We get asked many times whether to go with a Mobile design or Responsive design. The simple answer is: “It depends.”

When to go with a Mobile design for your eCommerce store.

We find it’s most economical to go with a mobile design for your eCommerce store when you already have an established store and aren’t currently wanting to upgrade or redo the look of the store. With our Mobile Module for X-cart we can customize the look to match your current current X-cart store.

When to go with a Responsive design for your eCommerce store.

We find it’s most economical to go with a responsive design for your eCommerce store when you are wanting to redo the look and feel and/or are upgrading your website. This makes it the easiest and most efficient way to get a responsive design by coding the template to be responsive from the start. It can be very inefficient to translate an existing code and CSS set into a responsive framework. So this is best done when you are already creating a new fresh look. We feel currently that responsive is the way to go in general because you then have only one set of files, css, etc to change if you want to change some items on your site. But it’s best to switch to responsive when creating a new look or upgrading.

Check out our new Magento Store which gives you a sneak peek at the new design coming to BCSE as well as our work making a responsive template!

What about SEO, is Mobile or Responsive better?

It really just depends on doing the one you pick well! If either is done well, then it will work well for SEO. Google for example recognizes both types of mobile design solutions. There is even a recent article about Google’s Matt Cutts answering these questions. You can read the full article here.

Contact Us to see how we can help your business become mobile ready!

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.

Note: We have discontinued upgrading the Authorize.Net CIM mod above version 4.6, as the ability to store credit cards is now available on the recent versions of the Authorize.Net DPM mod. This functionality is now possible on the DPM mod because of updates to the API.

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.

Don’t have Authorize.net yet?

Looking for Authorize.net CIM for Magento?

We have an Authorize.net CIM module for Magento on our sister site!

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!

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