eCommerce and

• Amazon announced new payment services in two flavors - Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay. Frankly I am excited to see what Amazon can bring to this already crowded space (PayPal, Google Checkout, eBillme and many more). Read the thoughts of Linda Bustos and Scot Wingo on the new service.
• I will not make mention of that new search engine and be another one of the 24,928 posts about Cuil. DANG IT.
• Write your own blog? Want to take a vacation this summer? Lisa Barone at Bruceclay is using guest bloggers to cover while she's on vacation. I leave next week for my vacation but luckily I found a blogging service called Posterous which you might be able to use. You can email just about anything to the system and it will post it your blog, pretty slick.
• Say, speaking of taking vacation like Lisa, and the fact that I also live just a couple miles from our office, I was wondering what else I might have in common with some popular bloggers. Please help me find matches for the following or create one for me, I'll take care of the first one.
  • Live less than 3 miles from work - Lisa Barone, Bruceclay.com
  • Is left-handed - ?
  • Was born in the November -  ?
  • Has never experienced a tornado (since I've done the whole earthquake thing) - ?
• I've planned and routed my whole trip using Google Maps. Earlier this week it appeared that Google was testing new features for Maps. As of today it looks like they may have rolled back certain ones, but I'm happy that one feature they rolled back and kept is the ability to reorder your multiple desitinations. I do appreciate the "avoid tolls" feature, that should save me $20 by avoiding bay area bridges!
• Microsoft's Live Search page got a makeover. If you are familiar with Easter Eggs on DVDs, then you'll enjoy finding the hidden hot spots on the page.
• SES San Jose is coming up soon. It's already August?! It doesn't look like I'll be going (not that I have something better to do), but please don't postpone your honeymoon to attend like this guy.
• I lost all my Scrabulous games on Facebook! If you enjoyed this game as much as I did, be sure to add wordscraper, the replacement that was built by Scrabulous developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla.
• I love Firefox 3 more everyday. I found a new favorite Firefox 3 plugin this week that refreshes webpages at customizable intervals. No more pounding the F5 key during a Woot-Off (I mean to review our orders tab without having to always keep logging in). My top 3 Firefox add-on's I can't live with out at work are; ReloadEvery, Screengrab!, and Live HTTP Headers. Zach suggests Search Status, Session Manager, and Web Developer for SEO-minded folks.
• Ask yourself, am I a Guru or an Expert?
• My random fact of the day is dedicated to Matt, our Development Manager, who's been looking to adopt a dog. Los Angeles' top dog is the chihuahua according to the LA Times.

I thought starting a new regular post discussing what affiliate websites are doing to be profitable and effective, affiliate websites that are downright hilarious, and affiliate websites that fall in between these two ends of the spectrum would be beneficial to our readers. My goal is to point out aspects of publisher websites that are unappealing, and also support those who are doing it right. I don't want anyone to feel ripped on, but I think we can learn from the bad websites just as much as we can learn from the good. Sometimes the sites are funny, like the ones that put pictures of themselves from way back in the day all over the site.  Sometimes there is so much going on with colors, animations that are flashing and making noise, and pop-ups that I wonder if they may cause viewers to have an epileptic seizure.  Still other times I question what the webmaster is thinking, for instance I recently came across an affiliate website that used a 7 year old Drowning Pool song as background music "Let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor" (shudders).  While these examples may be obvious “no no's” to those attempting to create a quality website, there are a few basic rules that I would like to point out this month that may help affiliate marketers make improvements.

Site 1: HydroponicsUSA.com - This website does not have a strong affiliation to our products, unless you really want to classify it as "Home and Garden". From what I'm aware, hydroponics are used frequently to grow illegal substances, and whether or not that is all they are used for, the correlation is strong enough to make me question the website before I even see it. Consider the affiliation between your brand and the connotation of hydroponics.  I guess it depends on who your target market is, but for me a red flag goes up. One of the first things that I notice when I look at an affiliate website is the contact information; it provides a sense of validity to the retailer and potential guests.  What I notice about this website is that there is no contact information or about us so that visitors can find out more about the website. This always makes me concerned about the legitimacy of the website.  

