Carrie & Brandon will be attending IRCE (Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition) 2013! Carrie is featured as a key X-Cart Community person at the X-Cart Beer Meeting in Chicago on 7th June, 2013.  Click here for more information on the event.

Marketing is moving towards a dialogue between buyers and sellers.  Instead of marketing “at” your customers, it’s become more effective to market “with” your customers.  Today, the companies that win are closest to those who buy, use, and advocate for their products. The five trends demonstrating a shift to collaborative marketing will create the biggest changes and ultimately offer the most significant rewards for marketers can be found by reading the article.

Why do your current customers do business with you? Understanding the answer to this simple question can help you expand your business and help you gain new clients.  Read the full article here.

A Facebook page for your business is an easy way to reach your customer base.  However, just like anything else, it requires some thought and preparation when setting up and maintaining the page.  This article is about a year old, but still has some great tips on setting up your business Facebook page.

Does your shop have a products and associated accessories? Do you have a tough time getting your customers to realize what accessories you have available? We’ve developed a great X-Cart mod that allows customers to add accessories to their cart direct from the product page!  Check out our Upsell Ordering Mod.

Hurry, we have this on weekly special for 20% off until February 6, 2013!

I always enjoy reading Elizabeth’s articles.  She always has something insightful you can take from them.  She has a recent article on Inc.com about how to change the way you work to better suit your goals and ideals as a person.  You can read the full article here:

3 Rules to Work By

She also has recently produced a great book that we enjoyed about Effective Time Investment.  Be sure and check it out!

In order to succeed as you climb higher in an organization, the more you must engage other people in conversations. Here are seven ways that the best bosses increase their effectiveness by the ways they communicate:

1. Bring the vision to life
2. Ask smart questions
3. Take time to read the room
4. Create a climate where things get done
5. Use stories to get your points across
6. Be mindful of what you don’t know
7. Make people feel they work for a winner

You can read the full article here.

Let’s face it, customers want to deal with companies that have “been there, done that” successfully.  But we all struggle with the best way to let our customers know what we’ve experienced and instill the confidence that is needed to gain their trust.  Follow these 6 rules and establish your credibility quickly:

1. Be genuine about who you really are
2. Know the legitimate value of what you provide
3. Have insights based on research and analysis
4. Listen actively, consider carefully, and respond succinctly
5. Never talk or write in “sales-speak”
6. Be a catalyst rather than a hero

You can read the full article here.

To-Do lists can be a great thing. A lot of us use them but many times we don’t get the most of these lists. Research has found if you put some thought into the list and put the items in order, you will work through your list more effectively.  You can read the full article here.

Great article on web predictions for 2013.  Make sure your site is up with the times!  You can read the full article here.

With the holiday shopping season upon us, this is a timely article describing a simple suggestion that may help boost your company sales and profile.  You can read the entire article here.

When creating a landing page for your website, it is important to make sure that it is visually appealing, easy to navigate, and free of errors. This article will tell you the five unbreakable rules of landing page design that can make or break your website. You can view the entire article here.

BCS Engineering offers 2 great mods for simplifying PCI compliance with X-cart

Which Authorize.net Module is Right for Me?

Both modules provide a path to simpler PCI compliance forms to be filled out.  Depending on the features you want will determine which one is best for you.  Some customers use both modules!  This is great if you want to give the customer the option to store Credit Cards or not.

Common Features

Both Authorize.net DPM and Authorize.net CIM modules for X-cart include the following features:

• Sensitive Card information is never stored or transmitted on your server or in X-cart’s software
• Simple to install and configure!
• Customers stay on your site for checkout!

With both Authorize.net DPM and Authorize.net CIM modules, Customers should request to be a ‘Redirect’ merchant type when conversing with PCI compliance auditors and scanners.

After over 100 votes and 20 mod submissions, the winning module is:

Product Option Weights!

The winning contestant was Kevin Bentz - Jeeperz Creeperz, Inc.

Congrats to Kevin!  He will get a free copy of the module!

We’re expecting to release the module late November.  Thanks for the great idea Kevin!

We asked our customers to submit new module ideas to us and they delivered!!

Log in to vote for your favorite mod idea. Deadline to vote is 11:00 PM EDT November 9th! Winner will be announced November 13th!

BCSE will be celebrating our 10th anniversary in November and would like to celebrate with our loyal customers.  The customer with the winning idea will receive the mod for free! 2nd and 3rd place winners will receive their choice of 25% off the winning mod or 150 reward points added to their accounts.

You can vote once per Person/login and can vote for multiple mods.  Please don’t create or use additional accounts to spam the system!

Anyone caught spamming the voting system will have their votes deducted from the totals.  If you have made the module suggestion and we find that you are spamming the voting system, we reserve the right to pull your mod from the contest!

Check out how one of our client’s use Pinterest to boost sales!  They are doing a great job organizing their boards and promoting their products.  You can find some pretty interesting items on their boards:
The Internet Antique Shop

Great article on the best way to kick off your work day.  What Successful People Do With the first Hour of Their Work Day

Offer Gift Cards!  When gift cards are used, normally more is spent than the amount on the gift card.  It also helps spread the word about your business and can generate new customers!

This color configurator provides almost 100 Million variations just for this one design!  Check out this feature. If you’d like us to quote something like this for your site, please contact us.

We have many clients that depend on Google Shopping (formerly known as Froogle).  We have been helping clients since the early days of Froogle connect their X-cart sites to Google Shopping.  We learned today from several articles that Google plans to have a pay-to-play model in by Fall 2012.  While we can see that this could potentially help keep their results cleaner and more relevant, however we are concerned for the small businesses that may not have a budget for this.

Read more at the Google Shopping becomes pay-to-play article on searchengineland.com

Sitepoint has an interesting article on new browser trends after IE9 has been heavily promoted in advertisements.  This article gives a nice perspective on current trends to keep in mind while designing a website.

Browser Trends May 2012: IE 9 Strikes Back

Last week, Google released a new update to its Panda algorithm that targets low-quality content. Who won and who lost?

Panda Update 3.5 is Live: Winners & Losers

All X-Cart customers should have received a security patch update today, 4/11/2012 from Qualiteam that affects all 4.1.x through 4.4.x X-carts.  While X-Cart has categorized this as a “minor” threat, we feel that there is potential for a larger threat if this patch is not applied.  If you are a BCSE hosted customer we will automatically apply this patch.  If you are not a hosted customer and are not able to apply your patch, please contact us and we will help you.  Feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns you may have.

Tier 1 wireless companies are banding together to create a nationwide database of stolen smartphones.  Within 18 months the carrier databases will be merged to form a national database that will also be used to block stolen devices from being altered to run on another carrier’s network.

Mobile Companies Join Forces to Combat Smart Phone Theft

Google has announced a search engine optimization penalty to “level the playing ground.”  Google’s goal for the penalty is to give sites that have produced great content a better chance to rank and drive organic search traffic and conversions.

Google Plans SEO Over-Optimization Penalty

According to a recent Harvard Business Review article, 25%-50% of people report that they feel overwhelmed or burned out at work.  The biggest cost it to your productivity.  Read the full article below for some great suggestions on the best way to help focus and get things done more efficiently.

The magic of Doing one Thing at a Time

Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices,” Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Monday. “Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life.”

Check out the full article below.  It’s an interesting quick read!
Personal Cloud’ to Replace PC by 2014, Says Gartner

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

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 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.