My store is almost ready to go live. I went to the publish screen and was ready to hit the button. But then…I hesitated. They start charge you for hosting as soon as you publish, so maybe I’ll wait two days until it’s June, just for the sake of neatness.

I was trying to tweak the shipping charges and I think I uncovered a bug. They have "ordering rules" which lets you set up a lot of different rules for shipping charges, etc. I was trying to have it charge 8.50 for shipping 1 item, but the 2.00 per item after that.

You can do that… however I believe it is buggy. I told my troubles to the online chat person, who is going to check it out and get back to me via email. But in the meantime, let me jump to a conclusion and call it buggy.

Here’s what I found:
Once you click on the checkout page, it calculates the shipping charge based on the rules you’ve laid out. Unforunately, if you then go back and add or delete something in your cart, it does not recalculate. It doesn’t refresh the shipping until you actually close the browser! (I tried just clearing my cache and deleting cookies. Didn’t work).

So for example, if I put 2 items into my cart, I should be charged 8.50 normal shipping plus 2.00 x 2 items = 12.50 total. This part works fine. But if I click on View Cart and the remove one of the items, then click on Checkout again, the shipping still says 12.50 when it should have recalculated to 8.50 plus 2.00 x 1 item = 10.50 total.

We’ll see what the rep emails me. Haven’t received it yet (that was about an hour ago).

If this is a bug, it means that I’ll try to take all choices for view cart off the checkout page so that once you check out, you can’t go back to change the cart.

Not really happy with this but…whatcha gonna do.

While I’m waiting for June, I started setting up Google Adwords ads so that they’re ready to activate once the store is live. At the seminar, they recommended starting with Yahoo ads, but I have a large amount of "store credit" with Google Adwords (to offset the $17,000 charge I accidentally incurred over three days just by clicking on one wrong thing on a page. But that’s another post for another day…)

One comment about ordering rules. This was one part of their user interface that I did not find intuitive at all. I had a hard time mentally wrapping my hands around it until I realized why—they don’t make logical sense.

Now, I think that ordering rules started out being shipping and tax rules that apply to the order, like the name implies. But I think somewhere along the line, they just started dumping anything that needs criteria and a resulting action based on that criteria into ordering rules.

One thing that doesn’t make logical sense is that the ordering rule is associated with a price set, for example "US Dollars." True, if you’re only talking about shipping or tax charges, it might make sense for this to be associated with a currency. But they also dumped things into order rules such as basic error checking. For instance, you can set up a rule that says “if the order is for 0.0, show an error message and don’t let the user continue the order.” This kind of thing is something that doesn’t depend on currency; a 0 order is a 0 order in any currency.

Also, there are 3 different sections on the ordering rules screen. In the top section, you have a choice for Type. The values are Shipping, Tax, or Fee.

In the bottom sections you assign a criteria and an action.

For some of the possible criteria and action, the choices for type make sense. For example, criteria of "person orders product abc" and action of "charge 5.00 shipping" makes sense to be of a type "shipping." But a rule of criteria: "order is for 0.0" causing action "give a warning and halt the checkout process" has nothing to do with a type of shipping, tax, or fee.

So, for this reason, I think ordering rules were once truly about applying additional fees and charges, but they’ve thrown so many other things into this screen, the interface no longer makes logical sense.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | No Comments »

Since it is after midnight, I guess this constitutes as the next day.

Still trying to set up my site. The biggest problem I had today was not with StoreBuilder at all, it was with Paypal.

Since I couldn’t afford the fee for having a true merchant account linked to my site, I opted to use my Paypal account. But I forgot how annoying Paypal is. Honestly, if a company came along that fixed all the really stupid things Paypal does, I bet they could get a huge percentage of the market.

Paypay really stinks if you’re trying to use one account for multiple websites (Paypal doesn’t allow you to have more than one account, so you really have to). I already had a Paypal account set up under a business name. But now I want to sell a different product from StoresOnline. Spent the large portion of the day trying to figure out how to have someone order a baby product from my StoresOnline site and not have Paypal tell it that it is sending payment to a bird feeder store.

Still trying to resolve this.

I did find one thing that the StoresOnline guys told me that isn’t true. They said a couple of times in the seminar that you have full access to the html of your pages. That is absolutely not true. From what I can gather from the StoresOnline forum (which I finally found, whoo hoo! http://onlinemerchantforum.com/forum/ ), this used to be true about the previous version. You could download any page, tweak the html, and upload it again, thereby creating a customized version of the page.

But this is not true in the latest version (version 5).

So I’m a little annoyed at being told this was the case. But not that annoyed. True, I can’t tweak the template or create my own template, but so far that hasn’t been an issue. I can use html in any text element, and I can add any tag to the head section. This means that I can link to an external stylesheet and then use the css classes in the html of my elements.

I tried this and it works great.

Maybe that’s good enough. We’ll see….

If only Paypal were that easy to solve.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | No Comments »

The Storebuilder has a bunch of different templates you can choose from. Unfortunately, there is no customization that you can do other than things they give you choices on–fonts, font size, and color.

The font size setting doesn’t always work. I changed the font size for the link part of the template, but it didn’t change the link size.

I knew that I wanted a template that was the full width of the screen when maximized and had 3 columns. There are only five that fit this criteria: serentiy, nile, bluegrass, matte, and gadget tablet.

I also knew that I wanted the center column to be white, and was hoping for the side columns to be a color. Only nile fit this. So I spent hours tweaking images, etc. so that my homepage would look good on nile. Then was I thought I could call it done, I went to another page. Lo and behold, I discovered a template bug. All the pages are supposed to look the same with the exception of different elements you put on the page. But I found that every page except the home page had a huge empty white space near the top. Looked really stupid.

So…back to the template list I went. Decided on gadget table. I’m not thrilled with it; it’s white for all 3 columns. Guess I’ll just have to try to jazz it up with images.

I wish there were more template selections. Actually, what I really wish is that you could make your own template.

I noticed one of the stores that the training dude has was done with a template that does not full the width of the screen, and yet his website does. I asked the StoresOnline chat rep how he did this. He didn’t know, so he opened a ticket with the web guys. I’m supposed to get an email when they know the answer.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | No Comments »