Site 2: BurberryCoatReview1234.blogspot.com - If your website listed in the program is a blog named BurberryCoatReview with a string of numbers, you are probably spam. I wish there was a way to block affiliates based on their URL, or words within their URL. Spammer affiliates will create hundreds of free blog websites about a particular product or brand in order to try and gain massive exposure to visitors. You'll also notice that such sites will have 1-2 posts that are likely very old. The publisher writes an article or two, then moves on to create another blog website account. If blogger affiliates are signing up for your program, verify their start date and look to see how many posts they have in their history. If there are only a few posts, most of which are older, and there is a good chance that this is the case, the publisher will not likely be a quality affiliate as most blogs fail when they are abandoned by their owner. 

Site 3: CouponCactus.com - This is an example of a wonderful effort by David Fitterman to collect and organize coupons from merchants. With a strong offering of exclusive coupons, Coupon Cactus has over 800 stores and 2,000 coupons to check out. The site provides visitors with the ability to browse by store, category, size of discount, new and expiring, as well as site favorites. Coupon Cactus incentivizes its users to sign up and register to earn cash back to their account, similar to Jellyfish cashback. While there has been much talk about coupon sites and whether or not they should be part of a merchant's affiliate program, I believe with the right approach and management a coupon affiliate site can be a positive addition in an affiliate program, and I think this is a good example of a publisher that is doing it right.

Site 4: Homeincomeportal.com/... - If your site is about how to make $$$$ from home in just minutes a day, you will get declined, at least by our affiliate management team. The quality of these sites is generally terrible, packed with false/questionable statements and gimmicky software solutions for sale, such as "traffic magnet" or "banner fiesta". This specific example has dozens of different topics including software ads, recipes, testimonials (with a picture of a man with no shirt on), and ten plus links to products called "Buy this here". The page was so long, I seriously had to scroll for quite a long time to review all the content (if you can even call it that). Such a long page is poor design and ineffective at generating conversions for your program.  This design structure and get rich quick type of marketing is not something I consider to be beneficial to the retailer, or all eCommerce for that matter.

Let's recap and look at the key takeaways for both publishers and affiliate managers this month:

1. Don't use animated gifs (especially ones of flames touting "Hot Deals!"), tiled/repeating background images, mouse cursor effects, useless sound effects and background music. 
2. Don't use free hosting site urls like tripod, geocities (yes, I still see applicants with these), etc. Spend $7 and purchase a domain, it will be worth it in the long run. 
3. Provide links for retailers to contact you for recruitment purposes or other reasons. 
4. Don't get nasty with the affiliate manager. Yes we have received, such distasteful replies to our publisher decline emails as "your loss", "it's your money (aka your company's) that you're losing" or "I don't know what your problem is". Let's act like responsible, grown up, mature professionals. We are trying to do business together to benefit both parties.  
5. Do include your affiliate ID in email communications, as it helps pull up your account instead of hunting you down by domain. 
6. Don't use free templates for affiliate sites. I usually get about a dozen applications a week that use some sort of pre-configured template. 
7. Avoid creating a page full of 468x60 banners that takes several minutes to load even on broadband. No one, I mean no one, will wait to see all the banners to load. 
8. Build a site that the merchant would be proud to link to and be associated with. 

Look for next month's edition with more reviews and tips. 

Like other online retailers, we have a presence on the Amazon Marketplace. Amazon has a great model that allows quality sellers to make their products available to millions of buyers. However, their integration model for Marketplace sellers is kind of like the Bejing Olympics; dirty and dirtier.

We began with a smaller offering of some of our most popular products, and gradually increased the offering (and sales) on Amazon. Recently we were offered the chance to become an Amazon Gold Seller, meaning among other things that we’d offer more products for sale on Amazon. More products listed on Amazon = more sales from Amazon. A good thing, to be sure; however, we were currently manually entering Amazon orders into our site, and this was about to flood our customer service department.

