I think one of my biggest complaints is that Stores Online has the most minimal integration with Paypal. What I mean is that the most you can do is link it to your Paypal account so that your store passes the total amount to Paypal for processing. You can also set the return URL so that if someone clicks on Return to Merchant, they will be brought back to your store.

But here’s what it DOESN’T do:

• It doesn’t pass the address fields to Paypal.
  
  Now I read it in a forum that it is possible to link a 3rd party shopping cart with Paypal so that the cart passes the address info and Paypal shows the fields, but doesn’t allow the user to change them. This means that your visitor enters address info on your cart, and Paypal uses the address when it handles the billing.
  
  The fact that SOL does not do this means either you must have your visitor enter the address twice, once on SOL and once in Paypal (which is really, really annoying for your customer) OR you need to take the address fields out of your SOL checkout page.
  
  If you do the latter, you run into a big problem:
  
  Since your SOL website doesn’t know a thing about the visitor’s address, you cannot set up shipping according to country. You can’t offer free shipping just for the US, for instance. (I found this out the hard way when a woman from Canada got free shipping! I’m not sure I’m going to make a cent on that order.) And Paypal doesn’t allow you to restrict the country list, so someone from Albania could order my product, for example. I’m pretty sure my drop shipper won’t ship to Albania.
  
  
• It doesn’t pass the order details.
  
  This means the confirmation email to your customer has a description of the product as "online purchase" which looks both stupid and unprofessional. It also means that you have to go to two places to see the details of the order: to Paypal for the customer’s name and address and then to SOL for the product that was ordered.
  
  
• It doesn’t let you pass a payment page parameter.
  
  What I mean by this: Paypal will let you set up different payment pages and assign a code to each. So if you have a website that sells, let me see, baby slings and another that sells bird feeders, you can have one payment page with your baby sling company logo and another with your bird feeder company logo. Most shopping carts let you pick one of these when setting up the integration so that someone who buys a bird feeder will see the Paypal page with the bird feeder logo at the top. SOL does not allow this to get set. This means that if you have multiple websites you’re trying to integrate with your single Paypal account, you should either have no logo or a generic logo to avoid showing your customer the logo for a different company than the one he is purchasing from.

The bottom line is, SOL just hasn’t made the effort to give us the type of integration we need to give our customers a smooth shopping experience.

So…I want to start selling bird feeders. I have a drop shipper all lined up. Do you think I’m going to utilize my second StoresOnline website that I already paid for? Nope. For one thing, I’d have to pay 25.00 per month for hosting (their charge is per website). For another, I’ll still have these Paypal issues.

So I purchased hosting with A Small Orange for 5.00 per month and I’ve installed Zen Cart (a free shopping cart.) I still have to use Paypal, but they have some of these extra integration features that Stores Online doesn’t.

On a side note: There are other problems with Paypal that are not related to the SOL integration. For example, just last week I had a woman purchase a sling using Paypal’s option to pay by bank account. Unfortunately, this is considered an eCheck and takes 5 business days to clear. After a few days, the woman canceled the payment.

I also had a customer supply a different ship-to address (it was a gift). On the Paypal email receipt, it showed that the address is Unverified, which was very confusing to her.

This is why I plan to dump Paypal as soon as I get enough orders to pay for a true eCommerce account.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | No Comments »

I was getting all set to write a post that I’m still waiting for my first order, but then…I got one! Whoo Hoo Peru!

Not bad considering I’ve been really delinquent about getting incoming links. One thing I did do, however, is write and submit an article on baby slings.

Unfortunately, I can’t find a way to put Google Analytics on my store so I can tell where my sales are coming from. My "total access to the html" that they promised me means that I can put Javascript in the body tag, but I can’t can’t determine where it will go. It automatically puts it at the top of the body tag, and Google tells you to put their code right before the end body tag.

Someone from the forum suggested that I add a text element, put the code there, and move it to the bottom of my page. Unfortunately when I try to do that, I get "error on page" and it won’t let me save it.

Also, when you set up Google Analytics specifically for an ecommerce site so that it will analyze return on investment, etc., you have to add a call to a javascript function in the body tag itself,

body onLoad=”javascript:_utmSetTrans()”

But there’s definitely no way to add something to the body tag itself.

Sigh…

We’ll I’m still psyched about my first order. I’ll have to make a real effort to get incoming links and see what happens.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | 3 Comments »

Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted!

This blog is a lot like my home improvement projects. I’m great at starting things, but not so great at finishing them. I’m embarrassed to tell you how many half-done moulding, torn-up floors, and walls with partial drywall you’d find in my house. The one home project I did finish was a cage for my pet rats made out of a bookcase.

But I’m digressing…

Since the last time I posted, I’ve gotten a few more orders. I still haven’t made much attempt at getting reciprocal links, although I did finally get up a links page. It has a single link on it, and I’m still waiting for that company to reciprocate.

One thing I did do is look at my Google Analytic results. I found that I had an enormous bounce rate: about 46% on the home page. A bounce is when someone goes to your site on one page and leave it again without visiting any other pages.

So, the question is, why are people leaving from the home page without going anywhere else?

I looked at one day for a sample of what’s happening. I found that I had 6 visitors, but 4 of them were bounces and showed an average time on the site of 0. I’m still not sure how this is possible. If the page loads enough for Google Analytics to register that there was a visitor, wouldn’t that mean the visitor would have spent some time on the page?

As an experiment, I assigned a different template to the site and change my images. I took out the few images of parents wearing the slings and added a banner image at the top that shows a few of these parents. That way there is only 1 image to load. I think this will make the page load faster.

Did it make a huge difference? Sadly, no. I still have over a 50% bounce rate. I’ve gotten one order this week, but I don’t think that was due to the page.

I also bought a Google Analytics 2.0 book. (Wel, actually, a friend asked what she could buy me for help with some Excel macros). I’ve only started it, but I’m hoping it will help me turn the Google Analytics data I’m seeing into changes I can make to my site that will result in more sales.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | 4 Comments »