Category Archives: Blog

Speed up your X-cart site!

Many X-cart sites that have been around a while start to get slower and slower. This is especially true if you have the Advanced Statistics module on. This module is required to be on for the bestsellers module to work. The good news is, there’s usually a really easy quick fix for speeding up your X-cart site! We have a free module that you can upload and either run manually or set it up as a cron (ask your host how to do this if you don’t know how). We’ve been using this free module for years for all of our hosted customers that need extra speed. Check out our FREE Clean Stats mod for X-cart!

The module simply cleans out the xcart_stats tables that you don’t need for bestsellers to work. Many people do not use the data in these because they have better analytics when using Google Analytics or something similar. For larger or order sites, these tables just keep getting bigger and bigger, eventually getting millions of rows of data in them. When a user browses the site, a new row is entered. In simple terms, if you have too many rows then this will slow down the site to insert a new row.

Some sites need more work to speed them up than this but many times this is all that is needed! Contact Us if you need more X-cart Speed help!

Athens Chamber of Commerce Biz Fair

Brandon & Stacy had the opportunity to attend the Athens Chamber of Commerce Biz Fair today. Had a great time mingling with the other great businesses in Athens County. Here’s a pic of our table…we love our personalized letter openers that we handed out to attendees. Thanks Dave at ZONEZ for helping us order these and getting them here on-time for the event!!

Biz Fair 2012

Authorize.net DPM now available in the Point of Sale!

We just released today an update to our ever popular Point of Sale system. The Authorize.net DPM solution is now available in the Point of Sale system if you have the DPM module installed!

If you already have the Point of Sale system and would like to update your software to include the DPM support, drop us an email and we’ll see if you qualify for a free upgrade.

The Authorize.net DPM module is a very popular payment gateway choice that runs on top of your existing Authorize.net AIM solution. It helps get you closer to PCI compliance than using regular Authorize.net. It has been the choice of many X-cart clients with the new PCI standards that came out in July of 2010.

X-Cart 4.4.5 Released!

On Jan 25th, X-cart released the latest version of the 4.4.x branch. 4.4.5 is now available for download. If you downloaded it prior to January 30th, you will want to re-download it as they found a bug and updated the version with the fix for it. You can view more details and a change log on this X-cart Forum thread.

Many clients are taking advantage of the latest release and are upgrading their old X-cart stores. Feel free to use our Free Quote form to send us an upgrade request. We’ve been performing X-cart upgrades since 2004 and have upgraded from simple to very complex and very customized X-cart sites.

Thanking Customers for their Business

I recently read an article that suggested an interesting way to thank our customers for their business and thought you might benefit from it as well. If you are an ecommerce business and ship goods to a customer, how about including a personalized thank you on company letterhead within the shipment itself? Tap into the resources you have on hand to personalize the letter and add the shipment date. Encourage the customer to contact you with any feedback they may have and use an actual signature from a staff member. Customer service goes a long way and this is just one example of how you can differentiate yourself from the competitor. The complete article can be viewed here

Whoa What happened to the lights??

Nothing spices up a rainy Monday morning like a major power outage, but our backup power sources held us until the generator kicked in. The power is back on now and thanks to our foresight in preparing for just such an emergency, we hardly missed a beat! Nice to see all of our prep and research in disaster recovery and business continuance pays off if it is ever needed. It’s important to plan ahead for the unexpected so a small blip on the radar doesn’t turn into a very very bad day! Strong storms predicted for much of today, be safe wherever it is you may be roaming…

Sitepoint’s 10 Web Predictions for 2012

While reading through sites I use to keep up-to-date, I found this interesting article. In it there are the 10 web predictions for 2012 from Sitepoint. I’m all for #9, the dying of IE6! It’s notorious for causing us and our clients so much issues with compatibility with new web technology.

I also found #3 interesting. I have been personally been using Windows phones for many many years now. Before ‘smart phones’ were called smart phones! I still have a windows phone today and love it.

Check out the full article below. It’s an interesting quick read!
10 web predictions for 2012

Vision Statement

The vision statement has been stuck in Carrie’s head for over 9 years. We finally have documented it officially.

“Providing customers with the proper resources to help their business succeed.”

Ever since 2002, when Brandon and Carrie came up with the idea of a shared company, their goal was to help others. With this vision in mind, they found that Carrie’s natural ability to program on the web was a perfect fit to helping small local businesses get their web presence online using a shopping cart called X-cart. Ever since then, BCSE has worked to help any an all customers, no matter what their size be successful via their pre-built modules, custom services and hosting.

Ring in the New Year with PCI compliance!

Ring in the New Year with $20 off of our Authorize.net DPM module!! Utilize our Authorize.net DPM module with your AIM account to support you to be PCI Compliant including the new PA/DSS standard! Our Holiday present to you $20 off of our Authorize.net DPM module!! Hurry! Sale ends January 16th!