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Monday, December 17, 2012

GTPay Payment Module Integration with your shopping cart

I have created a module to integrate GTPay payment method and Interspire shopping cart.

It works on all versions of Interspire shopping cart.

Contact me if you want to discuss the module in detail.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Interspire Shopping Cart - Using max of coupon discount or discount rules

In Interspire shopping cart; there are various features to provide discounts to customers:

  1. Coupon Codes
  2. Discount Rules
  3. Customer Group Discount
I have worked on a module that checks for the maximum available discount from the above 3 options and applies only the higher discount to the cart. 


It works on all the Interspire themes and very easy to integrate.

Contact here if you want to get this integrated on your site.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Maintenance of your Interspire shopping cart

Interspire has discontinued the following products from July 1st 2012:
  • Interspire Shopping Cart
  • Interspire Knowledge Manager
  • Interspire Website Publisher

If you run a website using Interspire shopping cart and want to continue using the same software, then you can contact me for adding/customizing the features or bug fixing  to your existing site.



Sunday, August 5, 2012

Try out ecommerce store for free for 30 days

Its always a good way to try out your online store for free before deciding on buying it.
Shopify offers a 30 day trial period in which you can try out the platform and see the features available before buying.


Also, there is no need to enter your credit card details for the trial version. Only once you are satisfied with the product and wish to purchase; the credit card details are required.


They offer various plan as per your store requirements.

In all the plans available, there is unlimited bandwidth support. 


If you sell less than 100 products, then you can choose the starter plan; but there are features like discount code coupon engine or real time carrier shipping which are available in other plans.

You can also upgrade, downgrade or cancel the plans anytime. There is no set up fees for any of the available plans.


If you wish to get started with your online store with Shopify, then signup and you are ready with your online store in minutes.


You can also read my post on "Create your online store in minutes"

Friday, August 3, 2012

Create your online store in minutes

Want to sell your products online but don't know how? 

Sign up for Shopify and get started with your online store within minutes.
  • Create your online store for free
  • Try out a demo
  • Reliable Ecommerce hosting service provided
  • Choose from the wide variety of themes or customize an existing theme
  • Add your products and images
  • Shopify integrates with over 50 payment gateways to allow your store to accept credit cards
  • Unlimited bandwidth support included
  • Automatic backup support for your data
  • Includes mobile commerce 
  • Extend the functionality of your online store by choosing from serveral Apps provided
Want to get stated with your store, then sign up here and explore the various features of Shopify

If you need help creating your online store then contact me and I can create it for you.

You can see a demo store as well.


Web server rejects utm_expid

Web server rejects utm_expid
Your server doesnt support added query arguments in urls



If you receive the above message while validating your Google analytics experiment then try to check the following cases:

1) Open the link which shows the error while validating and do "view source". Check if you can locate the experiment code in the file. If yes, then proceed for step 2. If you are not able to see the experiment code then the code is not mentioned at the correct page.


2) Now add some url parameters to the url. Suppose the url that you are trying to validate is "www.testurl.com", then add few parameters in the url like "www.testurl.com?utm_expid=test&utm_referrer=test". Now see if the page is coming up properly and not going to a 404 or page not found error.
Now, do "view source" and check if the experiment code shows up on the same page as well.


I hope the above two cases will help you debug the issue.



Tuesday, July 24, 2012

List of PHP IDE

Here is the list of commonly used PHP IDE:

  1. phpDesigner
  2. PHP Eclipse
  3. Zend Studio
  4. phpEdit
  5. EditPlus
  6. Notepad
  7. Dreamweaver

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Must haves on your online store or ecommerce website

Today,  I am sharing the tips that are required on your online store for increasing your produts visibility. The sales will increase when the probability of your products appearing on search results or visibility of the products are more.


