OT: Any e-Commerce experts out there?

[Owain]

They are, yes. A little bit limited in layout options (mostly because the designers don 't stray too far away from the templates) and usually rather hierachical product layout.

Owain

[Nightjar]

It is mostly in the area of site design. For example, Actinic has a maximum length for text in both product descriptions and what they call Fragments - blocks of text not related to a particular product. You can put one Fragment after another, but the programme adds lines between them, which you don't always want. I find it a particular problem when creating tables that contain lots of hyperlinks or if I want to do lots of things in HTML. Magento has no such length limitation.

It is perfectly good now, otherwise I would not be using it for a web site. However, you need to know that, for example, if you change the template for the custoemr emails, it won't recognise the new templates automatically. You have to go in and tell it you have made the changes. It also has some annoying features, such as insisting that, if the customer wants to see postage at the basket stage, they have to click a button for a quote, even if you charge a single flat rate. Some of the default settings also do not suit UK law, for example how it takes VAT on discounted sales, although that is simply a matter of changing a flag in the huge configuration file.

The thing to watch for with Magento is that it is wholly server based. If you have a slow internet connection, that can result in it getting upset and hanging, with the result that you need to disconnect and log back on. With Actinic, you change the site locally and upload the changes at a later date and it rarely has problems if the connection is slow.

I found HSBC very helpful and Lloyds TSB completely useless. Unfortunately there is a chicken and egg problem. You won't get a Merchant Account for a web site that is not yet running.

That is exactly what happens with Forms. If you use Sage Pay Server (I think I got the Server / Direct names the wrong way around before) payment is still taken on the Sage Pay server, avoiding the security problems of putting customer data through your computer, but the entry boxes can be set up as frames within your own custom page, so the customer is not aware of the transition.

Depending upon your browser, you may well have seen evidence of them - a green background to the address bar and the name of the company running the site alongside in the most commmon browsers and others will probably follow suit.

One of the most important things you have to do is to convince people that your site is secure and an extended SSL is one tool for doing so. Geotrust seems to be the cheapest. You might also want to consider joining one of the voluntary trade organisations, such as SafeBuy, whose code of practice has passed the first stage of acceptance by the Office of Fair Trading.

Colin Bignell

[Dave Osborne]

Thanks Colin. Much to think about and investigate further.

[Nightjar]

Dave Osborne wrote: ...

It is much better to test the site on the server it will run on. I have had issues with software versions on the server before now. However, you can have it set up for private access only while you test.

Colin Bignell

[Dave Osborne]

Yes, I thought that would be a good plan. I looked everywhere on Cpanel on my existing shard hosting service, but couldn't find a way of doing this other than to block all IP addresses except mine (using IP deny manager), which is painful.

Do you know if you are able to set "private access" on Cpanel Version

11.24.5-RELEASE? Or are you talking about a httpd.conf or somesuch setting?

[Nightjar]

I don't know the details, as the hosting company did it for me. However, the site was working in a sub-directory and was 'opened', by pointing the main URL there.

Colin Bignell

[Neil]

You can password protect access using basic auth. Use (cPanel/security/Password protect directories) to implement log-in credentials to any directory branch. You can apply this to the doc_root if you don't require any other public access to the site, or to any subdirectory if you have a dev version running separately.

[Neil]

Dave, Shop Factory was the other one I had in mind

Neil