Recently I won my very first iPad by providing the winning suggestion in a product detail page review for AspDotNetStorefront and it arrived today!  The contest involved reviewing a product detail page for a current AspDotNetStorefront customer and my suggestion involved modifying the color drop down box to display different images, based on the color selected (manual instructions here).  The customer explained that they “chose your comments over all others because you were brief, to the point and pointed us to a feature of ASPDNSF that we were not utilizing. We appreciate the time you took to share your comments with us.”

Thanks to the folks at http://www.safetylightsandsignals.com for selecting me and my buddies at Vortx for sponsoring the contest!

What should I do first??

The process of accepting credit cards on an online store is fairly complex– involving gateways, processors, banks, merchants and more. Authorize.net (one of our preferred gateways for Aspdotnetstorefront because of the ease of set up and range of options for the merchant) provides this multi-step diagram that I think does a great job of explaining the process: Credit Card Processing Diagram.  Hope it helps!

Beacon returned from ASPDotNetStorefront‘s user conference with a ton of great takeaways, new friendships, stregnthened partnerships and awesome experiences.  Ashland, Oregon’s amazing scenery, great restaurants, friendly people and downtown park rival the eTail West conference in Palm Dessert for the best eCommerce conference destination.

The conference kicked off with a welcome reception and continued full steam ahead through two full days of sessions.  Between Mike Wood (Sr. Engineer), Tracy Dirks (Dir. of Software Development) and I, Beacon had all tracks and the exhibit hall covered.  It was a great conference, we had the opportunity to get the inside scoop on the product roadmap, hear first hand insights from the consumer panel, pick the brains of APDNSF’s talented developers, discuss innovative uses of the platform with merchants and fellow partners.  It was action packed and a whole lot of fun.  Between the full days and long travels, I think I am just now recovered.

As an aside, I stayed an extra day to check out the awesome sites of southern Oregon and was lucky enough to catch Crater Lake on such a picture perfect afternoon.

Keep an eye out for Beacon as we prepare for two conferences during the month of April: The Bronto Summit and NCTA’s State of Technology.

Beacon kicks off its 2012 conference series with ASPDotNetStoreFront’s user conference in Ashland, Oregon on March 20th.  Members of our Development Team have been participating in the conference for several years, but this year Beacon wanted to exhibit the great things we have been doing with the platform in regards to design, development, marketing and hosting. So we’ll not only be soaking up knowledge in the sessions, we’ll also be sharing some on the exhibit floor.

Myself, Tracy Dirks (Dir. of Development) and Mike Wood (Sr. Engineer) will be manning the booth throughout the conference.  I’ll be holding down the fort a good bit of the time while Tracy and Mike are in the sessions, so I’m a little bummed to miss out on the interesting topics like: personalization, multi-store, mobile, social media and integration.  So if you are at the show, come by table #6 and say ‘hello.’  It would be great to hear about your business, cool things you are doing with the product, ‘take aways’ from the sessions, your journey to Ashland (14 hours and 3 flights from North Carolina), etc.

Also, If you are interested, I’m happy to talk about some of the awesome things Beacon has done for clients like Business-Supply, Robert Ham, BMI and dozens of others.  Our team has been turning out amazing sites featuring custom design and development work as well as really powerful solutions we’ve put together in conjunction with our partners, like: Bronto, Nextopia and Windsor Circle.

As always, please help keep those less fortunate (like the exhibitors, my fellow teammates back at Beacon and the others who couldn’t make it) in the loop via #ASPDNSFconf on Twitter – we’d really appreciate it!

Have a safe trip and see you in Ashland!

There are literally thousands of settings that you can configure for a new AspDotNetStorefront site, but here is a set of instructions that we use to quickly set up a very basic non-eCommerce (catalog only) site in Version 8 of AspDotNetStorefront:

