BCSE Articles

Many X-cart sites that have been around a while start to get slower and slower.  This is especially true if you have the Advanced Statistics module on.  This module is required to be on for the bestsellers module to work.  The good news is, there’s usually a really easy quick fix for speeding up your X-cart site!  We have a free module that you can upload and either run manually or set it up as a cron (ask your host how to do this if you don’t know how).  We’ve been using this free module for years for all of our hosted customers that need extra speed.  Check out our FREE Clean Stats mod for X-cart!

The module simply cleans out the xcart_stats tables that you don’t need for bestsellers to work.  Many people do not use the data in these because they have better analytics when using Google Analytics or something similar.  For larger or order sites, these tables just keep getting bigger and bigger, eventually getting millions of rows of data in them.  When a user browses the site, a new row is entered.  In simple terms, if you have too many rows then this will slow down the site to insert a new row.

Some sites need more work to speed them up than this but many times this is all that is needed!  Contact Us if you need more X-cart Speed help!

Brandon & Stacy had the opportunity to attend the Athens Chamber of Commerce Biz Fair today.  Had a great time mingling with the other great businesses in Athens County.  Here’s a pic of our table…we love our personalized letter openers that we handed out to attendees.  Thanks Dave at ZONEZ for helping us order these and getting them here on-time for the event!!


You can see our Presentation Slide here too!

We just released today an update to our ever popular Point of Sale system.  The Authorize.net DPM solution is now available in the Point of Sale system if you have the DPM module installed!

If you already have the Point of Sale system and would like to update your software to include the DPM support, drop us an email and we’ll see if you qualify for a free upgrade.

The Authorize.net DPM module is a very popular payment gateway choice that runs on top of your existing Authorize.net AIM solution.  It helps get you closer to PCI compliance than using regular Authorize.net.  It has been the choice of many X-cart clients with the new PCI standards that came out in July of 2010.

On Jan 25th, X-cart released the latest version of the 4.4.x branch.  4.4.5 is now available for download.  If you downloaded it prior to January 30th, you will want to re-download it as they found a bug and updated the version with the fix for it.  You can view more details and a change log on this X-cart Forum thread.

Many clients are taking advantage of the latest release and are upgrading their old X-cart stores.  Feel free to use our Free Quote form to send us an upgrade request.  We’ve been performing X-cart upgrades since 2004 and have upgraded from simple to very complex and very customized X-cart sites.

I recently read an article that suggested an interesting way to thank our customers for their business and thought you might benefit from it as well.  If you are an ecommerce business and ship goods to a customer, how about including a personalized thank you on company letterhead within the shipment itself? Tap into the resources you have on hand to personalize the letter and add the shipment date.  Encourage the customer to contact you with any feedback they may have and use an actual signature from a staff member.  Customer service goes a long way and this is just one example of how you can differentiate yourself from the competitor. The complete article can be viewed here

Nothing spices up a rainy Monday morning like a major power outage, but our backup power sources held us until the generator kicked in.  The power is back on now and thanks to our foresight in preparing for just such an emergency, we hardly missed a beat!  Nice to see all of our prep and research in disaster recovery and business continuance pays off if it is ever needed.  It’s important to plan ahead for the unexpected so a small blip on the radar doesn’t turn into a very very bad day!  Strong storms predicted for much of today, be safe wherever it is you may be roaming…

While reading through sites I use to keep up-to-date, I found this interesting article.  In it there are the 10 web predictions for 2012 from Sitepoint.  I’m all for #9, the dying of IE6!  It’s notorious for causing us and our clients so much issues with compatibility with new web technology. 

I also found #3 interesting. I have been personally been using Windows phones for many many years now.  Before ‘smart phones’ were called smart phones!  I still have a windows phone today and love it.

Check out the full article below.  It’s an interesting quick read!
10 web predictions for 2012

The vision statement has been stuck in Carrie’s head for over 9 years.  We finally have documented it officially.


“Providing customers with the proper resources to help their business succeed.”

Ever since 2002, when Brandon and Carrie came up with the idea of a shared company, their goal was to help others.  With this vision in mind, they found that Carrie’s natural ability to program on the web was a perfect fit to helping small local businesses get their web presence online using a shopping cart called X-cart.  Ever since then, BCSE has worked to help any an all customers, no matter what their size be successful via their pre-built modules, custom services and hosting.

The massive amount of information that flies at us from so many different directions is overwhelming to say the least.  Many times we can get so caught up in filtering through this information that we miss the bigger picture and what really is important to our business and success. Follow this link for a list of 5 things you can stop doing in 2012 and be even more productive than you are today!

