So if you take credit cards online or at a physical location, you may already know about PCI DSS but not be familiarized with the background of it. So basically, You know as time goes by old tech goes out the house and new tech comes in. Humans are all about Innovation and changing, this is what makes us progress forward instead of backwards. This means that even security needs some updating. a good example of this would be if you had a million dollars in your car and people knew this. the only person guarding it is a old security official in his mid 50′s or, would you [reffer a young security officer at 25-30 years old at the peak of his experience and in great shape. I can guarantee hands down you want the best for your security. With the internet, there are a lot of issues with security. This means your little web-page can get attacked by anyone in the world.

PCI DSS on web-pages, you may be asked to fill out some SAQ forms “Self Assessment Questionnaire.” Now as an E-commerce merchant you will have to focus on one of two forms. SAQ-A or SAQ-D. The last letters determine the extensiveness of your security documentation. The higher the letter grade the longer it will be. So lets go ahead and go through what makes your life easy and what does not.

So the “D” form, this form is very extensive, your normally going to fill this form out if your e-commerce page has its own check out, and collects the credit card data on your web-page. Now I know this may be confusing, why would anyone else ever want to forward there customers to input their data on someone other persons page? Well, this is a business practice that even E-bay does. Ebay uses paypal, we all know it as the company that handles secure online payments and buys out other smaller franchises that do the same. Now If you dont forward your clients to paypal, cybersource, etc… this means that your web-page handles the security of every in individuals credit card numbers and the transmission to the bank for authorization. This would be cheaper if your a big company but more expensive if your small.

If you do handle the transmission and collecting, some of the things that may be covered is that you will have to have a SSL certificate on your web-page to ensure that your on a secure connection, you will have to encrypt every piece of transmitted data with the newest in tech standards. This is expensive for a mom and pop shop and makes it near impossible for them to move onto online business. So if your in that situation you may want to consider paying someone to take care of the security. This is not as expensive as you think. Pay-pal has this feature and it can actually be integrated with your shopping cart or any system you have. Pay-pal has the best support i have worked with, they are also one of web dev’s favorite choices in e-commerce check outs.

If you choose to let a third-party deal with your credit card data transmission its the easiest way to make sure that the credit card data is not lost and also not your problem if something does happen. When you use a third party you will be filling out SAQ-A which is roughly about 20 questions.

So whats the difference and why should i choose one over the other?

Small business’s should stick to using a third party to handle this unless they can afford to keep up with SSL certificate costs, Web devloper costs, as well as costs with a Server host that will host that data under the “Data Security Standards”

When your business is growing and going you start to branch out to a franchise, I would recommend having all the of the security done by your company that way you can give the franchisee the ability to sell online as well depending on what you are selling as a service or a product.

SAQ-A form is about 20 questions, not technical at all.

SAQ-D is about 200 questions very technical

Overall think about what you are getting your self into when you decide to open a business online, understand the risks and appropriate fees the banks and other service providers will charge. If this is something you can get past than please progress into the exciting world of E-commerce business.

-regards Tin the mater of disaster Nguyen.

Wikipedia’s definition of Content Management System.

A content management system (CMS) is the collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based. The procedures are designed to do the following:

• Allow for a large number of people to contribute to and share stored data
• Control access to data, based on user roles (defining which information users or user groups can view, edit, publish, etc.)
• Aid in easy storage and retrieval of data
• Reduce repetitive duplicate input
• Improve the ease of report writing
• Improve communication between users

In a CMS, data can be defined as nearly anything: documents, movies, pictures, phone numbers, scientific data, and so forth. CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, revising, semantically enriching, and publishing documentation. Serving as a central repository, the CMS increases the version level of new updates to an already existing file. Version control is one of the primary advantages of a CMS.

Popular CMS’s – Joomla, WordPress, Drupal

Why?

 Spending on E-commerce keeps breaking records.

A record-breaking $43 billion was transacted online during the final quarter of last year in the US, new figures released by comScore have revealed.

The global analytics company revealed that this meant that e-commerce spending in the country was up by 11 per cent compared to the same period of 2009 and was the fifth consecutive quarter of year-on-year growth.

Among the best-performing products were computer software, consumer electronics, books and magazines computers/peripherals/PDAs and toys and hobbies, the firm revealed.

comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni explained that the impressive growth in e-commerce sales was a result of improving sentiment among consumers and strong discounting and promotional activity on the part of retailers.

“The 2010 holiday season saw the first billion-dollar day on record and several more surpassing $900 million to help propel Q4 to record spending levels,” he added.

“We anticipate that the progress we’ve seen in the past year as we climbed out of the recession will continue with sustained double-digit growth rates in 2011.”

by Rachel Wheeler

http://www.qas.com/company/data-quality-news/us_sees_strong_q4_2010_e_commerce_spending_6899.htm

Which means?

The market remains strong and growing even through this unstable economy which proves that if other segments of the economy continue to suffer, e-commerce won’t.

Perhaps the most daunting part of running an e-commerce business is getting online in the first place. You know what products you plan to sell, but the Website, the payment setup the tools etc.? These are the things that stop some would-be entrepreneurs in their tracks.   