  1. A section of "featured products" must appear on homepage.
  2. Keep changing the products listed on rotation basis to increase product visibility.
  3. Have an "All Products" page where customers can see all the products on a single page. No need to provide pagination. This can be sorted by category or in an alphabetical order.
  4. Compare Prices : provide an option to compare prices of similar products from your website or other related websites.
  5. Easy navigation to go back to search results page.
  6. Easy way of adding multiple products together to the shopping cart.
  7. Product information should be listed in a proper manner.
  8. Highlight the  key specifications and provide all the possible information that may help customers to make their buying decision easier.
  9. Provide an option of contact in case they need any further information for the product before buying.
  10. The product image should be clear and should be same as that of the product being delivered.
  11. The image should not be too heavy to load and provide more (i.e from different angles rear,front etc.) images of the product.
  12. The page should load faster.
If you would like to share some ideas or incorporate the above tips on your ecommerce website or would like to start you own ecommerce website, then contact me for details. 

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Create your Website

Creating a website depends upon a lot of factors and your requirement.
If you want  to create a website with 3-4 basic pages then you can have it setup and going in a day's time. However, if you want a website which involves user interaction or where lots of content will be uploaded on a daily basis then you will have to go for a content management system (CMS).


You can opt for a static website where the content doesn't change frequently, for eg: a website with only few pages such as About Us, Contact Us page.


Step 1: Decide your domain name
Choose a domain name that is related to your business, company name, or that relates to the content of the website. Once you have decided on the name, check if the domain name is available. You can refer godaddy.com for checking website availability.

Step 2: Register your domain name
Once you have finalized the domain name then you will have to register the domain name. Almost every registrar provides this service.

Step 3: Web Hosting
This is where your website will be hosted and your web pages will reside. Here, you can setup your emails and use the services provided by the web hosting company like blogs, forums, chat scripts etc.

Step 4: Start Building
If you have decided to make a statuc website, then only HTML is required. However, if you want to have a blog or content driven website then you will have to use a CMS and supporting technology like PHP/Mysql etc



If you need help or have any questions related to making a website then Contact me and I can answer your queries.



Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Advantages of having your e-commerce website


Ecommerce website or an online store has many advantages. 
  • You can setup your online store quickly and at a very less price compared to the overhead of a brick and mortar store.
  • It can be easily managed from home, office or even while you are travelling.
  • You can reach to millions of customers at once resulting to expanded customer base
  • Since your store is online, it is open 24 x 7 
  • More number of products can be added on the site which is not possible if you have space limitation or a small store.
  • It reduces your advertisement and marketing cost
  • The automation of billing, order details, shipment tracking,customer details reduces both time and personnel required to manage the processes. 
  • You can provide detailed information about the product
The advantages from customer point of view are many:
  • Customers can easily browse the products from anywhere and anytime
  • It saves customer's travel time and cost
  • E commerce facilitates comparison shopping. Customers can compare prices and get the bets deal in lesser time

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Set Cron for a url without using CakePHP cron_dispatcher.php

If you have a url which you want to schedule to run daily, weekly we can use the below command in the control panel cron job settings:

  1. Login to your control panel
  2. Click on Cron Jobs
  3. Add a new cron job
  4. Schedule it for the time you want to run it
  5. In the command tab,  put wget http://cron_url_to_run

Monday, May 14, 2012

Australia Post eParcel Integration module with your shopping cart

Interspire Add on:


I have created a module for Australia Post eParcel and Interspire shopping cart API integration for BigCommerce


It returns a csv/excel files in the format required by Australia Post eParcel  to be submitted into their system.


Contact me if you want to discuss the module in detail.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

BigCommerce API SSL error

While using BigCommerce API  if you are getting the below error:


" Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'BigCommerce_Api_NetworkError' with message 'SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details: error:14090086:SSL "


This is because by default it checks to verify the SSL certificate used by the BigCommerce store.


Adding the below line of code will disable the check.


BigCommerce_Api::verifyPeer(false);



Monday, March 19, 2012

Can't connect to database in Prestashop

If you are trying to setup database details for Prestashop locally and getting the following error:

"Database server was not found. Please verify the login, password and server fields."

