Is this necessary ? I believe yes !

Imagine your self being a customer from say France visiting a online store in the USA. You see the prices that look ok, but include US taxes and of course not the France VAT. You have no idea about freight charges, there may be some information on a page that explain shipping terms, but that is too general.

You still add the products you want to your cart, and then press “checkout”. You have to create an account, so you type in all your data. Now, after account is created you finally see the prices with the France VAT. Returning to the shopping cat page, you have still no idea about concrete shipping options and charges.

You click on “checkout” again and finally, right in the middle of the checkout, you have a selection of shipping options and charges.

In other words, the store is asking you to create an account and start checking out before you know what the prices including taxes are (or what the taxes are), before you know what the shipping options and cost are and before you know what you are going to pay finally.

That factors are essential for the purchasing decision. You want first to know what exactly the charges for taxes, freight, anything additional are and then decide to create an account and start checking out

Your customers need that information for their purchasing decision, unfortunately, that was not possible in osCommerce till now. I believe that a good part of abandoned carts and not completed checkouts are because of that missing information.

• visitors want to avoid the trouble of filling out a form or may not want to give out their personal data without knowing what the final total is.
• the click on “checkout” implies the feeling of commitment to pay (even in real that is not the case), people may hesitate to “checkout” before knowing exactly what they have to pay

I created a new module, to allow a guest or logged in customer to see what the order total is and what the shipping options are, before logging in and before starting with the checkout.

It creates a new section, where people can make their selections for country/zone/address, that display the available shipping options and rates and the calculated order totals.

You can see a live demo of orders total estimator here.

You can use the first 3 countries of the countries drop down (Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria) to see prices, shipping options and shipping charges changing and the order totals adjusting accordingly, they all have different tax rates and shipping options attached.

You are also welcome to create a test account and additional addresses if you want to see how the module behave for registered customers.

The module is activated for almost all pages, you have to add something to the cart

The module work for both, unregistered visitors and logged in customers

1) For unregistered visitors

The customer can select a country, if the country has a zone, then also a zone. The dropdown for the zones selection appear or not, depending on the selected country. A postcode selection is optional (admin setting) and can be set to be required or not. This depend on the shipping modules you use, if you base shipping on postcodes, you can have that enabled, if not, then it is better to leave that ou.

Based on the selection, the module

• set the correct tax rates and update the display of all prices store wide
• prepares a list of available shipping options with the corresponding calculated shipping rates. It select by default the cheapest shipping option available

If for example shipping is based on county it uses the country, if on zone, then the zone, if on postcode, then the postcode etc. People can now select their preferred shipping option

Based on that, the module recalculate the order total and display it at the bottom. It also updates the cart information in the heading area of your site

Before any selection is made, the module defaults to the store country/zone, shows shipping options and is doing tax/shipping calculations based on the store defaults.

2) For registered customers

The country/zone selection is replaced by the stored customer addresses. The customer can choose any of the addresses his has stored in his address book.

Based on the selection, the module

• set the correct tax rates and update the display of all prices store wide
• prepares a list of available shipping options with the corresponding calculated shipping rates. It select by default the cheapest shipping option available

Your customers can now select their preferred shipping option

Based on that, the module recalculate the order total and display it at the bottom. It also updates the cart information in the heading area of your site

Before any selection is made, the module defaults to the customer default address, shows shipping options and is doing tax/shipping calculations based on that

All updates are happening in real time, without any page refresh

The module can be enabled for any store page. You may want to show it on the shipping cart page only, or on your product information page, or on your index page etc. This is up to you and is one of the available admin settings.

First group of available admin settings you can choose what kind of additional information you want to display, if you want to display the cart contents or additional checkout buttons

Second group of available admin settings you can choose what kind of information you want to have from unregistered store visitors. If you use eg postcodes for shipping then enable it otherwise leave it out. Same for states/zones, enable the field if it affect shipping or taxes

Third group of available admin settings is about design. You can adjust colours and details to match your store design. The default settings look very nice and professional as well

In the last group of admin settings, you can select the pages you want to display the module. All store pages are available, except the checkout pages obviously, since customers are making their final selections there

You can see a live demo of orders total estimator here.