Fortunately, you don’t have this problem, [nwp] Fraternity Members are here at your disposal.

What else?

Blogs

It’s very cost effective (depends on your value of time vs money) form of marketing.  If that’s not a reason enough here are 5 more reasons why blogging is important

• Search engine optimization to get found
• Lifestyle content that hooks readers
• Education to get the sale
• Humanizing the company for stronger relationships
• Get valuable feedback for better sales

Design

Not only is social media, SEO and blogging important to marketing the design and representation of your product is equally as important.  A few pointers:

• Call to action has to be clear -  The user has to easily understand what actions they must take in order to continue to the ultimate goal, a purchase. Visual manipulation is key.
• Provide helpful product description in bullet points.  Sizzle products to persuade users into purchases. Listed bullet points to highlighted features of your product
• Use good quality product images. Makes sense
• Use a simple layout. Having product images on the left and description on the right.
• No lengthy pages.  Users will hardly ever read everything you provide on a page. Similar to readers of this post are skimming through.  Products at the bottom of the page that need to be scrolled down to view more than likely won’t be viewed.

Social media

HubSpot presented 4 ways Amazon’s New Facebook Integration Impacts eCommerce. I’ve pasted them here.

1. More Purchases Due to Mid-Transaction Influences – The physical presence of your friends and family when you’re deciding whether or not to go through with a purchase can have a huge influence on the ultimate decision. “Just get it”, “you should buy this” and “I want one” are common phrases when shopping with friends.  Now products on Amazon will include your Facebook friends who are also interested in that item, giving you that little push to proceed to checkout
2. Exposure to New Products – New products are being released every day and it’s hard to keep up with. By digging into your profile Amazon can recommend products to you every time you shop in their store. Undoubtedly many of these suggestions will involve products you haven’t heard about or that you had previously never considered purchasing until then.
3. Increases Purchases During Holidays and Birthdays – At one point or another we’ve struggled with finding the perfect gift for a loved one or friend during those special times of the year. Amazon’s ability to suggest gifts for friends and family will help take the pressure off consumers by providing viable answers to the burning question of what to get them.
4. Social Incentives to Purchase - Wanting new and better things others already have is a powerful factor in purchasing behavior. Many of us want the latest and greatest and this desire increases when the people we know have it. The ability to see your Facebook connection’s Amazon Wish Lists will push consumers purchases to not only get the desired product but also “keep up with the Jones’”.

Are you ready to begin an eCommerce adventure? Contact us.

 info@newwebprojects.net

1. Installed plugin here (follow install instructions, don’t forget to create page and insert “[ mingleforum ]” (no quotes or spaces))

2. To edit the default template of mingle forum You’ll have to go open wp-content/plugins/mingle-forum/wpf.class.php
a) Footer Mingle Forum by cartpauj Version 1.0.28.2 can be edited on line 1293 $this->0 is being built to populate the html
b) Note that if you’re wanting to build a custom skin for this forum it’s recommended to upload files to mingle-skins

3. When users register, they create login to the entire site. I customized the dashboard to limit the users access to the site. To do this I had to edit wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php, this is just an immediate hack which affects the Super Admin if not done correctly. I coded an exception to determine if the user is a subscriber (which forum registers you as) or admin

Now at the moment, when you navigate yourself to the Portfolio Section, you will only see developments I personally have done, so please pay attention to the time-stamp of this post because the idea is to bring other developers portfolios to the site. Why? To be blunt, the intent is to bring in quality links and content to the website. seo tip. Other developers portfolios will be integrated in a way that gives ability to pull in and demonstrate their different skill sets here.

Networking.

There will be future posts describing the development process of this new idea/feature.

So, for now, please enjoy my personal portfolio, and I invite you to come back and check out the progress.

1.    Download here installation is pretty well explained

2.    Select Theme here these are free themes that can be customized to your liking.  You’ll need to download desired themes to the wp-content/themes/ directory of wherever you download worpress. To activate,  login to your admin go to appearance and activate the theme you uploaded

3.  If you hadn’t created a sub-title during your installation, you’ll notice a subtitle ‘Just another WordPress site’, it took me a while to find where this was coming from. To change this, you’ll have to login to your account (site-domain.com/wp-admin) and go to settings and edit your ‘tagline’.

4.  To customize your sidebar, where it has your ‘Recent Posts Recent Comments Archives Categories’ you’ll have to open sidebar.php which is found in wp-content/themes/(name-of-theme-usually/  I didn’t want to show Meta, Archives,Comments or recent posts, so I had commented out lines that instantiated these calls.  Make sure you’re removing complete html tags so you don’t break the template design.

5.  The footer can be edited and customized in the same directory you found sidebar.php and is called footer.php

6.  When logged in, I wanted to strip wordpress from header and footer. These files are found in wp-admin directory and the files are called admin-header.php admin-footer.php

7.  When users register, I wanted to replace WordPress Logo with mine. This can be done by editing wp-login.php which is in the root directory you chose.

8.  When users register, they get emailed a password, and the email says its from wordpress, I want this email to say it’s from new web projects so I edited pluggable.php which is found in wp-includes/ and changed lines 375 and 391