Never fear, IT would come to the rescue (I left the cape at home though). As we had successfully integrated with PayPal and Google Checkout over the past year, I was pretty confident that the Amazon integration would be pretty straight-forward. After all, we are talking about the world’s largest online retailer. Why, they probably had a team of monkeys on standby to help with my every need, sample code to do the work for me, and color coded, easy to follow documentation that would point me right where I needed to go. Heck, I may put this one on autopilot and go golfing with my son.

So I began this integration the same way as always – looking for documentation online. Hmmm… that’s funny, I can’t seem to find what I’m looking for. No, that’s not it. No, I don’t want Amazon Web Services.

After a couple fruitless hours of searching, I finally just emailed our Amazon representative...

Matt: “Hi, can you email me the documentation to integrate with Amazon so we can process orders programmatically” 

Amazon: “Let’s schedule a call with your technical team and we can discuss the options.  We currently don’t have a formal document that describes this process.” 

Say what?!?!? The world’s largest online retailer and Marketplace to thousands of merchants doesn’t have documentation for integrating with them? Turns out no, they don’t. 

Some key paraphrases from that call and subsequent emails:

Matt: “Can you tell me how to access our orders?”

Amazon: “In order to download your orders, you have to use this tool (AMTU) that is open source. We wrote it, but we don’t support it at all. You have to download it from somewhere else”.

Matt: “I see online that you have a sandbox for testing this integration. Can you set me up with access to that?”

Amazon: “We no longer have a test environment. You have to test it live.”

Matt: “How can I push our order ID back into Amazon’s system?”

Amazon: “That option is not supported using flat file or manual fulfillment.” (The method they recommended we use)

This story does have a mostly happy ending. In a matter of a couple of days, we were able to integrate with Amazon and import our Amazon orders into our order management solution, relieving a large burden from our awesome customer service team and freeing them up from data input to actually helping our customers.

If you are interested in more information regarding integrating with Amazon, PayPal, or Google Checkout, feel free to comment. I’m here to help!

Well nothing crazy happened to me last Friday (phew), hope you were left unaffected as well. Vanessa is still out, so I’m covering the blog again. Disappointingly enough for Vanessa, the Lakers lost. She now owes Matt, a fellow coworker, dinner. If you are in the Southern California area I hope you are staying cool during these 100+ degree days. We are especially appreciative of the PlumberSurplus.com food program for providing ice cream sandwiches!

• If you live in California, new cell phone laws go into effect July 1^st. To make sure you are covered, I suggest picking up a hands free device soon. I’ve heard great things about the BlueAnt Supertooth Light available at Amazon (assuming they don’t go down again). For a low cost solution, purchase a plug in corded hands free device for your phone.

• Who else is getting worried about eBay and their desire to force PayPal as the only eBay payment option?

• Having trouble finding which social networking site your target demographic is on? RapLeaf (via Marketing Pilgrim) has some data which shows where these folks prefer to hang out.

• In case you were not one of the 8+ million users who participated in the world record attempt by Mozilla called “Download Day” and got FireFox 3, you can still get it at their site. I’ve been using it all week and it does seem to provide a faster browsing experience without any hacks.

• Looking for inspiration and innovation for your ecommerce site? Jason Billingsley at Elastic Path had a great webinar yesterday on Ecommerce Innovations. I can’t imagine implementing Coastal Contact’s “Try before you buy” feature on some products (shall I even mention toilets?) from our site…

• AdWords Quality Score is now influenced by page load times. If you run SEM, spot check some of your keywords for every domain you have ads for to ensure you have not been impacted by this change.

Now to all those I promised, its time for some pictures from Internet Retailer!

