Reward customers to bring them back!

Buyer rewards programs are the proven way to build loyal customers that keep coming back to your store.  Now you can create your own rewards program for your WP-eCommerce based store!

Customers accumulate points by purchasing products.  (Soon they will be able to earn rewards by doing other cool things such as liking your facebook page or tweeting about your site! )  Then they can redeem their reward points for any of the gifts that you have setup.

Your reward program is fully customizable…

  • Pick any reward program name that works for your brand – (Reward Points, Buyer Bucks, … )
  • Add new rewards options at any time
  • Rewards can be percentage off, currency amount discount and free product coupons
  • Works with built in WP-eCommerce coupon management

Plugin doesn’t customer registration to accumulate points!

 

WPEC Sizes and Colors

WP-eCommerce is one of our favorite commerce platforms.  It offers a flexible infrastructure that let’s you manage product variations that may have attributes more complicated than just size and color.  If most of the time all you need for your store is product size and color the WPEC variation structure, and the user interface needed to manage it, can become very complicated to oversee.  The large number of product variations can also slow down your store, and may even  require a more expensive server than would otherwise be necessary.

Our sizes and Colors add-in addresses these specific needs and greatly improves the product management interface used to update inventory and adjust prices.  If you use Pye Brook Company to build your ecommerce presence you will get the benefit this add-in as part of your implementation.  If your are building an ecommerce site,  for yourself for someone else, contact us to discuss licensing the add-in.

 

 

SEO and WP-eCommerce Performance Tuning

We have been doing some tuning work on the 80,000+ product Sparkle Gear WP e-Commerce store and wanted to share one experience with the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast.

Unless you are a SEO expert, Yoast’s WordPress Plugin is a a tool that will save you alot of work, and keep much the SEO process understandable and accessible to mere mortals.  It’s a great addition for any WordPress site, and especially useful for WPEC that create lots of posts (products are posts) and have lost of taxonomies (variations and categories are taxonomies). IMHO. the dynamic sitemap generation feature of the WorpPress SEO plugin alone makes it a must have.

WordPress SEO Plugin Developed by Joost de Valk

wpecHowever, there are some details about how WPEC is implemented that need to be addressed when you install the SEO plugin.First item, WPEC stores products as posts. WPEC stores 

variations of products as child posts of product posts.  These child posts are used to hold information about an individual product variation.  Details like the variation image, price, stock. etc.  The important detail to note is that these child posts are not directly accessible to the outside world. In WP speak, the permalink for these posts will give you a 404!

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Check out this killer e-commerce site

Sparkle Gear, a retailer of premium customized rhinestone bling clothing and accessories engaged us to build their e-commerce site!  The site www.sparkle-gear.com is up and running.

Created completely from open-source software and our own custom WordPress plugins, including a product templating and generation plugin, this site rocks.  It is fully integrated with Facebook and Twitter, processes Paypal and credit card transactions, and tracks orders from start through shipping.

One of the best features of our integration is our WordPress plugin that manages giveaways.  Check out http://www.sparkle-gear.com/giveaway/santas-little-helper-martini-glasses-handbag-giveaway/ to see it in action.