Author: Lee Blue

How To Promote Your Online Store

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RxgPPwVOZ8

It seems like there are thousands of articles telling you how to promote your online store. With all the social media channels, blogging tips, and content marketing strategies it can quickly get overwhelming. I found myself getting so bogged down with all the different tools and techniques to drive traffic and increase conversions that I lost site of two important points:

  1. You don’t have to do everything at once
  2. It’s actually not hard, you just have to do it

Let’s take a moment to look at all this together. We’ll sort out some details, and by the end, you’ll have a very effective plan that you can start on today. So let’s jump in.

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WordPress Security and Cart66 News

This past week has been mostly a week of coding and behind the scenes enhancements paving the way for a new Cart66 features that should land soon – perhaps as soon as next week! For now, I wanted to share some important information about keeping your online store safe and secure.

It’s Not About SSL Certificates

Everybody knows that if you are going to run an online store you have to make sure you provide a safe and secure website for your customers. A common myth is that you can just install an SSL certificate on your site and that’s all it takes.

This crazy story helps clear that up.

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Your Hosted Payment Page

Security is one of the most important things if you are running an online store. Cart66 gives you the strongest security possible by providing a PCI compliant hosted payment page that looks EXACTLY like your WordPress site and works with over 100 payment gateways – all built in.

The Cart66 platform, is the most secure ecommerce system for WordPress. In addition to securing the payment form, Cart66 also secures all of your critical e-commerce data, right down to the contents of the shopping cart itself. Cart66 secures:

  • All credit card payments

  • All of your product definitions (prices, options, etc.)

  • All of your customer data

  • All customer order history

  • Saved billing information

  • Subscription payments

  • Shopping cart contents

Watch this video to see how your secure hosted payment page works and why it is important.

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Cart66 Cloud Plugin Updates

Tuesday we released Cart66 Cloud 2.0.11 which includes a handful of enhancements and lays the groundwork for some new Cart66 features which may land as soon as next week. We updated some JavaScript libraries and tweaked a few things for a smoother ride on WordPress 4.5. The details are in the change log in the WordPress repo.

Around The Web

WordPress 4.5.1 Released
If you have not already, you should update to WordPress 4.5.1 – the latest maintenance release that fixes 12 bugs recently discovered.

Being A Developer After 40
Coding isn’t just for the 20-somethings. There is a growing group of developers over 40 years old. Here are some simple tips for staying a happy developer.

Structuring WordPress Plugins
It seems everyone has some of their own ideas on how to structure the code in their WordPress plugins. Nevertheless, you can always learn a few things from someone else. Here are Brady Vercher’s thoughts about how to structure WordPress plugins.

If you are in a hurry, here are three great tips:

  • Define the main plugin class in its own file (not the in the main plugin file).

  • Don’t register hooks in constructors.

  • Don’t execute code in the same file where functions or classes are defined.

Sharing and Helping

I’m quite passionate about WordPress, open source, e-commerce, and helping people any way I can. If you blog and are looking for anyone to guest post about WordPress, plugin development, ecommerce, running a business, etc. I’d love to help out any way I can.

If you have any specific questions, let me know about that too. I’ll do my best to get you the answers you need – and you may even find your name mentioned in a video on our YouTube channel – please subscribe 🙂

Stay Connected

Keep in touch on our blog, YouTube Channel, Facebook, and Google+

What’s Next

We’re pretty busy, heads down coding up some new features right now. I hope to be able to share those details with you next week. Until then, happy WordPress-ing 😉

It’s Not About SSL Certificates

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdPDcXA50Sk

A lot of store owners and even many WordPress developers assume that an SSL certificate is all it takes to secure your WordPress site for e-commerce. The interesting thing is that an SSL certificate doesn’t actually secure a server at all. An SSL certificate simply encrypts the communication between the web browser and the server the browser is talking to. Let’s take a look at the role of SSL certificates in the context of PCI compliance.

