Can your business compete with Amazon? If your business is like ours, than you probably would agree that it would be impossible to continually match the prices that Amazon offers their items at and also include free shipping.

So what does this have to do with Magento and Amazon Payments or Amazon Seller Account? I’ll explain.

After spending a few hours integrating Amazon Payments with our ecommerce shop I finally pushed the code to production. Everything was running so smooth and our orders we being processed as expected. As the week went on, something unexpected happened. On one of our test orders, we received an email from Amazon with item being recommended as items we would be interested in purchasing because they were related to the items purchased at our ecommerce store.

It turns out that after a customer places and order on your ecommerce site and checks out with amazon payments, that Amazon then uses that information for recommendations.

You may ask what does this mean to you the store owner. Well it’s very simple. The next time that customer visits Amazon; Amazon will make recommendations to that customer which will consist of similar products that they purchased from your site.

Wow what a great idea, recommendations of similar products that they purchased from your site? Hold on, what is the catch here. The catch here is that those recommendations are from the Amazon store and not yours. Get the picture now? Amazon is using your sales info to better position their sales to the potential customer.

We deactivated our Amazon Seller account and closed down our buying accounts with them also. We will do all we can to start supporting our local stores rather from buying from Amazon.

Opal Events coordinates leading pharmaceutical, healthcare and investment management conferences across the United States, Europe and South America. These events provide delegates with the necessary information and networking opportunities to help their business grow in today’s competitive environment.
We will be attending the following conference on June 13-15th 2011

The Business of Cloud Computing
Harnessing the cloud for innovation and growth
 

To see more on this even and who is attending, please visit Opel Events

Spent some time last week doing some updates to our website. We wanted to go with a cleaner look to our site and also optimize it further so that our load times would decrease. Google page speed now rates us at 90 out of 100, so we are getting closer to achieving our goals. Our next task will to work with browser caching, and parsing of JavaScript.

Our website now passes W3C Css and XHTML Validation

UPDATE: April 29 2011

We played around with the caching and also did some image optimizing and were able to bump that score from 90 to 93 out of 100. We will continue until we hit that 100.

The Cloud Culture was a site that we put together for sharing information about Cloud Computing. What is neat about this site is that it is layered on a WordPress back-end and also has a forum integrated. We created a few unique items in this site one of which you have the availability to place any content in a number of places on the site with out having to do any coding. We chose to place advertisements in these areas. Another neat feature is the use of jQuery that can be enabled to do slide shows or ad swapping.

We recently completed a website for a photographer in Denver Colorado. This site has a cms background with a custome skin to match what our customer wanted. We had fun developing this one because we had the chance to play with some PHP glob and directory search.

Check out the site and let us know whay you think.

Are you using a php file that contains just your navigation portion of your website? Do you want to use the active class?
Check out this code

Add this to the top of each page
<?php $page = basename($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']); ?>

Now open up your navigation.php page and tweak the following to fit your navigation pages
  <?php if ($page == ‘PAGE NAME.php) { ?>class=”active”<?php } ?>

 example

<ul>
 <li><a href=”index.php” title=”Welcome page” <?php if ($page == ‘index.php’) { ?>class=”active”<?php } ?>><span>Home</span></a></li>
</ul>

Thats it, now go test away.

Using $_SERVER has it’s positives, but we recomend that you fully understand it and know that using it can open up security holes. Using it as we did above is not a security risk.

We had been using a customized content management system for our website which has worked out perfect for easy management but we wanted to break away from that system and do our own php based site. So after a few days and a few cups of coffee, we have reached that goal and completed phase 1.

Phase 2, we plan to role out our very own blog site using wordpress as the back end and we are going to custom design a theam to run the front end.

Amazing Panes’s website was launched. This site has a custom theme built to use WordPress.