Then try replacing localhost with 127.0.0.1 as hostname. This worked for me.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Include file in CakePHP

To include a file in your .ctp files, make the path is given from webroot. So if you have placed your file outside the "app" directory then the path will be set as include("../../file.php");

Monday, March 5, 2012

550 SSL/TLS required on the control channel

When trying to connect through FTP, if you get the following error:

"550 SSL/TLS required on the control channel"

then try adding prefix to the hostname with ftpes://

This worked for me.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Adding additional product attributes to display in Interspire shopping cart

To add additional product attributes in product details page of Interspire shopping cart we need to add an inteface in admin section to enter those details. I tried the following:

  1. Admin Section: code changes
    1. Open admin/templates/product_form.tpl
    2. Add additional fields attribute in html format as required.
    3. In admin/includes/classes/class.product.php, include the post data for inserting into database and add the fields in database as well.
    4. Search for AddProductStep2
    5. Add entry under lib/entities/entity.product.php
Hope this will work for you.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Customer Rewards Point Module for Interspire

This is a very interesting feature to bring customers back to your site. I have worked on a rewards point module for Interspire shopping cart.
It works on all the interspire themes and very easy to integrate.


There are 2 sections in the module:


  • Admin Section
    • Assign points to each product
    • Check the status under Orders tab whether orders are paid or customers have redeemed points against their purchase.
    • Admin can also assign loyalty points to users and assign it to their account
    • Admin can also set the minimum points against every order or amount spent.
  • User Section
    • Users can see the points earned in their My Account section
    • Users can redeem points against products


Contact me if you want to know the module in detail.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Cannot modify header information - headers already sent error

This error ususally comes when we are working with session,cookies,redirects. If you are getting this error then try to follow the below steps to resolve:
  • Session should be started at the begining of the script and it should be written at the very first line.
  • There should not be any white spaces before session_start();
  • If you are using any MVC framework then make sure there are no whitespaces in controller files after the class is closed (after the close php tag " ?> " tag).

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Popular open source shopping carts

Paid Version

  • Interspire
  • Magento
  • X-Cart
  • Free Version
  • ZenCart
  • Oscommerce
  • VirtueMart
  • UberCart
  • WordPress Ecommerce
  • Magento
  • PrestaShop
  • Wednesday, February 8, 2012

    Changing the cart quantity in Interspire Shopping Cart

    The Cart "quantity" dropdown when changed to textbox allows only 2 digits that can be entered. To change this I tried the following:

    1. Open the template folder that is being used. You can check in "Store Design" section of Admin about the template that you are using.
    2. Go to Snippets and open  CartItemQtyText.html file.
    3. Search for "maxlength=" and change the number or remove it.
    4. Save the changes made.
    Please note that the above steps has to be repeated when another template is used.

    Monday, January 23, 2012

    Changing CakePHP sessions settings

    CakePHP manages its session inside CakePHP's /tmp directory. To manage cakephp session in wordpress integration add the following lines at the start of wp-config.php


    $CAKE_SESSION_COOKIE = 'CAKEPHP';
    ini_set('session.name', $CAKE_SESSION_COOKIE);
    ini_set('session.cookie_path','app/tmp');
    session_start();
    ?>




    Integrating wordpress and cakephp

    In one of my recent project I had a task of integrating Cakephp with Wordpress. The content pages had to be in Wordpress and other dynamic features were coming from CakePHP.

    While trying to call Cakephp from wordpress or vice versa I was getting errors like "Fatal error: Cannot redeclare __()". These are mainly because of namespace conflict as Wordpress and Cakephp use some functions with same name.

    CakePHP defines its functions in cake/basics.php. When Wordpress is integrated the file wp-includes/l10n.php gets included and has the same function names which results in fatal error.

    The alternative is to add:

    if ( !function_exists('__') ) :
    // the function
    endif;


    for wordpress functions.

    But I tried a different work around.
    I kept wordpress and app folder of cakephp on root folder. To use same wordpress theme across the website I moved the header and footer.php outside of theme folder and kept in root.
    So that the layout of cakephp also calls same header and footer.

    Then I changed the .htaccess file to handle wordpress and cakephp related links separately.

    This solved the fatal error issue and I was able to use wordpress and cakephp together in my website without any rework.