This past weekend, I had a discussion about how some eCommerce sites are more successful than others, how they draw you back, make it easy to place an order and just seem to have a higher conversion rate. This got me thinking on what is common denominator between sites that have a higher conversion rate, and I focused on the checkout process and how some sites just make it very difficult to continue and place an order. With that in mind, here is a list of simple steps that can be taken to improve conversion rates and the user experience in an eCommerce site. These steps are not a silver bullet, but they are steps that can be easily implemented in almost any eCommerce store running on any platform. These are what I would consider low hanging fruit and should at the very least provide a quick metric on what works ...

I have been working on submitting a form via ajax with an asp.net server back end. I normally use .ashx handlers and have used .asmx before to do ajax communication with the server, whether it is for filling autcompletes, looking up information, or just submitting small chunks of data, but for this one, we decided to use an .aspx method to leverage the built in serialization of objects. Here is the code: the server side code: [csharp] [WebMethod] [ScriptMethod(ResponseFormat = ResponseFormat.Json)] public static Foo Get(string path) { var foo = new Foo(path); return foo; } [/csharp] The client side code: [javascript] var DTO = { 'path': path }; $.ajax({ url: '/default.aspx/Get', ...

Roughly a year ago I implemented the Autocomplete plugin developed by Jörn Zaefferer for one of our systems. Since then, this plugin has now been integrated into jQuery UI and the original version has been discontinued, with no new development or support. The author made available a simple guide for migration, yet a few of the features were discontinued with no migration path clear. Per his own post: autoFill: Gone with no immediate replacement available, for good reasons: The default behaviour when selecting items via keyboard now puts the focussed value into the input, like the Firefox Awesomebar does it. It's not the same as what the autoFill option did, but there should be no need to recreate that effect. mustMatch: Gone, but easy to implement with the select event. Once more, the combobox provides an example for that. selectFirst: ...

This is an interesting yet frustrating issue, but it was fairly simple to fix: We have a simple script that use jquery GET request to add a product to a cart in an ecommerce store. The script just makes a get request to the server with simple info such as the productId and the quantity. We had been receiving reports that some users were unable to add multiple items to their cart.  We narrowed it down to an Internet Explorer quirk. Basically if a get request is identical to a previous request in the same session, Internet Explorer tries to outsmart itself, it executes the script but it ignores the new GET request, instead it uses the previous response received. The result is that the client side behaves as if the request had been made, but the server never received the request. Here is a sample of the request: [js] $.get('/ProductHandler.ashx?type=add', { ProductId: id, ...

Woke up this morning to a pleasant surprise in my inbox: Dear Victor Castro, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2011 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Commerce Server technical communities during the past year. It is a great honor to be considered in this elite group. Thanks goes to those who nominated me, the Commerce Server group, the Microsoft community, and specially to my team at Commerce Generation, and to our clients who allowed me to be exposed to challenging and exciting projects.