After four years of looking at the dreadful ‘biscuit’ colored hallway walls, we have finally decided on a paint color and painted them!

In Clayton’s words: “Damn!  That’s blue!”

Well it might be blue, but at least it’s not biscuit anymore!

According to an IBM analysis of consumer spending trends over the long holiday weekend, record online Thanksgiving Day shopping paved the way for strong Black Friday retail sales. Notable trends from the benchmark study include the following:
The Mobile Bargain Hunter: Black Friday witnessed the arrival of mobile deal seekers who embraced their devices as a research tool for in-store and online bargains. Mobile traffic increased to 14.3 percent on Black Friday 2011, compared with 5.6 percent in 2010.
Mobile Sales: Sales on mobile devices surged to 9.8 percent from 3.2 percent, year-over-year.
Read the whole article to make sure your business is marketed in the highest trending areas: http://www.smartertechnology.com/c/a/Business-Analytics/IBM-Benchmarks-Black-Friday-Sales/

Your marketing message is not about you or what you do. It’s about what your target audience is going through and what they desire to be, have or do. Make sure your marketing message is aimed at fulfilling that desire. If you sell insurance, for example, emphasize how your product can bring them comfort in times of crisis. 

We turned 9!  Little did we know 9 years ago that our vision and ideas would grow so big!  We quickly went from a small idea late in 2002, to launching our first client’s websites with X-cart in 2003 to opening our online store in April 2004 selling X-cart mods ‘just in case’ someone else would want the same things our clients were wanting.  Well that ‘just in case’ exploded and within 9 months we had to hire someone to help us fill mod creation and custom work demand!

Our first modules on the site were several from FiretankSoftware as well as our own that are still popular today:

• Marketing Manager Professional
• Inventory Pricing
• Search Engine Results - FREE X-cart Mod
• Ad / Banner Module for X-cart

Our first modules were very well received much quicker than we expected, much to our surprise.  We were excited with all the feedback we were getting on how much our modules saved our customers time and money and how they also brought in more revenue.  Fall of 2004 we had so many clients requesting a Customer Reward Points module we built one and haven’t looked back since!  The response received by this one was astonishing.  Several have tried to create it, but it still remains the most popular module out there being on several thousand websites!

By January 2005, we had so much demand for work and modules I wasn’t able to keep up myself.  We hired our first engineer.  In 2005, Henry joined BCSE as a contractor at that time.  He quickly came up-to-speed and about 9 months later we hired him full time as our first full time employee!

Over the years we’ve continued to grow and expand our business trying to keep up with customer demands.  Always wanting to make sure we could supply our clients with business solutions that helped them be more successful.  We want to greatly thank everyone that has supported us over the years.  It’s been an honor to be a part of your lives and business!

Carrie

We recently attended the X.Commerce conference in San Francisco and a key takeaway was the importance of websites being fully accessible by mobile devices. The line between retail and ecommerce sales is blurring by way of mobile devices. For example, a customer may be in the store shopping and will research the item online to see if they can find a better deal elsewhere before buying in person. If they find it, they will likely purchase the item via their mobile device foregoing the offer that is right in front of them.

We have had a great deal of success in converting existing websites to a mobile version. We no longer offer a mod for this due to the variances between devices and the intricacies within each site. However, we have found we can achieve this goal through custom work at a very reasonable and fair price. If you want assistance with making your site mobile, please feel free to contact us! View Details and Example Mobile Site(s)

Henry & I went to San Francisco CA last week and attended the X.commerce Innovate Developer conference 2011.  While there we both listened to great speakers including:

• John Donahoe - President and CEO of eBay, Inc.
• Katie Mitic - Director, Platform & Mobile Marketing for Facebook
• Bill Ingram - VP, Product Management, Digital Marketing Business Unit for Adobe
• Naveed Anwar - Head of Community for X.commerce
• Matthew-Mengerink - VP & General Manager for X.commerce
• Blake Mycoskie - Founder & Chief Shoe Giver for TOMS Shoes, Inc.
• Plus several more

While at the conference, we were able to meet and learn more about several key companies and products including:

• Adobe
• Kenshoo
• Magento
• PayPal
• eBay
• Plus many more

While at the conference, we concentrated mostly in the X.commerce and Magento tracks, learning a lot of insight into these new technologies and software.  Several new and upcoming features and functionality from PayPal and eBay, Inc. was also presented and discussed.  The conference not only gave good insight into upcoming technologies but also gave good insight into best business practices for our clients for the upcoming years.  There was a lot of discussion on how mobile technology will shape the buying world today.  With the information that Henry & I brought back from the conference, we’re working to implement some new technologies and also help best advise clients on current trends in e-Commerce.