Channeladvisor Booth

Singlefeed Crew- Angela, Colin, & Ben

McAfee’s Shannon Carter

Jay from PowerReviews

The Smarter Ladies

Andrew and Ian from Google AdWords Retail Team

Siva and Larisa from TheFind.com

Jeary from LivePerson

I’ll be helping with this week’s variety post while Vanessa is out. Eek, its Friday the 13th! Having just returned (albeit much later than planned) from Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition 2008 in Chicago, I have so much to share with our team and our readers. You have to love being separated from your luggage, missing connecting flights, and staying in foreign places overnight, but it was all a small price to pay considering I just had the amazing opportunity to speak for the very first time at IRCE.

• Danny Dover posted on SEOmoz a “Beginner's Checklist For Search Conferences” which is especially helpful if you’ve never attended such an event. Luckily it wasn’t my first time at a conference, just my first time speaking. I strongly agree with his point that you should blog about your trip (I can check that one off the list) once you return.

• My flights were uber-delayed causing me to spend the night in Dallas. Don’t worry though I had awesome seats on every connecting flight thanks to SeatGuru.com. Use the SeatMap Key to find the best seats with power outlets and the most legroom.

• Last week Microsoft adCenter announced Microsoft adCenter Desktop (Beta), an application similar to Google AdWords Editor. I immediately signed up for the betaAdWords Editor 6.0 late last week. that day, and was just sent a link to download the application. I haven’t installed it yet, more to come from me on that later. Google just recently released AdWords Editor 6.0 late last week..

• If you attended the workshops on Monday at IRCE, you may have caught the session about Affiliate Marketing. I was asked many times what my stance is on the subject, and honestly, we love affiliates and what they are able to do for us by driving additional sales and revenue. We work directly with publishers to provide them special coupons and incentives. You can catch panelist George Michie’s response on the RKG blog. Other than doing some “affiliate hunting”, one way affiliate coupon sites and merchants can get along is to have well developed policies and terms.

• Speaking of policies and terms, Linda at Get Elastic recently touched on 9 tips for privacy policy usability. Linda is amazing; not only was she staffing the booth at IRCE, attending sessions and taking time to review passerby’s site’s (including ours), she still found time to blog!

As I am slowly working my way up to “Excel Guru” around the office, I have been asked formula questions and excel functions that I never even knew existed. I remember the sense of accomplishment I felt when I wrote my first nested if-then function (that worked), ran my first advanced filter and created my first macro, all without having to ask for help. I felt like I could do anything in excel! The day I learned how to create a macro that would run several advanced filters for me, at two keystrokes, I danced around the office!

One day my manager came to me with a large excel file. He had all of his fields separated out into highly specific, individual cells that spanned across many, many columns. He needed the data from several columns and rows to be combined and shown in one cell. So, I needed a way to merge together several cells. The standard Merge Cell Feature in excel is helpful, but limiting. I searched the internet for a few minutes before I found the Merge Cell Wizard. This feature allows you to merge cells row by row as well as column by column.  What is great about the Merge Cells Wizard is that you can specify what separator to use: comma, tab, return, etc.

Needless to say, I was thrilled that I was able to complete the task. Using this plug-in saved hours, if not days worth of work. You can get the plug-in for a fee through www.ablebits.com, or search for a free download that will offer a 30 day trial. If it is a tool that you will utilize often, it is worth every penny! 

A Great, but Simple Promotion

When you are in business to sell products online, you may be after such things as more sales, increased internet traffic, and online communities touting your site as a great deal and encouraging people to buy from you. And usually these are good things. But as we found out recently, sometimes you have to be careful about what you wish for. An example of this is the Omaha Steaks promotion that we had just initiated, a promotion that had been highly successful and was well-received.  A little too well-received, actually, and that caused a few tense hours over a recent weekend.

Our Omaha Steaks promotion was simple: when you make a purchase from us, we’ll send you a gift certificate in the form of a coupon code for $20 off your Omaha Steaks order, which we sent along in the order confirmation email. We had partnered with Omaha Steaks, purveyors of fine steaks and other food products, to provide this great value to our customers. This seemed to be a great promotion, and all was running smoothly until it got SlickDeal-ed.