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Hosted Payment Page With 100+ Gateways

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-phPMWf8V8Y

One of the ways Cart66 provides the strongest security of any WordPress ecommerce solution is by providing you with your own hosted payment page. Your hosted payment page will look exactly like the rest of your WordPress site and works with over 100 different payment gateways. In this article we’ll talk about what a hosted payment page is, why it is the most secure, and how it makes PCI compliance as easy as possible. We will also compare Cart66 with other WordPress e-commerce plugins and explain why Cart66 is the most secure and why it matters when you are considering how to process payments for your online store.

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WordPress and PCI Compliance

There is a great deal of misinformation with regard to PCI compliance or, more formally called PCI DSS compliance. Let’s talk about what PCI compliance actually means and also how the various aspects of your online business affect your PCI compliance requirements. We’ll go over the role of SSL certificates, the difference between payment gateways, and how Cart66 goes beyond all other WordPress ecommerce plugins to provide the most security for your WordPress store.

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What Is PCI Compliance Scope?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raPJzjUckL0

The phrase “PCI compliance scope” is commonly used in two different ways. First, you might see something that says your website is either in scope or out of scope for needing to comply with the PCI compliance regulations. The other way you might see PCI compliance scope is relating to ways to reduce your PCI compliance scope. In this article we will talk about how you know if you are in scope or out of scope and the different things you can do to reduce PCI compliance scope for your website.

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Selling Payment Plans On WordPress

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQX00-6p1gY

If you sell an expensive product, you might want to offer a payment plan to your customers. With a payment plan, you can spread the cost of your product across multiple different payments. For example, if you sell a product that costs $500, you might offer a payment plan where your customer pays $100 over the course of five installments. Cart66 makes selling payment plans on WordPress easy.

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Inventory Management In Cart66

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy_FSjpNH74

If you sell products that you keep in stock, inventory management in Cart66 will let your customers know whether or not an item is in stock on your website. If a customer clicks the Add To Cart button and you do not have the inventory in stock to fulfill the order, your customer will see a notice saying, “This item is out of stock.”

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YouTube Marketing For Ecommerce

YouTube has over a billion users — almost one-third of all people on the Internet — and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views. YouTube reaches more 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the United States.  You can read even more statistics on how YouTube is skyrocketing, so let’s talk about YouTube marketing and how you can use YouTube to sell your products.

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Cart66 News And Updates

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It’s been a long time since we’ve sent out an email. I’m sorry for not doing better about staying in touch. I’m going to fix that now, starting with this email. If you are no longer interested in WordPress ecommerce or Cart66, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email. Otherwise, thanks for staying with us, and we’ve got some exciting news.

Demonstration Videos

Lately we’ve been working on putting together demonstrations of various things you can do with Cart66. We’ve started a new YouTube Channel as well as full written articles including the videos on our blog.

Top Blog Articles

Here are a few of our most popular blog articles:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Around The Web

We are always on the lookout for stuff about WordPress and ecommerce from around the web. Here is a quick list of a few noteworthy articles.

WordPress 4.5 Is Here
Take a look at the latest release of WordPress, version 4.5 “Coleman”. Here are a few highlights from this release:

    • Live responsive previews

 

  • Add a custom logo to your website

 

 

  • Inline URL editing in the page editor

 

 

  • Awesome new formatting shortcuts (our favorite new feature)

 

Thank You Emails
Here’s a great article from Elegant Themes about The Power of “Thank you” emails and how they can make all the difference when growing your ecommerce business. Want to send these emails with Cart66? Here is how you send “Thank you” emails with Cart66.

Be Your Own Managed WordPress Host
In this article Lee Blue explains how you can be your own managed WordPress host by combining WordPress with Digital Ocean for hosting, ServerPilot for server management, BackupBuddy for backups, and Sucuri for security. He also shares his experience with a few other hosting options.

What’s Next

We are continuing to create additional demonstration videos to show how to do all sorts of things with Cart66. So keep an eye out on our blog,  YouTube Channel, and Facebook. We’ve also got a big new feature we’re getting ready to announce. It is one of our most requested enhancements. So stay tuned!