Neocub is powered by WebAsyst Shop-Script.

A minor update for WebAsyst Photos has been released, in which we have fine-tuned the photo thumbnail generation parameters: the sharpening filter and the saving quality of JPEG images.

The main goal was to adjust the parameters in such a way that all routines performing photo compression to specified sizes in WebAsyst Photos yield as high quality as if you were using, say, Photoshop for the same purpose. Just upload your photos and stay confident that they are prepared for publication in fine fashion.

Tests were made with very different kinds of images: landscapes, portraits, photos with a high ISO setting, screen captures, icons, etc. In the process of finding the best parameter values we compared the compression results for the same images achieved with various online and standalone pieces of software such as Flickr, Google Picasa, and Adobe Photoshop (resizing down to the specified image size, sharpening filter, and the “Save for Web & Devices” option).

As a result, the fine-tuned sharpening and file saving values allowed us to significantly increase the image quality — in so far as it is possible with the PHP extensions Imagick and GD. The average thumbnail file size has become larger by 50%. Note that updated compression parameters will be applied only to newly uploaded image files during the generation of their thumbnails of all supported sizes: 96, 144, 256, 512, 750, 970. The previously uploaded images and their thumbnails will not be affected.

Updating your WebAsyst Photos is recommended.

In online store MegaPodarki the shopping cart area dynamically changes depending on whether a customer has added something to cart:

When there are no products in the cart, it looks empty.

If something has been added to the cart, it visually “appears” in it.

It is quite easy to make the shopping cart dynamically change its appearance in your WebAsyst Shop-Script store, you only need to use the built-in CSS design editor for that.

The shopping cart area in the storefront is contained inside a DIV tag to which CSS class cpt_shopping_cart_info is applied:

<div class="cpt_shopping_cart_info">
...here come the contents of the customer's shopping cart...
</div>

If there are products in the cart, the cart_not_empty ID is automatically specified:

<div class="cpt_shopping_cart_info" id="cart_not_empty">
...here come the contents of the customer's shopping cart...
</div>

Different appearance of the shopping cart area can be defined using CSS styles for the #cart_not_empty selector. Open the design editor of your online store and click the “CSS” tab. Find the cpt_shopping_cart_info class, it should look similar to the following:

.cpt_shopping_cart_info {
background: transparent url("../../images/shopping-cart-empty.gif") no-repeat top left;
background-position: 28px 38px;
}

To make the shopping cart change its appearance when products are added by a customer, just add style rules for the #cart_not_empty selector, e.g.:

#cart_not_empty {
background: transparent url("../../images/shopping-cart-full.gif") no-repeat top left;
...
}

Here you can use any necessary CSS rules: for background color, background image, etc.

This summer we embedded a statistical metrics system in WebAsyst online services. The metrics allow to evaluate the overall volumes and statistics of the WebAsyst services usage. We are using those metrics to find out how often several core functions are used by all WebAsyst accounts with the view to further improvement of the software. For example, we are counting the number of products added to shopping carts, number of processed orders, downloaded files and photos, assigned issues, views of individual account backend screens, etc. This allows us to track the dynamics of the online services usage in general and their individual functions in particular.

Note that we do not retrieve personal data from user accounts, the only thing we register are actuations of certain functions within an account. It is similar to the way website visits statistics contain information on what web pages are viewed by visitors (e.g. by Google Analytics).

It would be, however, more interesting to evaluate the total volume of transactions in Shop-Script based web stores, both those used as the online service and those installed as PHP scripts. Since we do not possess such information on Shop-Script stores installed on third-party (web hosting) servers, we can only use the metrics obtained from our online services  to extrapolate their data to all Shop-Script users. The total number of web stores powered by WebAsyst Shop-Script is currently over 8000 — this figure was obtained from the number of issued software licensed and through a series of “complex” queries in search engines. We have carried out such evaluation and have compiled a summary containing quite interesting results provided below:

131,000 orders are successfully paid and delivered during a month
Assuming that average order value is $50, the gross value of all orders will be $6,500,000 per month.