You can use the first 3 countries of the countries drop down (Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria) to see prices, shipping options and shipping charges changing and the order totals adjusting accordingly, they all have different tax rates and shipping options attached.

You are also welcome to create a test account and additional addresses if you want to see how the module behave for registered customers.

The module is activated for almost all pages, you have to add something to the cart.

If you want to see it working on a live store, you can check here: R.A.B. Hobbies It’s the store of a good old customer of me, highly specialized in hobby articles, located in Victoria Australia, but shipping worldwide. Please do not create accounts for testing purposes, you can do that on my demo store.

Domestic shipping options

Shipping options international

Shipping options and rates are pulled from the Australian post service and depend on country for international and postcode for Australian shipping. Rates are calculated by weight. For Australian shipping you have to enter a valid postcode, like “3195″. Its quite impressive to see the module working and pulling all that data without any page refresh. The module is set to display on the shopping cart page only.

After looking at things on the demo store, please take a minute and think about how much more confident you are to click on the checkout button and create an account having all information you need just in front of you. Now, go to your store, add something to the cart and look at your shopping cart page. Are your visitors missing something or not?

If you think that this could be a useful addition to your store, please get in touch and contact me

In the first part of my GDPR post I introduced a set of modules related to customers “Right of access” and “Right to erasure” In this post I’m going to introduce a module that will allow you collect customers consent for collecting and processing their data. Customers consent is required to process personal data by the GDPR regulations

In what cases do you  collect customer data on your online store ? 2 obvious cases are

• your visitors create an account
• your customers place a order

There are more cases of course where you could think/say that a customer/visitor is submitting personal data to the store, like sending a message through the contact form, writing a review, signing up to a newsletter etc.

Having that in mind, I created a flexible module that places a special “accept terms” section to forms where visitors submit their data. You can enable/disable the module for various forms and pages in admin.

The module display a checkbox hat people have to check in order to accept your terms and disables the “submit” button until the checkbox is checked

On the right side of the checkbox is a link to your terms and conditions, clicking on it activate a pop up window that display your terms

The content of the pop up window can be either a static file (like e.g. privacy.php or conditions.php etc) or a page created in admin with the MTS page manager. This you can set in admin, I’ll explain later on.

At the bottom of the pop up window, people can either accept the terms or close the window without accepting. Pressing on accept will close the pop up and check the checkbox.

Checking the checkbox enables the submit button and people can proceed

The module is self contained, there are no files to edit and all settings can be done in admin

You can set on what pages you want to enable the module.

Of course It makes sense only for pages where people submit something, so some of the store files are excluded from the list (like e.g. product_info.php)

You can have the pop up loading automatically upon page load, for this simply turn auto pop up “on”. People will get the terms pop up the moment they visit a page that has the module enabled. This is a good idea if you want to force people read your terms

Next, you can select what the content of the pop up should be. As said, you can either use one of your existing static pages (like privacy.php) or a MTS page created with the MTS page manager. In admin, you can either type in the filename you want to use or simply the ID of the page you created with MTS page manager

It is very easy to create a new page using MTS pages manager, the feature is available only to MTS users

Finally you can make various design decisions in admin and adjust the look of the section to your store design

The accept terms area display very nicely on small screens as well

GDPR compliance is required for all websites and online stores, doesn’t matter if you are located in the European Union or not. The moment your online store is accessible by European Union citizens and you have customers that are European Union residents, you have to adapt.

In case you don’t have already an other solution and want to have that modules for your store, please get in touch. While the module is tailored to MTS stores, there is an alternative solution available for regular stores

This post introduce a set of osCommerce modules that cover the GDPR obligations of:

1) Right of access: It gives citizens the right to access their personal data and information about how this personal data is being processed. A data controller must provide, upon request, an overview of the categories of data that are being processed as well as a copy of the actual data

2) Right to erasure: The data subject has the right to request erasure of personal data related to them

In simple terms, the set of modules being introduced here will allow your customers to:

• see what data you have stored about them
• download that data
• edit parts of that data
• delete parts of that data

Customers are ale to delete and edit anything but their orders, that you are obligated to keep for fiscal reasons

The set of modules create a new page called “account privacy” and a link to it on the accounts overview page. You can of course add more links to the account privacy page anywhere on your store.

