Alright, I just love this new feature of websites. If you go to Old Navy.com or many other sites, and you add something to your cart a little window just scrolls down and shows you a small icon of your product in the basket, with a checkout option. What is this, and how do I get it? I love that my customer wouldn’t have to flip back and forth with their pages and it’s just so slick to see it. I love it, love it, love it. Is it a flash thing? I’ve been told to stay away from that stuff because it bogs down and can cause problems for those customers who don’t have the plug ins.

I’m just curious…Mr Getting, can you tell me what the fancy thing is that makes these sites so fantastic? Thanks

Hey, we are still having problems with our host..Aplus. I always hesitate to name names, but I have to say I’m just so disappointed. And I’m curious on what people have to say about other hosts who use Miva, and are efficient. When you go to our site, and click on a product it’s SO SLOW! We are dropping Lots of orders and it’s really upsetting. I am going to go in tonight, and start deleting obsolete files and old stuff to make it faster and leaner.

According to our tech support, they feel that we’ve uploaded some new modules that could be problematic. The three new modules I’ve turned on are: Swaplink, Template Data Feed, and Metatags Helper. All of a sudden our server is just crawling, and I’m concerned that it has to do with any one of these. I really don’t want to switch servers before a big holiday season.

I am curious who knows what about switching servers. How quickly do the search engines respond? How easy is the transition? Are we foolish to do this two months before xmas? I can’t keep going on the way I am because I’m losing sales by the minute in our current situation. Tonight I’ll dump a lot off of our server and we’ll see how that works. This is HUGELY frustrating!! HELP!

I need to find out if something exists that can monitor our site to make sure it’s operating correctly. I can go into my control panel and run manual stress tests, but I’m talking about a complete system monitor. I want something that will notify me if my gateway isn’t working. It’s not unusual for me to go half a day with no orders, and then we may pick back up later in the day. So a quiet morning for sales, albeit a bummer, isn’t an indicator of our site being down. I just found out the other day, by the grace of one of my favorite customers, that our site was giving an error code when people were trying to run their orders. So the gateway was down. But we had no indicator of this.

Isn’t there something out there that can monitor the systems of an ecommerce site? My server can’t seem to offer me assistance in this area. I believe that if a customer tries to make a purchase and it fails, then they are unlikely to come back to purchase again. Unless they are really motivated to call us to inquire on what is going on, then we are out of luck. It’s infuriating, and I can’t keep going in to run fake orders when we are slow. I shouldn’t have to.

I’m on the verge of switching servers. I’ve been getting some recommendations from consultants, and others on sites that specialize in Miva. I don’t want to do this if I don’t have to, but I may have to. I’m unwilling to do anything before the holidays, so I’ll suffer through until then. If anyone has any ideas, please post!! Thanks, Michelle

ok, I’ve found something that I think is ingenius. It’s monk-e-mail, and I wish I could do something like it for my red hat ladies to send personalized cards and notes to each other. Check it out: http://www.careerbuilder.com/monk%2De%2Dmail/ but beware it’s completely contagious!

I like it because it keeps people coming in and using the site over and over. I can’t help but think when you have something like this is boosts your rankings tremendously. This is obviously way beyond our capabilities, but it makes me think how I could get my customers to come into our site to do more than just shop. I have the blog, and put a red hat joke section in which people like to enter their favorite red hat jokes. That’s a success, but I’m looking for something more exciting…maybe greeting cards? Any thoughts are appreciated.

Ok, is there anything that you can use with miva to generate a packing slip? I have been on the miva chat board, and haven’t received any feedback yet. I can’t believe there’s nothing out there, it’s so simple.

We are about to turn our brochure over to the printer, it just keeps getting larger and larger. I can’t believe that I actually was considering a small trifold brochure….I’m already up to 20 pages! It’s huge. And of course, lots of my photography from the site isn’t formatted for printing in 4/color. It’s pretty time-consuming, but worth it. We have a massive folder full of catalog requests, and I’ve been putting the whole idea down for a long time, but I don’t think I can anymore. the list is just too long! It should be at the printer this week…and circulating in time for the holidays, which I hope will really give us more exposure.

OK, That’s it for now…