5% of orders are placed by store staff in the backend (these are mainly phone orders), 10% of orders come from widgets published on external websites, and the rest 85% — from storefronts

720,000,000 page views per month

0.85% of page views are generated by mobile devices (e.g. iPhone or PDA)

3,000,000 products are added to shopping carts

21% of products are added to shopping carts through widgets

around 10,000,000 products are available for sale in the storefronts

754,000 new products are added and published each month

2,114,000 products’ data is updated monthly

GoingPostalT-Shirts is powered by WebAsyst Shop-Script.

We have released critical WebAsyst security update.

IMPORTANT: If you are using WebAsyst as PHP software on your server, update your installation (run software update in your WebAsyst Installer). We encourage you to perform update at the earliest opportunity, because amendments in this update are critical to the functioning of WebAsyst kernel (and published/common/ folder particularly).

If you are using WebAsyst as a hosted service, you do not need to do anything—we already updated all necessary system files.

Please contact our customer support if you have any questions.

BestBathStore is powered by WebAsyst Shop-Script.

At the end of September this year PayPal have renewed their SSL certificates that are used for transactions performed through online stores. The renewal of the SSL certificates may result in SSL handshake errors during checkout if the PayPal payment option is chosen by the customer.

To avoid occurrence of such errors in our customers’ Shop-Script stores, we have published a comprehensive guideline on replacement of the PayPal certificate file on their servers in our knowledge base at http://www.webasyst.net/support/help/paypal-ssl-error.html. Should you encounter any problems implementing the suggested certificate replacement routine, please feel free to contact our support team at http://www.webasyst.net/support/contact-support.html.

MegaPodarki is powered by WebAsyst Shop-Script.

The owners of MegaPodarki are our customers from Russia, most items in the store are also available at http://www.greatbigstuff.com/.

It has already been quite a long while since we started developing the new version of WebAsyst Contacts, though this topic has not yet been covered in our blog. In this post we begin telling about the development process and the features that shall be expected in the version.

The current version of WebAsyst Contacts (read a detailed description on our website) allows to store business and private contacts arranged in folders as well as to create signup forms for the visitors of websites and blogs. The new version of the application will be the first step towards a fully-fledged CRM system within WebAsyst.

Our goal now is to implement CRM-like features for WebAsyst applications through several successive updates for online stores owners, web developers, freelancers, and everyone else who need to organize their relationship with customers in a convenient way.

To create a CRM inside WebAsyst in a common sense of the word, that would allow, for instance, to quickly find full details of a customer, when he or she made a telephone call, to track all interactions with the customer, to view all customer’s orders and the projects you are working on or have already completed for that customer, etc. – implementing all those features will require some time. Therefore, to speed up the whole process, we have divided further development of WebAsyst into several steps:

1. Platform creation

This part will be released very shortly and will include updated Contacts and Users. These applications will be used for direct management of your contacts and account users database. We are planning to release updated WebAsyst Contacts before the end of the current (2009) year.

2. Integration with other applications

To begin with, it will be the integration with WebAsyst Mail and WebAsyst Support (the latter one is a new application which is currently in development, too), then with WebAsyst Projects, Issue Tracker and, of course, with Shop-Script.

3. Shop-Script + Contacts

The next Shop-Script update will already by fully integrated with Contacts, the mechanism of customer management is now being re-written to take the functionality of the new Contacts into account. Certainly you would be able to use Shop-Script without WebAsyst Contacts, but both applications, if used together, would provide much more efficiency, as it would be an online store + CRM.

4. Extendable functionality of your CRM

The possibility to assign custom event triggers for various actions related to contact management, to develop custom functionality for the Contacts (e.g., a billing system), an open API. These possibilities are already partly available in the software kernel and will be released as the Contacts become more integrated with other WebAsyst applications.

In several following blog posts we will keep telling you about the new Contacts and the functionality of the WebAsyst CRM system. Screen shots will be posted, too – wait for the updates!