Deal Wars: When Slickdeals Strikes Back!

Slickdeals.net is a great site for sharing, finding, and aggregating deals. I am a frequent visitor of the site, and have made some great buys based on deals I’ve found there. Slickdeal-ers tend to be a savvy bunch who really know how to game the system. They are a great source of information about products, pricing, and great buys.

So when a Slickdeal-er made a purchase from our site and instantly got their free $20 Omaha Steaks gift card in their order confirmation email, a light went on. They posted this great deal onto SlickDeals.net and pretty soon the frenzy began. The Slickdealers searched our site, found the cheapest item they could with free shipping, and began placing orders. One guy even placed over 60 orders! Being the sophisticated online retailer that we are, we allow customers to easily cancel orders that haven’t shipped. Since this happened on a Saturday, customers were able to place orders, receive their coupon codes instantly via email, then cancel their orders and repeat the process over and over again.

While we are all for good deals, we felt it wasn’t fair to our promotion partner to give away these gift certificates to fraudulent consumers whose only goal was to sell them on eBay. So after some discussion, we decided the best course of action would be to send out the coupon code after we knew the order wouldn’t be cancelled rather than instantly. Our terms of use stated that the offer was only good on non-cancelled orders, so those who placed orders then cancelled were not sent the coupon code.

Lessons Learned

This was a great lesson for us in the value of community sites as well as their potential dangers. While we loved the idea of our site getting a lot of notice and exposure, we also learned that we have to protect ourselves from situations that can spiral out of control. Rest assured, while our next promotion or deal may be a “slick deal”, we will take measures to prevent an incident like this from occurring again.

Third party software is like a box of chocolates. Once you buy them, they quickly get stale and can get quite messy.

OK, so this isn’t always the case. However, often you can have buyer’s remorse when it comes to buying software or a service from a vendor. Of course it’s all roses during the courtship phase; they tell you how much better and cheaper they are then their competitors, how reliable they are, and how we’ll see tremendous growth by using their product. It’s almost like it’s their job to sell us something.

Of course we do our research, including price comparisons, competitor research, and cost/benefit analysis, but in the end you really do have to make a decision without first hand experience. Sometimes these vendors work out great, and we get more than we bargained for and that leads to a great experience for all involved. But sometimes things aren’t all they are cracked up to be, and you could end up with something you can’t fully utilize, something that doesn’t work like it is supposed to, or something that flat out is a waste of money.

So for all vendors and potential vendors out there, here are a few suggestions that the decision makers want out of a partner.

• Get to the point - My time is valuable. Don’t waste my time with glossy presentations that offer little real data I need to make an informed decision. Give me useful facts. 


• Don’t belittle your competitors - Rest assured we have or will research them and they are going to say the same things about you. Feel free to point out solid differences that apply to our situation, but don’t get petty. 


• Deliver as promised - Often the salesperson’s job is to get the sale and it is someone else’s job to deliver. If you are willing to say it, put it in writing. We have been burned before and don’t care for your “I’m pretty sure we can do that” or “It should be no problem”. I may like you and I may trust you, but forgive me if I don’t take your word for it. 


• Keep us informed - Have a scheduled downtime? Tell us in advance. Making a major upgrade? Gee, that would have been nice to know yesterday. You’d be surprised how forgiving we are if we are kept in the loop. A major problem discussed in advance is better than a minor one that surprises us. 


• Work with us - Value us as a current customer or risk losing us at the end of our contract. We may not be your biggest client, but we have needs too. Be flexible when you can. A minor sticking point on your end could make a major difference to us. 


• Be supportive - Specifically with your technical support. Have a clear, concise way for us to get answers to our questions. Don’t put us in the support ticket loop and wait for us to call three times before you escalate it. We don’t want to waste your time or ours.
  

