As you probably noticed, the visual appearance of several sections of the WebAsyst website has changed, specifically that of the order checkout and the Customer Center. The update took place on Wednesday, April 25th.
WebAsyst Customer Center is the place where the changes were most obvious. Your Customer Center is now more convenient and offers more useful information and efficient actions, e.g., replacing necessity to send inquiries to the support team and to wait some time for response.
The Customer Center is now located at a different URL: from https://my.webasyst.net/ you are automatically redirected to https://webasyst.com/my/.
Users of WebAsyst online services may also have noticed that attempts to extend their paid account, to change the pricing plan, or to purchase extra SMS credit result in a completely new page being opened in the web browser. Its design now greatly differs from that of your WebAsyst account; however, in time, we will apply this common style to all pages to make the use of WebAsyst products and services even easier.
Tip: If you are using only online services and want to log in to your Customer Center but have no password, please click on the password recovery link on the Customer Center login page; this will send a special notification to the specified email address, which must be the one connected with your existing WebAsyst account.
If you have any questions related to the functioning of the new Customer Center or if you experience problems when placing an order on our website, be sure to report such cases to the support team via the request-sending form or directly to support@webasyst.net. Most urgent issues are now being promptly resolved upon notice.
The offer is valid from September 12th through September 30th for any WebAsyst license. Be sure to buy WebAsyst scripts while this special offer holds!
WebAsyst Shop-Script version 305 has been released. What’s new:
More authorization options have been added for order detailed information and order status viewing pages accessible to shoppers. Online store administrators can now either completely deny access to such web pages from non-registered customers or require input of customer’s last name or one-time password to allow access (a one-time password can be requested by a simple click on a button). Access settings are available in backend section “Settings → Settings → Cart & Checkout“.
Improved CAPTCHA code to strengthen protection against spam.
Optimized database queries have for simple and advanced product search pages.
More setup options have been added to the Google Base export module: Brand, Manufacturer Part Number (MPN), International Standard Book Number (ISBN), shipping_weight.
Shipping rates calculation for delivery across USA has been added to USPS module; a weight re-calculation bug has been fixed.
Additionally, several minor errors have been rectified.
Note: This update should be installed using WebAsyst Installer. We cannot publish a list of updated files or a patch because of a large number of updated files including system ones.
We are often asked about the most basic things involved in the creation of an online store. To help you find answers to most beginners’ questions, we describe below one of the easiest methods of creating an online store and tell you about the costs and technical knowledge associated with that method. This brief tutorial is intended for those who probably have only a vague understanding of how to sell goods or services over the Internet and simply do not know exactly where to start.
In this article we will describe how to open an online store using the WebAsyst™ online services, a very affordable and easy method for anyone who cannot make large investments at the very beginning and who is not very technically savvy.
1. What to sell
First decide what you will be selling in your online store. Consider the following issues to make the right choice for you:
storage and delivery expenses
necessity for customers to try things on (e.g., clothing or footwear)
probability of repeat orders of your products
necessity to provide post-sale support to customers
strength of competition in the chosen market
actual demand of your products on the Internet.
2. Create an online storefront
An online store is a website controlled by a special piece of software (e.g., Shop‑Script™). The software can be either purchased and installed on a special web server, or used as an online service via a web browser.
After you have gained experience with Shop-Script as an online service, you can later purchase the software for personal use. As software, Shop‑Script must be installed on a web-hosting server; e.g., provided by GoDaddy, iWeb, or another company. Instead of paying for the online service, you will then pay for web hosting.
Shop‑Script offered as an online service can be used free of charge for small stores. Payment is necessary only if you are planning to sell a large number (over 100) of products or to process quite a few (over 25) orders a month. You can begin with a free account and later switch to a paid plan at any time (and also change it back to free).
In our experience, owners of 95% of newly opened online stores are satisfied with the most affordable plan at 9.95 USD/mo. Note that even this plan allows you to register your own domain name as described below in this article.
Shop-Script as an online service is pre-installed on WebAsyst servers, which are specially set up for correct functioning of online stores. To begin using the Shop-Script online service, you only need to sign up (free of charge) at http://www.webasyst.net/signup/?app=shop.
Creation of an online store using the WebAsyst Shop-Script online service is shown in detail in the video below:
3. Product catalog
Create a product catalog and add useful information to your products: names, prices, descriptions, photos, etc. Adding products is easy: click on the “Add product” button, enter the product name, description, price, specify other product properties, and then click on “Save”.
4. Payment and delivery
Arrange payment and order delivery for your customers. To accomplish this, you may need to open a bank account and execute contracts with payment gateways and courier companies. You will find useful information about it in the WebAsyst knowledge base. Once these arrangements have been made, set up the corresponding payment and delivery options in your online store to make them available for choice during checkout.
5. Domain name
An online storefront created using the Shop-Script free online service is available at quite a long address: storename.webasyst.net/shop/. Should you want to change it to something shorter and more attractive (e.g., storename.com), you only have to switch to a paid plan and then register a domain name using the WebAsyst online services. A domain name is registered (and later renewed, if necessary), for 89 USD a year.
6. Advertising
To attract visitors to your online store, you need advertising. Advertising can be free or may require payment; e.g.:
registration in search engine databases
placing links to your storefront on other websites
search-engine optimization
offline advertising, i.e. dissemination of information through channels other than the Internet; e.g., printed media, television, radio, personal contact with prospective customers.
Advertising on the Internet is also often one of the most important expense items. Note that advertising and search-engine optimization will require significantly more time than the actual creation of an online store. Be prepared for the fact that competitors often spend large amounts of money to make links to their websites appear in top search results provided by popular search engines. To beat the competition in some markets, you may have to invest similar funds and efforts.
7. Support and development
Once you have an online store up and running, do not stop! Operating the business successfully requires constant attention to all details.
Keep analyzing your customers’ feedback and visiting other popular online stores in order to make your own storefront more and more convenient, informative, and visually more attractive. Remember that, aside from simple convenience for visitors, logically arranged information on a website usually results in better indexing by search engines and, as a consequence, in the growing number of visitors and in higher profit for your business.
WebAsyst version 302 with a security update has been released. This update adds extra data verification to prevent remote reading access to the contents of arbitrary WebAsyst files.
IMPORTANT NOTE! We strongly recommend upgrading all installed WebAsyst scripts on your servers to install this security update. All user accounts in WebAsyst online services have already been updated.
UPD: If you have modified WebAsyst source files and would like to avoid installing a full software update to preserve your code changes, please request information on partial update from our support team in order to apply changes to updated files only. You will be provided with detailed instructions, and an archive containing only modified files which must be simply uploaded to your server. Note that such partial security update instructions will be sent only to registered customers with valid WebAsyst licenses.
A few weeks ago Facebook developers introduced the ability to embed iframe applications (e.g., online storefronts) as tabs in user accounts next to “Wall”, “Photo”, “Discussions”, etc. This new feature allows shoppers to proceed to the storefront without leaving the online store’s main Facebook page. Before the feature was added, online storefront opened as an ordinary application, i.e. still within Facebook but outside of the store’s main account page.
In order to embed your storefront as a tab on your online store’s main Facebook page, follow our detailed instructions (see section “Main Facebook page of your online store”).
To see the difference, look how an online storefront was embedded in Facebook before:
… and how it can be embedded now using this great new feature:
By the way, owners of WebAsyst Shop-Script based shopping carts have already begun to embed their storefronts as Facebook tabs; e.g., http://www.facebook.com/MegaPodarki
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