Category Archives: Ecommerce

PayPal Integrations at BCS Engineering

The Faster, Safer Way to get Paid!

We’ve been using PayPal since 2000 and want to let our customers know that it’s one of the best payment methods available! Great customer service for the merchant and the customer, as well as safe transactions, are key to your business success!

How can we help with PayPal?

Why is PayPal great?

  • Customers do not have to post financial information to you to get paid
  • Merchants can easily see if a person is a Verified PayPal account holder
  • Protects you against fraud

Contact us now for help setting up the faster and safer way to get paid!

This entry was posted in Blog, Ecommerce, Magento, X-Cart on by .

Heartbleed Bug – Critical OpenSSL Security Flaw

A very serious OpenSSL security flaw, known as the Heartbleed bug, has recently been discovered simultaneously by two different teams of security experts. The bug is a serious vulnerability in the encryption technology used throughout most of the Internet and the bug has been around since 2012!

Does this affect me?
The answer is, it depends. If you are hosted with us, then no, you were never affected by this bug. We have never used an OpenSSL version that includes this vulnerability on any of our hosted servers. If you are hosted somewhere else, you need to check with your host and insist that they fix this if needed. It is extremely important that you check with your host and make sure they fix the bug!

Do you have more technical details?
This website gives a great overview of the technical details surrounding this bug: http://heartbleed.com/

This entry was posted in Blog, Ecommerce, Magento, X-Cart on by .

Revamping X-cart Customer Reward Points!

10 years ago in November is when we released what became our flagship product! I can’t believe it’s been that long already! Time has flown by and it’s well past due a complete overhaul!

This year we’ll be releasing a major update to our infamous X-cart Customer Reward Points module and we need your help! We have molded it and changed it along the way based upon customer feedback and we want to make the new version even better than before! Contact Us to make your suggestion and be eligible for a FREE software upgrade to the latest version! We’re looking to get all requests by March 15th, 2014.

This entry was posted in Blog, Ecommerce, X-Cart on by .

Authorize.net CIM for Magento

Our Authorize.net CIM for X-cart has been so popular we created an Authorize.net CIM for Magento as well! We saw the need for a good, flexible CIM module for Magento and extended our knowledge of creating it for X-cart and created it for Magento too.

With our Magento CIM module you can have even more flexibility to allow the customer to opt out of storing their credit card. You can use their PA-DSS compliant iframe or their standard on-site payment form. It also works with Magento’s One Page Checkout and their Multi-step Checkout!

Check out the screen shots for our Authorize.net CIM Magento Module on our sister site and full feature list!

Don’t have Authorize.net yet?

This entry was posted in Blog, Ecommerce, Magento on by .

Responsive Design vs Mobile Design

We get asked many times whether to go with a Mobile design or Responsive design. The simple answer is: “It depends.”

When to go with a Mobile design for your eCommerce store.

We find it’s most economical to go with a mobile design for your eCommerce store when you already have an established store and aren’t currently wanting to upgrade or redo the look of the store. With our Mobile Module for X-cart we can customize the look to match your current current X-cart store.

When to go with a Responsive design for your eCommerce store.

We find it’s most economical to go with a responsive design for your eCommerce store when you are wanting to redo the look and feel and/or are upgrading your website. This makes it the easiest and most efficient way to get a responsive design by coding the template to be responsive from the start. It can be very inefficient to translate an existing code and CSS set into a responsive framework. So this is best done when you are already creating a new fresh look. We feel currently that responsive is the way to go in general because you then have only one set of files, css, etc to change if you want to change some items on your site. But it’s best to switch to responsive when creating a new look or upgrading.

Check out our new Magento Store which gives you a sneak peek at the new design coming to BCSE as well as our work making a responsive template!

What about SEO, is Mobile or Responsive better?

It really just depends on doing the one you pick well! If either is done well, then it will work well for SEO. Google for example recognizes both types of mobile design solutions. There is even a recent article about Google’s Matt Cutts answering these questions. You can read the full article here.

Contact Us to see how we can help your business become mobile ready!

This entry was posted in Blog, Ecommerce, Magento, X-Cart on by .

Password Strength

Many of us at BCSE enjoy xkcd’s comics (www.xkcd.com) since most of the time they are technical and thought provoking in nature. There is one particular comic though that really stood out to us to be very true and highly useful for ecommerce and password strength. We felt it was so good at helping customers create better passwords that we would write about it here.

Too many times we find customers give us passwords that are even more insecure than their example. So try to keep this theory in mind when creating your passwords and remember to rotate your passwords every month or so! Computers are getting extremely good at brute force guessing of passwords.

This entry was posted in Around the Office, Blog, Ecommerce on by .

HootSuite has helped us Streamline our Processes

Social media has so many outlets that it can be quite time consuming and difficult to determine if all of the time is really worth the effort! We’ve been using HootSuite for under a month and have already seen over a 10% increase in followers and a marked increase in retweets, likes, viewings and comments. This great tool has dramatically cut down the time it takes to post to social media outlets while providing us the metrics and industry information that we need to keep our business at the top of our game. Being a small business requires that we be as efficient as possible with our business processes. We realize that many of our customers are small businesses too without the resources to keep up to date with marketing via social media. We wanted to share our success story with the hope that this may work for you plus increase your business and exposure as well!
HootSuite: Social Media Dashboard

Update!

November 7, 2013
Over 3 months later and HootSuite is still helping us increase our followers and saving us time. It has been well worth the less than $10 a month! It’s been a great investment for us! We’re encouraging all of our clients to use it as well!

This entry was posted in Around the Office, Blog, Ecommerce on by .

Customers Don’t want Ads, They Want A Conversation

Marketing is moving towards a dialogue between buyers and sellers. Instead of marketing “at” your customers, it’s become more effective to market “with” your customers. Today, the companies that win are closest to those who buy, use, and advocate for their products. The five trends demonstrating a shift to collaborative marketing will create the biggest changes and ultimately offer the most significant rewards for marketers can be found by reading the article.

This entry was posted in Around the Office, Blog, Ecommerce on by .