SEO friendly permanent redirects
You have always been able to set up redirects in your easywebstore admin area ("admin home" > "package and payment details" > "Sub Domains / Redirect Manager").
You could always do this on subdomains, for example you could automatically redirect the friendly "specialoffers.mystore.com" to a less friendly "www.mystore.com/special-offers_123X". You could also redirect any pages within your store to a new or different page but you can now add redirects on static pages (.htm files) even if they do not exist. This is useful if you are migrating a site into easywebstore and you want to preserve any inbound links for SEO reasons, or indeed just to improve the user experience for your customer and visitors.
Free Google Adwords voucher / coupon
It looks like Google are giving away free Adwords spend via the link below. They do this from time to time so be quick as the offer could expire at any time.
For a free £30 Adwords voucher try the link below:
http://services.google.com/marketing/links/advertising-freetest
How to improve sales by making the most of your product images
Product images are a key part of your product descriptions (your descriptions themselves should be as detailed and comprehensive as possible). Each product should have at least one good quality image large enough to make out the product detail.
EasyWebstore has always automatically resized product images to appropriate and consistent image sizes and we have always allowed for the larger and original image sizes to be shown if requested by the customer.
We recently improved the way these images are shown by using the excellent lightbox 2 script (examples here). Of course there is nothing you need to do to enable this on your store all the technical details are taken care of by us as ever. Your customers will now see your product images displayed in a more professional manor without requiring any popup windows be shown.
EasyWebstore product code changes
Some modifications have been made to the system today that make it a requirement that all products have unique products codes. The main reason for this change was to resolve bugs and problems in the content downloader / uploader and in related product functionality.
The only changes most merchants will notice is that when adding or modifying products the product code box will need to be filled in (if left blank the system will auto generate a code for you). It is still up to the merchant to choose if the codes are used on the website and visible to their customers (the default is to hide the codes).
Some merchants had some blank or duplicate product codes for existing products and we had to correct those automatically when we put this change live. To do this we appended a unique part to the end of the existing code in a minority of cases.
Reports of scams via merchants using our system and the importance of staying safe when shopping online
We have been receiving many queries relating to a site hosted on our systems (the address of the site is http://www.cheaper4you.com/).
It would appear from some postings on the internet and from some communications we have had via phone, email and online chat that this may be a scam site of some kind.
We have attempted to contact the merchant and understand that their site is currently unable to take orders at this time as the card processor (WorldPay) may have suspended the processing functionality therefore the merchant is at this time unable to process further orders.
EasyWebstore is not affiliated with this merchant in any way and we have many hundreds of UK customers running successful online businesses using our ecommerce software. We would of course comply with any legal request and cooperate with any authority or investigation if required by law to do so.
I must emphasize that at this time we have no reason to suspect that this merchant is not running a legitimate business however we make no recommendations and are not affiliated with any merchant other than supplying the customer with a hosting facility.
We sympathise with the many people who have been posting messages on forums around the internet who are expressing fear that they may have lost money purchasing from this site. If anyone has any suggestions of what we could do to help please direct your communication to this thread on our forums as we would very much like to hear your views. A member of our team will check the forum from time to time and may post if they can reply to any questions.
You may also like to review our page on how to stay safe shopping online.