The account privacy page, display all GDPR modules that you have installed in admin.

Each module contain a section of the customers data stored on the website. Modules display “collapsed” in order to have a better overview. Displaying all data at once could be confusing for store visitors and cause a lot of scrolling on mobile devices. The visible heading part of each module, display its title and 2 buttons.

• the “show” button expands the details on screen
• the “download” button allow customers to download the data of the corresponding module.

The “account data” module display the basic account data of the customer, like name, email, address, the date the account was created, number of logons etc. It also display any recorded actions of the “action recorder” modules that are included in osCommerce by default.

Customer can delete their account by pressing the “delete” button. In order to prevent accidetial deletion, customers have to confirm the action, since it can’t be undone.

The “address book” module display the main and any additional addresses the customer may have stored. Each address can be edited and each address – beside the main address – can be deleted on this page

The “subscriptions” module display the subscription status to newsletters and global product notiofications and create a list of products your customer has subscribed for, in order to receive individual product notifications and updates.

The customer can easily subscribe / unsubscribe to newsletters and global product notifications and easily remove any individual product notifications.

Its worth to mention that all actions are performed via ajax calls, that mean without page reloads that improve the customer experience specially on mobile devices

The “cookies” module display all cookies that the website stores on customers device. In admin, you can set the cookies that are essential for the store operation, like the “osCsid”, that is the session ID cookie. You can also add a optional description to each cookie to make clear what it is good for.

Your customers vcan delete any cookie by pressing the delete button

The “product reviews” module display all reviews the customer has submitted, regardless their status (you can turn the status of reviews on or off in admin and make them visible to public or not)

Your customer can either delete a review or “anonymize” it. The “anonymize” function replace characters of the customers name with asterisks (*)

The “orders” module display all customers orders. Orders do not really belong to personal data protected by GDPR, but I believe its a good idea to have that information on this page. Its is up to you to install the module in admin or not.

The module display a list of all orders. The customer can see the details of each order by pressing the “show details” button. Order details are shown without any page reload.

The details page display shipping and payment details, a list of the ordered products and the complete order history.

Orders can’t be deleted by the customer, the store has to keep order records or fiscal reasons

The “shopping cart” module display the contents of the customers cart. While this also doesn’t belong to data protected by GDPR, its good to have the option to display it on this page, you can decide your self if you want to show the module or not.

The customer can remove items from the shopping cart, the action is performed without any page reload

GDPR compliance is required for all websites and online stores, doesn’t matter if you are located in the European Union or not. The moment your online store is accessible by European Union citizens and you have customers that are European Union residents, you have to adapt, fines can be very high from what I’m reading.

In case you don’t have already an other solution and want to have that modules for your store, please get in touch.

You can also checkout part 2 about collecting customers consent

You type in a state, select a country, submit the form, and return to the same page with an error message that the state entry was not correct. You can now select a state and proceed.

Practically this mean that each customer who create an account on the store is presented that error message and has to submit the form twice, each customer has to go through the frustrating experience that she/he did something wrong, right at the beginning of the checkout process. Not very motivating I think

This happens on every page where customers can enter an address

• create_account.php
• checkout_payment_address.php
• checkout_shipping_address.php
• address_book_process.php

It only work correctly in case the selected country has no zones. The majority of the stores do use zones of course

The reason for this behaviour is build into the system from day 1, the way the system work is as follows, in simple terms:

if there is a country selected, check if there are zones for that country.

If the country has zones, display the drop down of zones/states, if no zones, display a text input field.

If no country is selected, display a text input field

Now, the system know if there is a country selected only after the form is submitted. It “decide” to display a drop down of states or not only after the form is submitted

You are lucky to get an account created in 1 step and without an error message only if the country you selected has no zones or if you typed in the zone name exactly as set in admin, not very likely to happen.

There are of course some solutions available as add ons, they all modify quite many files and/or don’t work well.

