Shopping Cart and ECommerce Software
Solutions from PDG Software, Inc.^®

Another interesting article from Practical eCommerce about increasing conversions and keeping customers on your site…

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1350-Conversion-15-Reasons-Why-Consumers-Will-Leave-Your-eCommerce-Site

Any other suggestions?

I ran across an interesting article at Practical eCommerce that proposes that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. I tend to agree with the author that while there are some negatives to having duplicate content (e.g. page rank from links dispersed across all the pages that share the same content), it ultimately appears that each and all of the pages can and do often appear within search engine results.

What do you think?

Ran into another useful article from our friends at Practical eCommerce magazine that addresses implementing Yahoo and Bing paid listings into Google Analytics. Very useful to be able to compare the success of your paid search listings across multiple channels all in one spot.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1288-Integrating-Yahoo-Search-and-Microsoft-Bing-with-Google-Analytics

Enjoy!

By popular demand, PDG Software has added functionality to PDG Commerce version 5 that will automatically block IP addresses after a certain amount of declined transactions have been attempted.  You can download the new patch at http://download.pdgsoft.com/download/PDG_Commerce.

To access the new section in your Commerce Administrator, open the “Configuration” menu and select “IP Black List.”  Select the “Automatic Deny” tab.  You will find the following fields available to you.

Automatic Deny

Automatically block an IP address if they attempt to authorize ___ credit cards in ___ minutes:
Fill in these fields to indicate how many declined transaction attempts are allowed within a given span of time.

Please Enter IP Quarantine Duration:
Enter the number of minutes you would like to use as the quarantine time.  Any quarantined IP address will not have access to your web store during this time.

Disabled:
This feature is not currently in use

Quarantine IP Only:
The IP address will be quarantined and not allowed access to your site for the specified duration in minutes.

Quarantine IP and Remove Session:
The IP address will be quarantined and not allowed access to your site for the specified duration in minutes.  Additionally, any baskets assigned to that IP address will be deleted from the web site.

Permanently Block IP:
The IP address will be added to the Store Deny list.  It can only be restored access to the site if you go to the Store Deny tab and manually remove it from the list.

Purge IP from Automatic Block List:
This field applies to the “Quarantine IP Only” and “Quarantine IP and Remove Session” options.  In these cases, the IP address will be quarantined for the specified amount of time.  You can use this field to remove a specific address from the quarantine.

In a recent search of the Government Security website, we  found this article (http://www.governmentsecurity.org/articles2/ecommercesecurity.php) that gave some tremendous insight into the environment we all work so tirelessly in and how to address it’s protection.  An ounce of prevention…is worth a pound of cure.

Ran across this excellent article at the E-Commerce News site. While they note that online sales are projected to grow 11% and top out at $156 Billion for the year, that the growth rate has shrank from previous years. With the current economic client effecting purchasing decisions of your online visitors, now is the perfect time to revisit your store’s checkout process and make sure that it is optimized for easy and fast buying processes. This article suggests some basics that every ecommerce merchant should visit with regards to their webstores.

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/68143.html

Enjoy!

To All,

I ran across this information as I was browsing google for info on search engine optimization. Hope you find it useful:

Steps

1. Make sure that your website is ready (i.e. no broken links, has enough unique contents, etc).
2. Optimize your website for keywords that are highly related with your website content. You should use your main keyword for each page in the file name, meta tags (description and keywords section), in the heading of the page as well as in the first few sentences of the page preferably at the beginning of the first sentence. Also use that same main keyword a few times throughout your pages.
3. Create a sitemap file for your website. Sitemap file is a formatted file with an XML extension. It contains the URLs for all of your pages in your website. You can use free online or offline tools available to generate your sitemap file.
4. Upload the sitemap file to your website root directory.
5. Go to Google Webmasters Tools and log in using your Google account. Create if you don’t have one. It is free.
6. Type your website full URL in the “Add Site” field on the top of the Google Sitemap page and click OK.
7. Click the “Add Sitemap” link on the right of your website name.
8. Choose “General Web Sitemap ” on the “Choose Type” option list. Check all the checkboxes provided.
9. Type your full sitemap URL in the provided field and click “Add Web Sitemap” button.
10. Wait for about 2 or 3 days. Check Google by typing your website name in the search box with the word site: before the url example site:http://www.yourdomain.com. If it shows up in the result, it means that Google has indexed your website.

