Blog General
Exporting orders from Magento to OrangeLeap MPX
Written by Jase Clamp Tuesday, 22 June 2010 19:00
Some of our non-profit clients use a customer relationship management system called MPX by Orange Leap. The software is mainly used to process incoming orders and donations. Many of those same clients also use Magento for their online shopping cart. The challenge is how to export orders from Magento and into MPX. MPX has a custom CSV format called "TI." Basically orders are split up into at least five different CSV files that are all linked together by order numbers. The files are basically:
- Master order file
- Details (products per order)
- Telephone numbers
- Email addresses
- Magazine/newsletter subscriptions
At first we thought we would have to custom script a solution that would either pull orders direct from the MySQL database that Magento runs on or pull orders via Magento's API. We spent months working on this approach and basically got it working. We felt the time investment was quite high though. That is when I found a Magento extension called Xtento Order Export Module. This module promised to be able to export orders in any format you could want. The price is $250. After all the time we'd spent trying to do it manually, I figured this was a pretty fair deal.
A guide to church audio or video streaming
Written by Jase Clamp Monday, 21 June 2010 19:00
Many churches now want to live stream their service audio and/or video on the web. I think thats great, the more Biblical content on the web, the better. I recently helped my church foray into this territory and figured I would write up the lessons that we learned. It can be difficult to know where to start.
Windows Media Encoder
I think our first attempt was using Windows Media Encoder. I'm not sure our attempt worked although I'm sure it could be made to. The basic methodology is: you'd plug a camera into the computer (either via Firewire or a video capture card) and then run media encoder. You'd find out your public IP address by going to http://whatismyip.org/. Then, after ensuring the right ports are open, you'd give people a link to your IP. The problem with WME is that it requires Windows Media PLAYER to work. Most people have that but many people use a Mac or just may not have access to the software.
Ustream free but not good quality
Our next try was using Ustream.tv. This was pretty cool. Ustream is free. All you have to do is go to their website and literally start streaming. We used this for a few months. The problems we started having however revolved around the concept "you get what you pay for." We were getting reports of the stream hanging, cutting out or looking very low quality. We knew we had to find another solution.
Diagnosing a domain (web address) for potential problems
Written by Jase Clamp Saturday, 19 June 2010 13:57
This is an article that anyone who owns a website would benefit from reading. It's a very basic approach to understanding how domains work and diagnosing problems with them. When ever anyone calls me with a domain problem, the first thing I do is type in this address:
www.whois.sc/thedomainname.com
Now of course, you replace the domain name after the "/" with the actual domain name you're wanting to check.
So you can try it for our domain: http://www.whois.sc/winworld.com
Ask some questions:
1. Who owns this domain?
What happened to Extreme Exposure Media?
Written by Jase Clamp Friday, 18 June 2010 13:18
Back in April of 2009, Extreme Exposure Media (EEM) and WinWorld merged to form one mega web development company. It seems like just yesterday that "tax day" for 2010 passed us again. That marked our one year anniversary of the merger. I thought I'd write a bit of a review, covering how things have gone.
EEM's History leading to the merger
I remember back when EEM started in Bridgewater, VA. We started it in my brother Edwin's apartment. Those were humble beginnings. At the start our portfolio of offerings were fairly broad. We included video media as well as web. I suppose we wanted to see where the market would take us, but our concentration initially was more on the video side. I suppose that is why our logo had a shutter in it, that was how things started.
It was quite ironic that one of our first web opportunities, we actually collaborated with WinWorld on. We were just getting into web around 2003. I had seen some of WinWorld's work and always really admired it. I also admired how their values, brand and clientele seemed to mix together pretty clearly. The opportunity was a church website so we decided to tag team with Byron Winters of WinWorld on that opportunity. They had many sites like this already. I really enjoyed talking with Byron about this opportunity and I thought their sales process and documentation was very well put together.
EEM continued to grow rapidly after that. We moved out to some office space in Elkton, Virginia and then into some larger space in Harrisonburg. Our projects were mainly surrounding web/digital marketing. Our clientele were mainly small businesses.
In late 2008, Byron called me up out of the blue and we got to talking. What we figured out was that since 2003, both of our companies had followed such similar paths. We'd had the same type of growth, we'd had the same type of struggles with assembling systems to organize our growth. We talked more, got together a few times, talked even further. We decided that with so much in common it would really make sense to join forces.
Where we are now...
Landing Pages
Written by Jase Clamp Wednesday, 16 June 2010 19:00
A landing page is the first page a user hits, either from an ad or from following a main link (which could also be an ad) from the front page of a website.
Here's an example. Recently I setup a Yellow Pages ad for a client. We didn't run the ad because of the exceptional value, we ran it because we wanted to really know the truth about Yellow Pages, and whether the ad would really bring a profit.
To determine this, we setup a special offer on the ad. Folks looking at the ad either have to call a special number (with tracking built in) to get the deal or they have to visit a special page on the company's website. We set it up so it's something easy to remember like theircompany.com/yp. The YP ofcourse is an acronym for Yellow Pages. The important thing is 1)We're tracking hits to that page and 2) We're tracking conversions.
A conversion is when someone not only engages your ad, visiting your site, but also buys. With Google Adwords for example, it will track that person for up to a month so that if they come back to the site later and buy, it still records them as a conversion.
The way we're tracking conversions for this client is, the person making the purchase either has to select or mention this special deal. At the end of the year, we will be able to see the number of hits on the ad (calls and visits to the special landing page) as well as the number of conversions. Our hope is that it will show the ad paid for itself and also yielded a decent profit. I will post my findings on here.
Yellow pages, lets see what you're made of. Landing pages are good for more than just tracking however, many companies really focus closely on optimizing the layout of their landing pages so that they can increase their conversion rate. They will do this thing called A/B testing. Basically what this is is if you put the big "buy now" button in the lower left for some folks and you put it in the upper right for others, if the later buys more, that is considered a better optimization. I really love this stuff (read more).
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