there that can do this for you for your whole catalog (do a google search for “batch image resizing” to find a free one), or you could choose to optimize images one by one in a program like Photoshop.  Be sure you are saving for the web and not for highest quality or for print.  Visually there is almost no difference whatsoever, especially not at the size that your images should be and on an average computer monitor.

Lets go back a bit to where I said to determine the size of your images.  There is a nice little tool (that’s free) called Screen Ruler that you can use to literally measure the space where your images will be (Download it here: http://www.spadixbd.com/freetools/jruler.htm).  As a last resort, ProStores itself can resize images.  It actually produces a fairly good looking result that is optimized for download.  To set the sizes ProStores will use go to Product > List in your admin panel and click on Product Settings to the right, above the list of products.  These settings affect all images uploaded through either the product manager, or through Support > Upload Images > Shared Images(When you change the Shared Images “Image Type” dropdown menu from “Category Photo” to “Product”).

If done properly, image optimization can noticably decrease page load times, reduce wasted bandwidth and keep your users browsing your site a little longer on average!

ProStores is a very powerful, template driven eCommerce platform developed and maintained by eBay. It’s proven itself to be a great springboard for many eBay sellers, allowing them to launch their own web site with a robust shopping cart platform. ProStores gives small-to-medium sized businesses an opportunity to set up shop on their own domain name, helping them build their brand and sell to a booming on-line market.

While ProStores is an awesome eCommerce tool, many folks aren’t satisfied with the way that ProStores looks right out of the box. This is where our ProStores Templates come in handy. We’ve been creating fully customized ProStores sites for years and we know what works. We put all of the best and most popular features into our ProStores Templates, helping you turn your ProStore into a fully fledged eCommerce powerhouse.

Oh, and by the way, since we wrote the templates, we can easily take care of any additional customizations that you might be thinking of. No matter what you’re looking for, we’ve got the know-how to get it done the right way.

Howdy everyone out there in the world of ecommerce!  As my first post on our new site I just wanted to start with the basics (why you should choose ProStores as your ecommerce platform if you are still undecided).  We know that there are dozens of choices out there, and many of us have worked with quite a few platforms in the past.  While each of them has its own merits, ProStores will continue to be the best choice for most businesses for a number of reasons.

• Longevity - You don’t want to sign up for ecommerce hosting, go through the trouble of having a store designed and built for you and spend the time to get familiar with the software only to have the platform you’ve decided to use go out of business.  Even if your site doesn’t go down right away you’ve lost any chance of getting support from the people that made and maintained the software.  With ProStores, your choice is backed by one of the ecommerce giants, eBay, and unlike some major companies in today’s climate, they’re not going anywhere.
• Customization - Not all platforms are as easily customized as ProStores.  Even out of the box ProStores offers many features and opportunities for making your store unique.  Dozens of included template sets and page layouts give you the ability to have a professional looking site without needing to know how to program.  If you want something more than what you get out of the box, there are plenty of designers and developers that are available to perform the work for you.  Nearly anything is possible in ProStores with enough expertise.
• Support - There are many free or extremely cheap ecommerce platforms out there and as the saying goes, you get what you pay for (or don’t pay for in some cases).  With ProStores, there is a dedicated team of programmers constantly expanding the software’s capabilities and correcting issues when they’re discovered.  The large number of ProStores clients means there are literally thousands of people out there that have gone through what you’re going through and in many cases they’re willing to offer suggestions or help you with your problems through the ProStores Discussion Board.  Depending on who you chose to host your site (that’s right, you have options there too!) you can get even more specific support because there are many companies (like IntuitSolutions) that specialize in this software and can help you one on one.
• User Friendly - ProStores is one of the most user friendly platforms out there.  It is incredibly intuitive and straightforward and allows you to do exactly what you want to do, whether you’re a computer guru or someone who’s just starting out and needs a little more hand-holding.  In all areas of the system ProStores offers both entry level and advanced level options such as wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) visual editors for site pages and product descriptions for beginners and the ability to plug in your own code for advanced users, or a graphical product manager for beginners and the ability to do mass imports and adjustments via spreadsheets for advanced users, etc.  With ProStores, there’s something for everyone.

So there are just a few of the many reasons ProStores is a fantastic tool you should consider essential in running an online business.  Through this blog I hope to offer information, helpful tips, and general best practices for starting and keeping a profitable online business.