I created a completely self contained system, with no code changes at all, that produce following behaviour

1)  if no country is selected, a text appear at the state field: “select country first”

2) If a country get selected, the text disappear and automatically is replaced by:

2.1) A states dropdown, in case the country has zones, people have to choose from there

2.2) A text input field in case the country has no zones, people can enter any text

If you change the country selection, the sate field update automatically, showing either a updated drop down or a text input field

The critical and important part is, that the state selection drop down appear before the form is submitted letting customers do the correct selection on the drop down

In admin, all you have to do is, install the state selector module and select what pages you want to use it on.

The page selection was added in case you are using other, alternative checkout method, like for example “Purchase without account – the easy way“

The State Selector extension does not require any file changes. Installation consist of uploading 3 files to the server (+ one more or each additional language you use) and installing the module in admin

Get in touch if you want to have this on your store

]]> https://multimixer.gr/02/12/2015/state-selector-the-easy-way/feed/ 0 https://multimixer.gr/16/11/2015/product-notifications-get-the-overview/ https://multimixer.gr/16/11/2015/product-notifications-get-the-overview/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2015 17:43:38 +0000 multimixer http://multimixer.gr/?p=1473 You all know about the product notifications system in osCommerce: People can click, either on the product information page or after successful checkout and register their interest in a particular product. The store administrator can then send a newsletter to that customers using the – complicated – newsletter system of osCommerce.

That’s all fine, my point is that the store owner never get an overview about how many customers and who concretely registered an interest in what products.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that e.g. there are 300 people interested in lemons and only 5 in melons? You know immediately what the important product is.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to export a csv file with the customer data, that you can either import into a modern newsletter program (like mailchimp) or work with the list offline?

That is exactly what this extension is doing, lets see the details

You’ll get a new page in admin (under “reports”) showing all products that have a notification entry

The list is showing

• product ID
• product name
• the number of notifications registered
• the current product quantity
• the product status

You can sort the list by any of that labels ascending or descending

You can preview the customers who registered a notification for a product by clicking the button “view” in column “view customers”

You can preview the product in question in both, the store side and the admin side by clicking the buttons “view in store” or “view in admin” in column “view product”. So you can quickly change something without leaving the page

You can expire a csv file with customer data either of the complete list (button “export complete list” on top) or of a list related to a particular product (button “export” in column “export customers”)

You can work with that list local in excel or a similar program, or import it to any online or offline program that accept csv files as a import source, like for example mailchimp for newsletters. That way you can easily create targeted newsletters

Finally you can reset either the complete list (button “clear complete list” on top) or you can reset the entries for a particular product (button “delete” in column “delete notifications”)

The extension is compatible with any osCommerce version of series 2.3.3.3 and upwards, including of course the latest osCommerce version 2.3.4

There are no core file modifications necessary, you just have to upload some files to the server, that’s all

Get in touch if you think that is something useful for your store

Why would you need such a list? There ae many reasons for, some examples:

1) You sell seasonal items and need the list to arrange shipping

2) You run out of stock for an item and need to contact all customers who didn’t receive the order yet

3) There is an upgrade/newer version for an item available and you want to inform all people who purchased that item

I’m sure you’ll find more reasons

With this modification you’ll be able to see and/or export a list of all customers who ordered a product from your store, including default address, delivery address and shipping address in case they are different to the default address. The list also include payment method, order date and order status.

You’ll get 2 buttons on the product listing page in admin, when you have a product selected

Pressing the first one – “Show Orders” – will open a pop up window showing all orders for hat product

Pressing the second one – “Export Orders” will let you download a csv file

The cvs fil contain all order elated data. You can filter that data as you like using a program like Excel, print the list ut, save it on your computer, import it to other applications etc

The installation is extremely simple and will not affect any other modifications you may have, there is just a single line of code to add to one file

Get in touch if ou think this is something useful for your store

Now, you have 10 newer products that you are selling since 3 months, and they are  selling really good. You want to have them in your bestsellers box but no chance. The old products still show, no sign of your new best selling items.

Wonder why? Easy to explain:

Say that the 10 older top products have sales from 1000 items and up. Your new product is selling 10 items per day. You need 100 days at least to get it into the top 10 of your bestsellers list. After 100 days it may not be relevant any more.

