Archives For e-commerce

Consider, dear Reader, a long-winded story about a man smitten by the gods of travel. I arrived at my hotel in Istanbul at 3:30am, 10 hours before I was to speak at the e-commerce expo, and without my one piece of luggage. The mechanics of how I got to this place have already made their way onto Twitter and Facebook, but how the glamour and excitement of traveling half-way across the world to speak can be tainted by the harsh realities of modern travel is another story in itself.

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Okay, it’s a plane. Right now, depending upon when “now” is for you, I’m on my way to Istanbul, Turkey, from State College, PA, to Washington Dulles, through Frankfort, Germany. I’m traveling there to speak at the E-commerce Expo on Wednesday, May 30th. My presentation is titled “Building a Successful E-commerce Venture, or Failing Gracefully”. When I’m done, I’ll be certain to share my experience, but for the week while I’m traveling, I won’t be too good about replying to emails, forum postings, and blog comments. Which is to say, I won’t be doing those things because, as much as I can, I’m going to be touring Istanbul!

On May 30, 2012, I’ll be speaking at the e-Commerce Conference and Expo in Istanbul, Turkey (note: the linked site is in Turkish, but if you view it in Google Chrome, for example, it will translate the pages for you). This is a one-day event, from 9:30 am until 5:00 pm. From 1:40 to 2:25, I’ll be presenting “Creating a Successful E-commerce Venture, or Failing Gracefully” as the conference’s technology session. At the end of this post is the presentation’s description.

If you’re in Turkey specifically, or nearby, I’d recommend you attend. And if anyone has any recommendations as to what I should do while I’m in Istanbul, please let me know!

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In Part 3 of my “[intlink id=”1578″ type=”page”]Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL[/intlink]” book, I use Authorize.net to process payments for a site that sells physical goods. Authorize.net accepts credit cards and can be directly integrated into your site, so that the customer never leaves (unlike, for example, PayPal’s Website Payments Standard, used in Part 2 of the book, which goes through PayPal’s site). The code in the book was written in a very modular style, with the intent that you can use the components you need, and swap others in and out. A reader specifically wanted to know how you would use PayPal’s Website Payments Pro instead of Authorize.net, and that’s what I’ll explain here. Continue Reading…

Top 100 E-Commerce Tips

February 3, 2012

I just recently came across this somewhat old post titled Top 100 E-commerce Tips from WebmasterWorld. Despite the fact that the article was published over four years ago, and it’s based upon a slightly older forum thread, there’s still a lot of material in the article worth reading if you do any e-commerce. Even though there are a full 100 tips here, they’re short—most are just a single sentence—and quite valid. Admittedly, I disagree with a couple, and feel like a few could be tossed out, but there are many good points made, and many reminders of things that perhaps you’ve forgotten to emphasize on your most recent e-commerce. project.