I just came across this article on the Practical eCommerce website and thought it might be beneficial for our merchants.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1257-Shipping-Rates-Flat-Rate-Boxes-Usually-Save-Money-

Enjoy!

For the sake of both PDG merchants and others who might be searching for information on this attack, we wanted to provide some information regarding a recent “iframe” hack/attack that has affected some PDG merchants. This attack appears to be a result of local computers that have been compromised by a virus/malware program. The local virus locates stored user id and password information on the local computer and then connects via FTP to the site. Once connected, the program attempts to locate all files that have “index”, “main”, “default” or “home” in the file name (standard file names for most website’s home pages). Once it locates these files, it inserts a hidden iframe on the page so that subsequent visitors to the page are also infected with a virus/malware program.

Unfortunately, some of the PDG Commerce administration templates do have “main” in the file name. Fortunately, though, since PDG Commerce checks the admin templates for unauthorized changes, PDG Commerce refuses to load the template and informs the user that the code within the template has been changed.

When we were first notified of the problem, we assisted one of our customers in confirming via their host’s FTP logs that the files were compromised via an FTP session with “authenticated” access. We have confirmed with several of our hosting partners that this attack appears to be effecting numerous users and does not in any way appear to be specific to PDG Commerce users.

We’ve provided some links below to articles/blogs/alerts that we encountered during the course of our research that detail both how the attacks occurred and what steps users can take to remove the offending malware and prevent the attack from happening again. The general consensus appears to be that a) removing the hidden iframe from all affected pages (hidden <div> that contains the iframe) b) running a full system scan utilizing a current anti-virus software on the offending machine c) changing all user id and password information associated with the hosting account and d) converting to the use of SFTP (secure FTP where all login information and other data sent through connection is encrypted) are the best steps. The most immediate step should be changing your hosting account/FTP log in info, but bear in mind that until the offending program is removed from the local computer, it will continue to access your updated FTP account information and re-infect the files on your server.

http://securitylabs.websense.com/content/Blogs/3422.aspx
http://directadmin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=159176
http://www.diovo.com/2009/03/hidden-iframe-injection-attacks/
http://blog.tigertech.net/posts/ftp-virus-spreading/
http://www.spamfighter.com/News-12579-Security-Experts-Identify-Causes-Of-Gumblar-Attack.htm
And even a post from one of our competitor’s forums… http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/41070/

Users may download the most recent AdminTemplates and CommConfig directories from the PDG Software website at http://download.pdgsoft.com/download/PDG_Commerce/Upgrade/ . Once you have located the correct download for your server’s operating system, you can proceed with upgrading your PDG Commerce installation. The upgrade process will restore all PDG files that might have been affected by the iframe attack. It is important to note, though, that you will also need to check any and all non-PDG related files to confirm that the program did not inject itself into other files located on your server.

You asked for it and we listened! We have just released a minor version update to PDG Commerce Version 5 that introduces the ability for you to display products within multiple categories in your webstore. In addition to automatically displaying within it’s primary category and applicable “parents”, this new feature allows you to specify up to 100 additional categories that you would like the product to appear in. Extremely simple to set up, you simply click a checkbox for all the categories that you want the product to be included in.

You’ll access the new functionality within the ‘product details’ section of your PDG admin:

When you click the “multiple categories” link, the follow page will appear (note that the categories appearing in this sample will be replaced with the categories actually set up within your storefront):

The primary category that the product belongs to, as well as any ‘parents’, will automatically be checked. These checkboxes will be grayed out as they cannot be unselected. All other categories within your storefront will appear in an indented list based on the product hierarchy. You may select up to 100 additional categories that you would like the product to appear in from the list simply by checking the box located next to each category. Note that if you want the product to appear in multiple levels of alternate categories, you must click EVERY level that you want the product to appear within (e.g. if you click the box next to “apparel -> mens -> shirts”, product would not be displayed in the “mens” category. Although this is exactly what happens with the primary category that the product belongs to, within the multiple category display, you must explicitly set every level that you want the product to appear in.

Hope everyone enjoys this new functionality!