1. Follow manual instructions to do a base install: Installation Guide
2. Skin/Template set-up
• Review the available default skins or purchase a skin template
• Navigate to the docs/skins folder of your new AspDotNetStorefront site and rename the  Skin_1 folder to Skin_old
• Copy the new skin to docs/skins and rename “Skin_1″
• Resize the company logo to the height of the logo.jpg file included in the skins/skin_1/images/ and save as logo.jpg in this folder (if not a jpg file, see #3 below)
3. Template.ascx Set-up– Open /docs/skins/skin_1/template.ascx in an HTML editor and make the following updates to the HTML code.
• If the company logo is not a jpg file (png, for example), change logo.jpg in template file to correct logo name
• Remove shopping cart and wishlist links from utility nav in template.ascx
• Remove all links and content from top and bottom nav that do not apply
• Update copyright line/year in footer
• Remove departments/sections from left nav (if not in use on site)
4. Style.css Set-up– Update colors and styles in docs/skins/Skin_1/styles.css as needed to match corporate colors
5. Admin Set-up
• Log into Admin with default id/password and create super users under Customers/Add New Customer and then Customers/View-Edit Customers/Super User button.  Notify new admins of id/password/Admin URL.  Log in with one of the new super-user accounts and delete default admin user. 
• Update store details under Configuration/Site Configuration Wizard including Store Name, Store email address, etc.
• Go to Configuration/Email and set email server information
• Appconfig updates– Make the following updates in Configuration/Advanced/Appconfig Parameters
• Search for “meta” in the Appconfigs section and complete all relevant fields with search engine data/keywords
• Remove buy and wish list buttons by setting ShowBuyButtons and ShowWishButtons to “false”
• Remove items from site map that should not be displayed by searching appconfigs for “sitemap.” and setting areas that should not be in site map to “false”
• Hit reset cache to force updates to appear on public site
6. Topics– Update the following under Content, Manage Topics in the Admin area
1. Add content to all topic pages that are relevant to this company (about, service, security, hometopintro, etc.)
2. Hyperlink any new topic pages to Help & Info box so they show in the left navigation
3. Review each existing topic page and do the following:
• Remove topics that will definitely not be used using “Delete Topic” button
• Set topics that should not show in sitemap to “no” with “Publish in Site Map” field
• Update text on all topics that start with “Empty” and “Productnotfound” topic
• Update hometopintro with homepage content
• Update pagenotfound text
7. Products/Categories– Add Categories and Products using either a product import (our preference) or manually in Admin
8. Complete “Go Live” checklist
9. Carefully review and test the site, make revisions as needed
10. LAUNCH THE SITE!

We launched another great site for ITW Texwipe at http://www.texwipe.com! This site seamlessly blends the functionality of Hannon Hill’s CMS (the Products, Industries and Technical Data menus) with a full-featured ecommerce store (the Buy Texwipe menu), with shared navigation and design. This is the first project that integrated both products at the same time and, thanks to hard work by pretty much everyone on the software dev team at one point or another. 

BEFORE

AFTER

Other interesting features of the site:

• Ability to “hide” pages from different geographical regions, based on the “region” selection of the visitor in the footer.

• Transition of transactional applications from old system to new
• Email verification required to place order

Beacon is a development partner for the eCommerce platform ASPDotNetStorefront and has been developing successful eCommerce websites with them since 2007.  Here are some features and functionality that we love about the software as well as a few “tips and tricks” that hopefully you will find helpful!  Please be sure to chime in with your own thoughts and suggestions…

Public Site Features

These are some features about AspDotNetstorefront that we really like and promote to our clients, along with a few links to where we have put some of these features to use.  Note that a few of these items require a purchased add-on for full functionality, but they are generally inexpensive, easy to install and don’t require source code.

Admin Site Features

We successfully launched another AspDotNetStorefront site today, in partnership with G-Force Marketing, at http://www.famoustatemattress.com. This is another in the series of Sealy mattress vendors (including http://www.nobodybeatstheking.com and http://www.mattressking.net) that we have worked with in the past year.

The site features the following:

• Rotating banner image on home page, able to be updated by client via Admin site
• Dynamic filtering on category landing page (by price, size, comfort level, etc.)
• Multiple static content (topic) pages that can be updated by the client via Admin site
• Social media icons site-wide
• Customized warranty form (http://www.famoustatemattress.com/warrantyrequest.aspx) through which customers can submit warranty claims via the web site, which the client thinks will shave several weeks off of the process
• Tabbed product detail page, for Accessories and Recently Viewed items
• Opt-in mailing list that can be downloaded by client via Admin
• Interactive store locations page– http://www.famoustatemattress.com/t-storelocations.aspx

Thanks to John Wallwork and Thomas Brinegar who did the primary development on the site and to Wayne Van Zandt and William Nichols for assisting with launch today.  Also thanks to John Scaramuzzo for client support!

