Today we have added electronic funds transfer as a new payment method for both Web-form-buddy payment forms and the Web-store-buddy shopping cart.

The idea is that you can enter your bank account details on your control panel, and then if you enable this payment method your customer will be provided with bank transfer instructions. If you accept payments from abroad, there is an option to provide the special instructions that the bank may require for those (such as SWIFT code number or IBAN number).

One slight problem with electronic funds transfers is that unless your customer provides a unique reference number with the transaction, you may find it difficult to figure out who a payment is from. To prevent that from happening Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy advise your customer to quote the unique transaction reference with the payment.

We have now completed the integration of  Google Checkout with Web-store-buddy.

The aim of Google Checkout is to try to make it as easy as possible for your customers to purchase from your store using a single user name and password. This fits in neatly with Web-store-buddy as, unlike most other shopping cart systems, Web-store-buddy does not force shoppers to create accounts with yet more user names and passwords.  So if this has the effect of making your shoppers’ experience more comfortable and hassle-free, then it is surely likely to help you increase sales and customer loyalty.

if you use Web-form-buddy for secure forms or archived forms, the data is available at our secure portal www.buddydata.com.

Likewise, if you use our Web-store-buddy search engine friendly shopping cart, your store orders are available from buddydata.com.

Up until now, the same password would grant access to the control panel and to buddydata.com. And that stays the same – your  primary password gets you into both locations.

What’s new is that we have added an option to create an additional password that grants access to buddydata only – not to the control panel. This means that access for administrative staff can be kept separate from webmaster access.

The Web-store-buddy control panel has now been completely upgraded to the same style as Web-form-buddy. This makes it much more manageable for us, and – hopefully – much better for you dear customer!

We have an additional payment method now for Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy :   payment by money order.

The next one we’ll be looking to add is Google Checkout.

A while back we added the capability to have an offer coupon.  In other words the Web-store-buddy shopping cart allows the customer to enter a special code you have supplied them which qualifies the customer for, say, a 10% discount.

This has been working very well, so we’ve now added some more features:

• You can have regular (non-coupon) offers that apply to all shoppers.
• You can have multiple coupon or regular offers running at the same time
• You can set a minimum order value that qualifies for the offer
• You can set a start date and an expiry date for the offer

Examples might be:

“Save 10% on all orders over $100 in November!”

Or

“Enter voucher code ABC001 to get $15 off!”

We have now added support for Google Anaytics E-Commerce Tracking to Web-store-buddy.

Google analytics is both very powerful and free! When combined with Web-store-buddy you can get really useful e-commerce statistics – including revenue, conversion rates, average order value, product performance, transactions, visits to purchase, days to purchase, etc.

To enable Google Analytics with Web-store-buddy, all you need do is enter your Google Analytics ID on your control panel and you’re done.

We have now added the same time-zone feature for Web-store-buddy that we added recently to Web-form-buddy.

The settings are shared – so if you change the time zone offset from UTC (GMT) in one program then that changes it for the other too.

Many products have “attributes“. For example if you sell shoes they might be available in different sizes and different colors.

In coping with attributes, one approach would be to create a separate product code for each possible product option – but you would soon find you are dealing with a huge database of products!

So for that reason you have always been able to add a field for attributes with your Web-store-buddy “buy now” buttons (typically a drop down list). Like so:

However, with only one drop down list to work with, this method gets awkward if you have multiple sets of attributes. For example supposing you had lots of size variations and lots of color variations! You could try adding them to one list like this:

This approach is fine with just a few product options.  But when you have lots of options (and lots of different types of options), it gets out of hand.

So to solve this problem we’ve upgraded the Web-store-buddy attributes feature so that you can now add up to five separate attribute lists to a buy now button. Here is the example above using the new method and two attribute lists.

With Web-store-buddy you can add add a field for custom text with a “buy now” button. This field needs to be named “optiontext“.

Previously the field was limited to 100 characters – but that has now been increased to 200 characters.

And whereas before you were restricted to a single line text field, now you can use a <textarea> field so that the shopper can enter more than one line. E.g.:

<textarea name=”optiontext” cols=”50″ rows=”3″></textarea>