Exclusive Concepts Blog » Herb

Daily Deal Bar – Schedule by hour of day

Herb — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:53:14 +0000

You can now schedule your deals by the hour. That means you can have the Daily Deal Bar from Conversions On Demand promote a new deal multiple times during any day. We have updated out calendar widget to allow you to select a specific hour on a specific date for your deal to run. Remember, all scheduling is based on the US East Coast time zone.

The Cart Closer – Minimum Cart Value

Herb — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:52:57 +0000

We have added a new feature to The Cart Closer from Conversions On Demand that allows you to specify the minimum cart value (not including shipping and tax) that will determine whether The Cart Closer will trigger. If you specify zero or leave this field blank then The Cart Closer triggers without regard to the cart value. If you want to use a Minimum Cart Value then just enter an unsigned number without a dollar sign.

The Cart Closer Gets Even Better

Herb — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:14:39 +0000

We’ve listened to feedback from our users and have added several new features to The Cart Closer.

Coupon Codes Can Now Be Modified
You can now modify the coupons used for The Cart Closer. For the near future we still use the coupon codes to track revenues so we still have a minor limitation that any coupon used must begin with “cod-”. But, in the near future we will modify the way we do tracking so even this limitation will disappear.

Return Visits
Previously we would only display The Cart Closer pop-up once to any shopper. This was “hard-coded” in the system so as to prevent savvy shoppers from taking advantage of the offer on every visit. We also felt that the pop-up could get annoying if it was too persistent. While we still think that these are good reasons to limit The Cart Closer from always being triggered, we have now added a feature which gives you the ability to specify how many return visits you wish to enable.

These new features demonstrate that we are listening to our users needs for increased control and flexibility. We are serious about our promise of “The Power You Need. The Control You Desire.”

Visit Conversions On Demand to learn more about The Cart Closer.

New Conversions On Demand Website launched

Herb — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:00:44 +0000

Conversions On Demand now has it’s own website. This will become the home for all our future marketing and educational initiatives for Conversions On Demand. We’ve included a convenient login so that you can bookmark this location and make it your destination for all things “COD.”

We’re very excited about the official launch of Conversions On Demand as a free standing software as a service offering. We have big plans for new services and encourage you to provide us ideas for enhancements to our existing services (Daily Deal Bar, Peel Away Ads, and The Cart Closer) or for new ways we can help improve conversions and revenues for your store. Thanks for being a part of the launch of Conversions On Demand.

New look, new features and simpler pricing…

Herb — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:37:05 +0000

We have made a number of changes to Conversion On Demand today. The most obvious is the new look of our menu system. We have organized the various links into a more logical “tree” structure. This should make it easier for you to locate what you need and keep clutter to a minimum.

We have also added a Peel Away Ads capability, that is available for no extra cost to our Daily Deal Bar users. You’ll see this as a separately available service but it’s already available to your store. Just upload the necessary images and turn the display status on. If you would like our partner EY Studios to create custom designed images for use with the Peel Away Ads please just send me an email.

Finally, we have simplified our pricing and capped the high end. You can see the details on the “My Account > Pricing” section in Global Settings.

By the way, you’ll see a discussion there of a soon to be announced new Conversions On Demand service called “The Cart Closer.” This is an exciting new capability we will be announcing very shortly that will help you boost sales revenues. We have seen great results from our test stores and will be rolling it out soon to everyone.

The New Conversions On Demand Communications Center

Herb — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:25:35 +0000

Today we are introducing our new Communications Center. Our goal is to provide you with relevant and timely information related to the Conversion On Demand platform as well as our service offerings. The Communications Center is now your new “home” page when you sign in. We’ll be updating it regularly to keep you informed as well as providing links to articles that may be of interest. We hope you find the new Conversions On Demand Communication Center a valuable addition.

Some of the key features of our Communications Center are:

New Feature Announcements
System Alerts related to our software and services
A general announcement area for message of interest to the community
Links to our most recent articles on SEO, PPC, Conversion Optimization and Email Marketing

Google to end support for IE6

Herb — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:37:20 +0000

The bane of every web developers existence has been ensuring that websites operate properly in all the major browsers.The browser that creates most problems (by far) has been Internet Explorer 6. Why? Because it does a poor job of supporting HTML and CSS standards. While we can criticize Microsoft for even releasing a product that is so “proprietary,” they have released multiple replacement versions that do a much better (if not perfect) job of supporting these standards. Unfortunately, too many users haven’t bothered upgrading.

As long as significant numbers of the user community use IE 6 we need to ensure that what we develop will work with this outdated and proprietary browser. We’ve recently done some analysis among a cross section of our clients and found the following browser usage:

Browser Users

IE 8.0      30%
IE 7.0                      29%
firefox       18%
IE 6.0                      11%
Safari Mac        9%

While IE 6 is down to 11%, that’s still too significant a user base to drop support. What will it take for users to finally upgrade? A major player dropping support.

Thankfully, Google has now announced that they are dropping support! Hopefully, this will finally rid us of the ghost of IE 6.

Bring Down IE6

Herb — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:08:49 +0000

Anybody involved in web development can tell you, IE 6 is the bane of our existence. As the grass roots effort to phase out IE 6, Bringdownie6.com says, “Internet Explorer 6 is antiquated, doesn’t support key web standards, and should be phased out.” I estimate that a good 10% of our development resource is wasted trying to make web pages that display properly in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even IE 7, work in IE 6.

Unfortunately we can’t just refuse to support IE 6. We recently did an analysis of browser usage for a number of our ecommerce clients. 30% of their customers are using IE 6 (or older) versions. With that many customers still using this obsolete browser we are obligated to make our clients’ sites work on IE 6. Arghhhh.

What we need is a concerted, grass roots effort to inform these users about the benefits of upgrading, but it will probably take the support of major service providers, like Google, to force the issue. Please join the effort to “bring down IE 6.”