There is also no use for all time bestsellers if you sell seasonal items: You don’t want to show Christmas items on Easter just because the sold more during Christmas period. You don’t want to show bikinis in November if you sell clothing

Same if you sell items that are expiring in some way, for example technological items: It may be that you sold more iPhone 4 than iPhone 6 all over, but you don’t want to show that old iPhone 4 any longer in your bestsellers list just because you sold more of it once upon a time

You got the meaning. Old products are on top, no chance for bestselling new products to appear in your list.. The older your store, the bigger the problem.

What you need is a way to reset your bestsellers list from time to time and show recent bestsellers to your visitors.

This modification here is doing exactly this: It is a way to reset the bestsellers list,  leaving the default osCommerce data tracked in place.

Using the addon you’ll get a new page in admin under tab “reports”, showing your bestsellers

You can reset the list anytime using the button on top, the message on the left is showing you the last time of reset

For each product listed, there is a button “edit” so you can go directly and edit it in admin. You can also preview the product directly in admin if you want to check how it look on your front side

On the front page, your bestsellers box is showing the new list. In case you use mini template system, you can show the results of the new list in any of the various modules that display bestsellers

The modification is not touching any core code file and is made for osCommerce 2.3.4

Installation of the modification is extremely simple: Upload the files to your server and enable 2 modules in admin

Feel free to get in touch if you are interested in this extension, I think it’s useful and make a good sense

Things are simple: You want people to be able to checkout on your store without having to create an account. You want to store the order but you don’t want to store the customer data. All you want to know about the customer is the name and address so you know where to ship to. You don’t want your customers to be forced to create an account.

What I did is, to create a system that present an alternative checkout option to the store customers, parallel to the existing login and create account options that exist by default. Your customers can use that option and checkout without creating an account.

Best of all: no core file modifications at all. You don’t have to modify any file.

On the login page, there is one more checkout option:

If you want, you can disable all other options in admin, that way you’ll have only a checkout without account. You can also leave the login/create account as an option, this is up to you. You can name the PWA checkout option as you like, in this example it is named “simple checkout”

Using the PWA option, people arrive to a special page, where they have to enter their name, address and email. That is necessary, otherwise you wouldn’t know where to ship to

The rest of the checkout process is same as per default: People select shipping, then payment and finally conform the order.

In your admin, you can see the order with all products and the shipping address. No customer is registered

How to install: Since there are no files modified, installation is extremely simple, only requirement is, to use the latest osCommerce version, 2.3.4

1) Upload the files to your server

2) install 2 modules via admin

Thats all, the system already work perfectly on a number of websites

If you like this modification and want to use it on your website, please feel free to get in touch

If yes, then here is a nice solution for you: automated order status text. Each time you update the status of an order, the system will add automatically a predefined text to the “comments” field of the order

Lets see the details

On the order statuses page in admin, you’ll get a new text field where you can add a standard text for each status and each language you use in your store

When updating the order status for a given order, the standard text is added automatically to the order comments field

You can of course edit that text and add e.g. a tracking number or some personal message etc

The modification require some small code additions to 2 core osCommerce files in admin, there are no major changes that would affect any other functionality you have in your store.

The modification work also very well with the addon “order editor” in case you have that

Let me know if you are interested in this modification, I think its a very handy little modification that will save you a lot of time

I’ve been in the need of exactly the opposite: Copy a product to multiple categories in one step, and that is what this little modification does.

Day you have a product that you want to double or triple place and have it listed in several categories. Only way to do it now is, to repeat the “copy to” action each time. This can be time consuming in case you have many products that you want to list within multiple categories. Even more time consuming it is, to remove any additional listings of that product

With this modification, you can copy each product to any number of categories in one step directly from the product listing or product editing page in admin

You’ll get a new button on the product listing page in admin
and of course on the product editing page

Clicking the button, you’ll get a nice pop up, showing all available categories.

You can now easily select the categories you want your product to be listed in. You can add or remove the categories you want your product to be listed in any time.

Installation is very easy, there are just 2 simple additions to a single file.

This extension is made exclusively for Mini Template System users.