If you’re interested in setting up Zen Cart to sell downloadable products (mp3’s, e-books, etc), I highly recommend taking a look at the Downloadable Products in Zen Cart by Adam at I Make Websites. It is very easy to understand and you should have your downloadable products ready to go very quickly and painlessly.
As always, feel free to contact us regarding our Zen Cart services.
The Dilute the Magic Blog has been launched and is going to focus on making sense of e-commerce by offering anecdotes, tips and reviews of the available e-commerce options. The blog will be administered by Watershed Studio and will be accepting submissions and questions from readers. If there’s something that you’re curious about or have a submission, please contact us.
Lately we’ve been getting a little disgusted with eBay’s antics, specifically towards their eBay Stores users.
Here’s their latest bit on nonsense…
…(Core listings — auction-style, auction-style with Buy It Now, and Fixed Price) are the foundation of eBay…they account for about 91% of the gross merchandise value sold on eBay.com
Store Inventory listings now comprise about 83% of active eBay.com listings…(and) current Store Inventory insertion fees don’t cover eBay’s costs for hosting them.
These Store Inventory format insertion fees take effect Aug. 22, 2006:
Starting Price New Insertion Fee Current Fee $0.01 -- 24.99 5¢ 2¢ $25.00 and higher 10¢ 2¢Some Store Inventory format final value fees also will also increase, effective Aug. 22, 2006:
Selling Price New Final Value Fee Current Fee $0.01 -- 25.00 10% 8% $25.01 -- 100.00 7% 5% $100.01 -- 1,000.00 5% (no change) 5% $1,000.01 and higher 3% (no change) 3%…the best way to display Store Inventory listings on the site…is, when a buyer’s search returns 30 or less core listings, we display up to 30 Store Inventory listings.
…starting in about a month, we’ll also include an unlimited number of Store Inventory listings after all matching core listings, when the buyer clicks the Buy It Now listings tab at the top of every search results page. When the buyer hasn’t selected this option, eBay.com will display Store Inventory listings along with core listings as described above.
So, to paraphrase, eBay is saying, “Good riddance eBay store owners. We’ve crunched the numbers and you’re not worth our time and efforts. We hope to gain back the auction listings that we’ve lost over the years.”
One huge thing that we’ve noticed over the years is that many people don’t want to hassle with auctions to possibly save a few dollars. Many people want to find what they’re after, buy it and have it in their possession within a week of purchase. From what eBay has been saying, it would appear that they are oblivious to this fact.
In addition to this major issue, in the past week or so eBay decided to not allow users to use Google’s Checkout as a method of payment in an effort to strong-arm people into using eBay’s comparable (and more expensive) PayPal service (tough they deny that of course).
In the near future we will be closing our eBay store. That may be a few months down the road as we explore our options, but eBay will be getting a whole lot less of our money in the coming months and we will not be suggesting eBay Stores as on option for clients. (We will stick with eBay’s Skype service until they give us a good reason not to.) From what’s out there right now we’re leaning towards a Zen Cart installation even though it’s a little bloated and doesn’t function exactly how we’d like, but it does offer key features that we need, is reliable and is free (plus domain and hosting fees of course).
While there are options out there for e-commerce shopping cart services, most are not very user friendly and/or affordable at an entry level plus we don’t know of any that are very well publicized. If someone came out with an affordable, easy to use and well publicized shopping cart system they’d be setup to make a fortune if they did it right. If someone wants to consider offering VC for such a service, let us know.
As a frequent visitor of the WIBC web site, this caught my attention a few days ago. While it doesn’t add value to the web site in regards to content, it does let visitors know that the site is updated regularly (as do the “On Air Now” images).
Adding content value to it would be quite easy though. They’d just need to create a special page or section related to the image (Halloween related information in this case) and link the image to that particular page or section. Then visitors could consistently look there for seasonal information.
While reading The Cost of Cool I was reminded once again why I hate Flash for web design of informational sites.
Flash is great for entertainment if done right, but most people rarely go to a web site to be entertained. If you want to use Flash for menus, fine. But keep them simple and offer an alternative navagation system. But please don’t use Flash for content you want someone to read.
So far this morning I’ve ran into two sites that might have decent content but the Flash was too distracting for me to tell. (Re: Vector.ize and Superlooper. And take a look at The Double’s website that the article is about.
While some may see my designs as too “plain”, that’s fine by me. I intend for my audience to focus on the content, not the graphics and gizmos. My approach is to treat the content in the same manner you would text in a book or well designed magazine. I try my best to make the content easy to find and easy to read so people can find what they’re looking for and then be on their way. We’re all busy and should strive to make things easier and more timely for one another. And just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Yes, there are some things Flash does very well, but there’s a time and place to use every tool. If you’re wanting to get information out to your audience, Flash probably insn’t the best choice.
I could go on but I’ll leave that for another time. Down from my soapbox…
For a while now I’ve been trying to figure out why certain pages which link to CSS refuse to load the CSS file in Firefox and Netscape.
After searching Google to no avail, I posted to a forum about the issue and Bob quickly found the root of the problem. My server was treating the mime type as html, not css like it should.
Since the problem wasn’t the link (which is setup as text/css) I had to create an .htaccess file and put the following line of code in:
AddType text/css .css
I uploaded it and that did the trick.
