New Collectorz.com shop page

newshopHere’s something from a project I have been working on off-and-on for the past few months: Rewriting the entire shopping-cart system of the Collectorz.com site.

From the shop, via the upsell interstitial page and the name/address page, to the payment details page and finally the order confirmation page. I have written some new back-end PHP classes and am now rewriting all website pages based on those classes, making the pages more consistent, and more importantly, easier to maintain. Easy maintenance is essential, because I am tweaking these pages quite often.

I have already posted about my upsell interstitial page a while ago, which was the first page I based on the new back-end classes. This long Easter weekend I have completely rewritten the first page of the check-out, the shop page. Continue reading

Simple coupon codes

I was browsing through the orders of the past few days and noticed something interesting in the way our users enter our coupon codes.

You see, all our coupons are always published written in all uppercase, e.g. “CLZTWEETZ”, “GETORGANIZED”, “GOOGLER”, etc… But our order tracking system stores the coupons exactly as entered. And scrolling through this list, I found that for most coupons, users enter them in all lowercase (e.g. as “clztweetz”), indicating that they typed them manually (as opposed to copying/pasting from our emails).

With one exception: the coupon we give to all our trial users: ITRYB4IBUY
Continue reading

RebateDelivery – Mail-In Rebates for online sales

rebatedeliveryAt SIC 2009, Sytske and I talked with the RebateDelivery people, Jason Foodman and Steven Miller.
We have worked with these guys for years, when they were running SwiftCD, so we were curious to hear what they were up to now.

Well, in short, RebateDelivery is a new system for offering Mail-In Rebates for online software purchases. Let’s look at the details of how it works and how to use it to improve sales. Oh, and of course I am running a new A/B split test to find out if it indeed helps to sell more software 🙂
Continue reading

Discount Coupons – how to use them effectively

Discount coupons can be an effective tool to increase your sales and, more importantly, your profits. But how big a discount do you need to give? Should it be a percentage off or a fixed amount? How do people use the coupons? Pass it on the URL? Enter it into a coupon box? Where to put this box? Who do you give the coupons to? And aren’t you loosing revenue because these people pay less for the same stuff?
Continue reading