StoreSecured Blog

Recently we have had some merchants asking how to unsubscribe from the feedback forum emails.

To unsubscribe

Go to My Account–>Feature Requests–>Feedback Forum

This will take you to the feedback forum

In the top right look for your name/store name, ie Signed in as x

Click on your name

Uncheck the box next to the emails that you do not wish to receive

Hit submit

There have been some questions lately regarding the new password requirements.  This article is meant to clarify and give recommendations for good passwords.

Password requirements:
Must be at least 7 characters
Must have at least 1 uppercase letter
Must have at least 1 lowercase letter
Must have at least 1 number
Must have at least 1 symbol, such as ` ! ? $ ? % ^ & * ( ) _ – + = { [ } ] : ; @ ‘ ~ # | \ < , > . /
Must not not be one of your previous 4 passwords

Recommendations for passwords
Do not use your name
Do not use your login
Do not use your friend’s name
Do not use your family member’s name
Do not use a dictionary word
Do not use a common name

To see some good examples or for help creating a good password please visit the strong password generator

Did you know that you can edit attributes for an item directly without having to first go to the item edit page?  Go to inventory–>items–>attributes–>view/edit.  You will see a list of all attributes for all of your items, you can then search for attributes of a particular item or a particular option, ie Size, Color, Red, Blue, etc.

The StoreSecured administration application is optimized for the Firefox browser.  We recommend using the Firefox browser when making edits to your store.

1. Optimize all images for the web to a maximum of 90% quality.  This will make the image filesize 50% smaller, load in half the time and take up less bandwidth, all without sacrificing quality or image size.
2. Dont use any special characters.  Use only a-z, 0-9, underscore and dash.  Special characters can cause problems with some older browsers and are not worth the trouble.  It is not a good idea to use spaces, quotes etc in image names.  Use a dashes or underscores instead of spaces in image names.  Ie little-red-wagon.jpg, not little red wagon.jpg
3. Organize images into folders.  This will allow for easier finding of images and later management.  We have found that putting images into folders by department generally works out very well.
4. Use keywords in your image names to help with search engine placement.  A name like little-red-wagon.jpg is much better then 123ABC.jpg and will also help to remember what the image is for.
5. Don’t resize the images on the webpage.  It is better to resize the image before placing it on the webpage as this will ensure that the image loads more quickly.  If you upload a image that is 800×800 pixels and only display it as a 10×10 image it will still take as long to load as if it were displaying at the 800×800 resolution.

Maxmind is a third party tool that is integrated with the StoreSecured and helps to identify and reduce the number of fraudulent transactions that are processed by the store.

The Maxmind service will check a variety of factors and give a score reflecting the likelihood of fraud for that particular transaction.

The following types of checks are done:
Is the user connecting from a high fraud country?
Is the billing address they have entered close to the location they are connecting from?
Is the user using a free email address?
Is the phone number located in the same location as the billing zip code?
And so on….

The cost for this service is $5 a month for up to 1250 queries. We highly recommend that all merchants use this low cost service to reduce the amount of fraud especially for high dollar items. Remember though no service is perfect and this will not 100% reduce your fraud. It is still up to you to decide which transactions to accept and which to deny but it will give you increased information to detect and stop a large majority of fraudulent transactions.

Many merchants ask, how should I use the maxmind service? Originally I would recommend that you set the fraud rejection score to 11. This will approve all transactions because the maximum score returned by maxmind is 10. As transactions begin to get maxmind scores you can see what kind of scores that they get from maxmind and determine what score is an appropriate rejection score. Ie I want to reject all transactions with a fraud score over 5. Once you set that score then no transactions with a score over 5 would be allowed to complete.

To get started with maxmind login to your storesecured account. Click on General–>Payments–>Fraud Control and complete the on screen directions and signup.

Continuing our series on how to increase conversions this article will cover increasing conversion through the use of unique content.

• Tell people what to buy. If you sell multiple different types of a certain product tell them which one is the best and why. Use your personal experience to help your clients get over the tough questions.
• Give folks the information they need to decide what to buy. A buyers guide has been shown to increase conversions by up to 50%.
• Never use the manufacturers copy and description for your items. Every other ecommerce site is using the same pictures and descriptions. Make your site unique by taking your own pictures and writing your own descriptions. This will greatly increase your rankings with the search engines by giving your site unique instead of duplicate content.
• Play 20 questions with every product starting with your most popular products. Think of questions that you would have as a potential buyer of the same product.
• If you can afford it, use professional pictures. The image can make a huge difference on how the product looks especially since your visitors cannot pickup the actual product.
• Capture content anyway you can. If you use the products yourself take video and/or pictures of yourself using them. Get testimonials from users.
• Use the text from the product box if available.

There are a variety of ways to increase the conversions on a website. This article will go over a few things that you can do to build trust. Remember that online you only have a few minutes to make a impression and get your customers to trust that you are a reliable merchant.

• Include a link to view the shopping cart or a mini cart object in the template. This allows your customers to what is in their shopping cart at anytime which helps to reassure them.
• Include your phone number in the template somewhere that is easily seen. This gives customers the confidence that if they need help its only a phone call away. Include your hours of operation in smaller text.
• Include a page detailing shipping costs and how they are calculated. Link to the shipping costs page from your view cart page.

Recently many merchants have complained of receiving spam from their own email address.  For instance if my email address is barackobama@thewhitehouse.gov then the email is also coming from barackobama@thewhitehouse.gov

Spammers can send email with the from address as anything that they would like and this is a easy way for them to get the emails delivered.

Why do the emails get delivered to my inbox even though they are spam?

In most cases people setup their own address as a trusted sender.  A trusted sender is one in which no spam checks will be executed and the email is always delivered to the inbox.  Spammers know this and they use your own address as the from address so that the spam will be delivered.

How do I fix this?

Remove your own email address and/or domain name from the trusted senders box inside of webmail.   Once this is done email from this address will be checked for spam and you should see an immediate decrease in the amount of spam.