We launched a really cool new eCommerce site for BMI Surplus!  BMI Surplus is located in Hanover MA and is a supplier resource center of equipment for premier colleges and universities, research facilities, individuals and manufacturing businesses worldwide.  Their website uses the newest version of AspDotNetStorefront with several purchased add-ons and custom apps built by Beacon. The purpose of this project is to redesign the BMIus.com web site and replace the existing shopping cart with AspDotNetStorefront. The primary audience for the new website will be universities and other research centers, but also individuals looking for specific parts/equipment by searching via part number and/or SKU in search engines.

Here are the project highlights:
• Custom Logo Design
• Custom site design
• AspDotNetStorefront Version 9.1
• Rotating banner on home page pulling from Featured Products category
• Paginated, sortable and filterable category landing pages
• Custom fields pulled from backoffice system for product detail page (condition, tested, location, etc.)
• Share this button on product detail page
• Customized ‘Email a friend’ form that sends questions to customer service
• Customized shipping functionality (allow warehouse pickup, self-shipping)
• Wire transfer as a payment option
• Integration with back-office inventory system (Fishbowl)
• Web marketing analysis and recommendations
• eNewsletter signup integrated with Constant Contact
• Enhanced basic and advanced site search

HUGE thanks goes to John and Tiffany who really made it all work. There were lots of new and fun challenges with a new version of AspDotNetStorefront and the Beacon team met each challenge admirably.  Other big contributors: Wendy provided a lovely custom design, Thomas assisted with setting up the informational pages and Jeff provided essential WMS feedback and analysis.  Finally, BIG thanks to William and Wayne for their launch assistance.

I’ve already blogged about each of the sessions that I attended on Day One and Day Two of the conference, but feel compelled to share my overall impressions as well…

Overall, a very successful conference!  I learned a lot and am excited to go back to the office and put it into practice.  I also met many other people using the product to do some really interesting and exciting things.  I’m comforted that Vortx has committed to maintaining the same (or better!) level of support and community that I’d come to expect from the previous owners and I recognize their sincere commitment to high standards and dedication to the product.

Because I can’t seem to write a blog without a bulleted list, here are some other quick thoughts:

• I think the length of the conference was just right.  Three days would have strung it out too much and one would have been way too crammed.
• Not sure how I feel about the two “track” approach.  There were several sessions that were held simultaneously that I wish I could have attended.  Unfortunately, I’m not really sure how to fix that and still keep the two day format.  It would have been great to have gotten the agenda a little bit in advance so that we could have made the decisions about “who’s going to what” in advance.
• HURRAY for the organizers that got the coffee flowing all day on Thursday!  Even the most dedicated of developers start to get hazy around 3pm in a darkened room without a caffeine jolt.
• The staff (both hotel and Vortx) was extremely responsive and helpful
• Sessions and breaks were well timed and everything started and ended precisely on schedule
• The master of ceremonies/magician/announcer was brilliant…  Bravo!
• I think the conference could have benefited from an “Ask the Experts” or other open brainstorming-type session.  Despite very active forums and helpful support, there’s really nothing like sitting down with one of the “inside guys” and picking his brain.  Lots of times I don’t really need to know exactly how to do something, just whether or not there’s an easy way to do it (vs. the dreaded source code modification!) or if there’s an add-on out there that already does it (bonus!).  To keep the session from getting too detailed or bogged down, maybe asking for questions ahead of time would be effective?
• Organizers did a good job of making sure that the participants did not feel that every vendor was trying to push their products on them, but I do wish there were a few more hands-on examples of how to do things in the product itself.  I don’t mind seeing a vendor’s solution in action during a session as long as it solves my problem and it isn’t a hard sell.  I don’t feel like any of the vendors that I met would do that, but that they did feel constrained to not advocate their products too much.
• Post the slide decks to the presentations immediately after the session if at all possible.  Alternatively, make it very obvious (maybe in the agenda booklet) exactly how and when the slides would be available.  Someone asked about the availability of the decks at every single session that I attended and there was lots of confusion about where and if they would be available.

Keep the up the enthusiasm and commitment to being a company with very high standards and commitment to the AspDotNetStorefront community!  This was clear in every facet of the conference and made me proud to be associated with you all!  WELL DONE!