http://www.verboon.info/index.php/2009/02/ipv4-vs-ipv6-song/

Listen to this and your inner geek will have a ball!

In IE, however, leaving ‘var’ out has a side effect – if you use the variable name as an element id in your html, you are likely to get some vague errors form IE.

I recently spent some time trying to figure out why a very simple bit of test code was not working in IE, but worked fine in other (better?) browsers.

     Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.1.zip.

     Unpacking the update.

Then nothing.

To fix it I had to switch to PHP5. My cheapie 1and1 hosting account that this blog runs on uses PHP4 by default.

If you are running WordPress on a 1and1 shared hosting account, add this to your .htaccess file:

     AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Fixed. Hope it helps anyone who runs into a similar problem.

Promotion is very important but is only one part of a complete strategy to make money as an online merchant. Conversion ratio is the proportion of website visitors that end up becoming paying customers. A typical conversion ratio can be around 1%. Some shops do much better, some do worse. The checkout is the final step in the customer’s journey through your online store but can account for large share of drop-offs (visitors that leave before paying).

Lets say your conversion is 1%. That means that for every 100 visitors you make one sale. All things being equal, to double your turnover you can do two things:

• Double the number of visitors
• Double your conversion ratio

Doubling the number of visitors is hard. It may mean increasing you advertising spend by more than 100%. And you may have to keep up that increased spend up consistently for a number of months before a sustained increase in visitor numbers is seen.

Some simple changes to your site, and in particular the checkout process can permanently boost your conversion ratio by lowering the number of customers that leave frustrated and without buying.

Here is a collection of tips that are easy to implement and can have a lasting impact on your shops performance:

• Build trust. Be open about your contact information, show off customer testimonials if you have any.
• Don’t hide information. Be upfront about the total price including shipping. Your customers don’t like to be surprised by a hefty delivery charge after theyspent time navigating through most of the checkout process.
• Make it easy to shop. Make the ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Checkout’ buttons prominent.
• Simplify the checkout process. Don’t test your customers’ patience by collecting more information that is absolutely necessary. Ideally the checkout should be one or two pages at most.

As the checkout pages can be the worst offenders in driving potential customers away, here are a few more tips specifically on that topic:

• Don’t force visitors to create an account. Make it an option
• Offer assistance with form filling, add an address finder to speed up address capture
• Give an option to use billing address for shipping, or make shipping address optional
• Give assurance that your checkout pages are secure, display your SSL certificate
• Give some thought as to what information must be collected, make everything else optional

Hopefully you will find these quick tips useful. Making small tweaks to your website that improve conversion can drastically boost the return on your investment in advertising and promotion.

osCommerce is possibly the most established open source cart. It has been around for years and is now a very stable and proven ecommerce platform. There are thousands of freely available contributions to customise it. There is also a very active online community ready and willing to support newbies. The only problem with osCommerce is its outdated software architecture – display and logic are intermixed and very tghtly coupled. Modifying the look and feel of an osCommerce site can quickly become a major effort. Templates are essentially complete new installations of the cart, so if you have any contributions installed moving to a new template can be a real pain in the proverbial.

There is a completely new version of osCommerce in the pipeline which promises to be great, but it is currently still in alpha stages. I’ll keep an eye on it and when I have a bit of time I will experiment with it and maybe write up a bit more.

ZenCart traces its roots back to osCommerce, but is now a very different piece of software. Out the box it has very good support for templating which makes changing the look and feel of your store very easy. The downside of ZenCart is that there are far fewer addons available (all addons have to be pre-approved by moderators). For example – you may be limited in what payment methods you can support without having to do some PHP coding. There is a good online community where help can be found.

In summary:

I would go for osCommerce if you will design the look of your store upfront and are not likely to want to changed it drastically later. It is the more robust and time proven platform of the two.

I would go for ZenCart if the ability to tweak and update the design of your store is very important to you and you do not have the time/abilty to dive into PHP to do it.

Of course there are more choices for a free shopping cart, and there are a number of fairly low priced solutions too. But I think that for someone thinking of starting up an online shop on a shoe string budget osCommerce or ZenCart are possibly the best options right now.