Fortunately, we have many outstanding third party partners that we love to tout.  Hopefully a peek into the mind on other side of the equation can be of use to those of you who are or hope to be vendors to eCommerce companies.

The promotional potential in packaging and shipping a product can be immense, when materials are utilized correctly. PlumberSurplus.com used to offer each of our suppliers branded packing tape.  Each package they shipped for us, they would use our tape, with our logo on it. It was a great selling point, suppliers loved it, and we got our name plastered on thousands of shipments that went to the United States and Canada. Sounds like a win–win situation right?

Wrong.

Let me recap for you the problems we ran into. First, we started growing so quickly that we could hardly keep our suppliers stocked with enough tape. We seemed to continuously have boxes of branded tape on order from our vendor. Second, what had been purposed as a several hundred dollar promotional opportunity quickly became a several thousand dollar promotional opportunity. We were willing to keep supplying the tape, and did, in fact, for a few years until we started monitoring returns. This was the third and final problem. We began to notice that our returns were coming back, not with our branded tape used as a seal across the box, appropriate for branding our name on the box, but it was being used to hold boxes together! Any promotional aspect went right out the window when the tape was so overlaid that you could not read the text. We began to closely monitor returns for “tape abuse” and found that many suppliers were taking advantage of the branded tape. We decided to pull the branded tape from suppliers, and instead asked that they use the traditional clear packing tape that they use on the rest of their shipments.

Now, this is not to say that if you have only a couple facilities that make up your shipping departments, that you cannot control the use of the branded tape in such a way that it holds promotional value. In fact, in our infancy the branded tape was a great feature for us to utilize. 

Anthony Abram has written several articles on, and or related to, packing tape, and its promotional benefits. I would recommend reading them before making your decision.

In his article “Packing Tape Facilitates Commerce” Anthony strongly emphasizes the use of tape over other box sealants, and branded tape over clear packing tape. I would agree with him on all points, until the promotional value becomes mute due to abuse. He even explains how the packages are prime real-estate for your logo. 

So, how does PlumberSurplus.com take advantage of the prime real-estate we have from shipping thousands of products around the country? We have began investigating the use of branded stickers, much like you already see on boxes. Kohler uses an embossed foil sticker, UPS utilizes colored stickers to designate different levels of services, and many other manufacturers use branded stickers to complete their packaging. A sticker offers the same promotional potential as tape. You can put your logo, contact information, slogan, etc. on the sticker, and you can better monitor their use by instructing that suppliers are to put one sticker on the top of each package. You can even monitor their use, down to the sticker by tracking how many stickers each supplier is sent, how many orders they have processed and the number of boxes used per order. In this example, you would be able to tell when a supplier is running low because you will be able to see that you sent 500 stickers, and they have shipped 450 orders, with one box used per order.

As far as cost goes, from our research, the difference between the cost of tape on a box, and the cost of a sticker per box is miniscule. If you are questioning the promotional potential for your company in branded tape, the main factors to analyze are cost and who is going to be using it. If you have control over the output, branded tape is a great promotional avenue.

As you may or may not know, we at PlumberSurplus.com have just completed the process of launching a brand new site in a completely new market, OutdoorPros.com. For the 7 week time period it took us to launch I was in the middle of making that happen. Our plan was to simply take our existing site and infrastructure, and copy it over and start a new site. We call it our “Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V” plan. Sounds simple, right?

Well, yes and no. Our site has been around for about 3 ½ years, and in that time a lot has changed. We’ve made many improvements and modifications along the way, and left some things alone. All that to say that after more than 3 years of coding, the task of doing this copy/paste has left me thinking more about proper site architecture methods and the modularizing of code and processes. Fortunately we’ve done a lot of that all along, though not perfectly and not everywhere.

So given that it’s on my mind right now, I thought I’d share my thoughts to help you eCommerce developers out there as well as remind myself of some of the more important things to consider when it comes to site design and architecture.

1. Plan on Succeeding – You will grow. You will increase sales. You will offer more products. Don’t build anything thinking “ah, this will be good enough for now”. Don’t take shortcuts because it’s good enough for your current needs. It just adds layers of problems once you finally do outgrow it but are dependent on that piece. A small example is our name, PlumberSurplus.com. We only sell brand new, top notch products. Nothing “surplus”. And we sell a lot of non-plumbing products, including power tools and lighting. Very early on, we had no idea how broad our product line would get. 


2. Separate Your Layers – This is kind of a no-brainer to programmers, but we all get lazy, rushed, or think something is so small and trivial it doesn’t matter. And we all eventually regret those decisions. Take the time to separate your data, business, and interface layers. To the lay-persons out there, what I mean is this: don’t hard code your site based on your current products, database, email system, etc. Because when you need to change something out, the world blows up. Renaming our mail server was a bit more tedious than it needed to be due to numerous references to it by name throughout the site. Now we use a global setting to refer to our mail server, so when we need to change it again it is a one line change. Even things as simple as a state drop down list; you may say “well how often are the states going to change?” They may not, but what if you start shipping to Canada? Now you have to add those provinces to all of the associated drop downs you have. It is much better to utilize your database for data and save your interface for content and actions. 


3. Stretch the Limits With Third Party Vendors – One thing that our legal department is so good at is thinking ahead when negotiating contracts. Some vendors have arbitrary limits on products, categories, requests, bandwidth, etc. These are mostly arbitrary, as in not due to technical or physical capabilities. So if a vendor says they can support 40K SKUs, get them to bump that number up to 100K. You may only have 1500 products, but by agreeing to a ceiling you increase the chances of having to renegotiate later on. And most of the time it doesn’t cost them anything extra to change that number in your contract. 


4. Imagine Everyone in Their Underwear – OK, so maybe that is a tip for public speaking. Skip that one. 


5. Imagine Quadrupling Your Estimates – If you are just getting going, you really have no way to estimate your growth. You never know when you’ll land that major supplier, customer, or piece of market share. So plan as best as you can; just make sure you build it to handle a lot more. 


6. Modularize –As much as is possible, develop your site so that components are hot-swappable. One thing we struggle with is our shipping logic. Our logic is based on many layers: boxing (how many packages to ship this order), warehouses (where is each package shipping from), weights, dimensions, etc. It is a cumbersome mess. This leaves us with a huge black hole that does not easily lend itself to upgrading or making relatively minor changes. As much as possible, spend the time modularizing and breaking out segments so that if you ever need to change one component you can with no problem. If you are writing custom shopping cart code, make the part that does the credit card processing its own piece. You give it the data, and it gives you the response. That way if you ever change credit card processors, it’s a simple integration with your existing checkout page rather than a page rewrite. 


7. Globalize – So many times something needs to be referenced in multiple places. Things like a merchant ID for third party software, an ftp location, or even the aforementioned email server. Don’t hard code these references! You will only regret it later. Instead, put all these variables in a global location and reference them that way. In .NET, use the web.config <appSettings> section to refer to all your connections strings, account IDs, mail servers, email notification addresses… well, you get the idea. You will save yourself a lot of time down the road. Extensive utilization of globalization has made the copy/paste that much easier for me. 


8. Strategize – Develop your code as if you were going to expand to other sites and industries. It will probably help you architect your site a lot better using a lot of the above mentioned techniques regardless of whether or not you ultimately do your own copy and paste. However, when you do come to that road (or quit this business and start a new one), you won’t have to do it all from scratch again. A few minor techniques planned in advance can save you so much time later on. One example: throughout our site, none of our links, pages, or images (in code, not rendered) link to PlumberSurplus.com. In code they all look something like this: [SiteName]/images/imageName.jpg. Our site is built for multiple domains, so now instead of looking for hundreds of references, I just change our site name variable and it’s all there. This is just one small example of how to develop your site with expansion in mind.