Manish Chowdhary, the CEO of GoECart, is an exception. The numerous bad reviews about his product have been handled by him in an interesting way. Improving his product and resolving customer issues? Nope. He’s chosen to take legal action against me.

I first heard from Manish in 2007 where he demanded I provide him with the IP addresses of reviews he didn’t like. Of course I didn’t comply. I have a whole series of fraud checks which, while they can never be 100% accurate, are pretty good. Let’s just say after running this site for about 10 years, I’ve learnt a few things and upgraded the review approval process a number of times to become increasingly sophisticated in detecting astroturfing activities.

Manish then contacted me in February 2011 asking to be left out of my site. When I say “ask” that would suggest a polite request. He demanded.

His email:

Subject: GoECart Trademark Infringement on Shopping-cart-reviews.com

Mark,

We do not wish to participate in your online reviews program and request that you remove all GoECart review pages (http://www.shopping-cart-reviews.com/carts/Go-E-Cart.aspx etc.) and all other mentions of GoECart from your site immediately. We are also troubled by the fact that you are exploiting our registered trademark (Trademark numbers: 3376888, 3371337, 77572916 and 77572899) to generate revenue for your site by selling paid sponsorships and promoting our competitors’ products. This is obviously intended to take a free ride on GoECart’s hard earned branding. We view such actions as intentional infringement of GoECart’s intellectual property for commercial gain in violation of Federal and state trademark and unfair competition laws. This practice, which is clearly intended to lure away prospective customers of GoECart’s products and services to competing businesses, inappropriately trades on the intellectual property rights of GoECart.

We kindly request that you immediately remove GoECart from all your review pages such as http://www.shopping-cart-reviews.com/carts/Go-E-Cart.aspx and remove all mentions of GoECart, from your site within five (5) business days following which we would have no option but to take strict legal action against you and your website hosting provider.

Please acknowledge receipt of this email.

Sincerely,
Manish Chowdhary

CEO, GoECart

203-336-2284 ext. 202

My response:

Hi Manish

Thank you for your email. I acknowledge that you own the trademarks as listed (2 current, 2 abandoned).

I deny that I am “intend(ing) to lure away prospective customers of GoECart’s products and services to competing businesses”. You have the same chance as any other product on my site. I send free traffic. You have received free traffic from me (I record all clicks). Others with more satisfied customers have received much much more.

Trademarks are designed to prevent “likelihood of confusion”: the standard legal term. There is no likelihood of confusion, the intent of my site is very clear – the word “reviews” in the domain and header supports that.

Any further attempts whatsoever you make at trying to bully your poor reviews off the internet (I suggest you redirect your legal fees to invest in improving your product) will result in me blogging this incident, and investing SEO effort into ensuring that the information appears prominently in Google for searches related to GoECart.

I received no response to that email, and assumed that he had backed off. Not so it seems.

This week, my webhosting company received a DCMA takedown request.

To whom it may concern,
This is a notice of request to takedown the following website. We consider this notice a formal “Cease and Desist”:

http://www.shopping-cart-reviews.com/carts/Go-E-Cart.aspx

GoECart has many federally registered trademarks which provide prima facie evidence of its trademark rights (and for those marks that have obtained incontestability, the registrations are conclusive evidence of GoECart’s rights. The above listed URL is currently infringing on our registered Copyright and Trademarks (Trademark numbers: 3376888, 3371337, 77572916 and 77572899). We ask that any and all references to GoECart and MachroTech LLC including all logos are removed immediately.

If we have not received written confirmation of your agreement to these terms by January 30, 2012, GoECart will not hesitate to take appropriate action to enforce its legal rights in its valuable intellectual property. GoECart is prepared to recover any damage that is fallen on our clients or liable damage of name that might result from exposure to unmitigated risk arising from the above domain name. Please note that this letter is not meant to be a complete statement of facts, and nothing contained herein should be deemed a waiver of our rights or defenses.
We appreciate your cooperation in this matter and do not hesitate to contact us for information.
Sincerely,

Manish Chowdhary
CEO

I’m very appreciative to my webhost, www.arvixe.com, for recognising Manish as the troll he is and not responding to his DCMA claim. I also think it’s funny that Manish continues to mention abandoned trademarks.

Manish seems to be thinking that either:

1. A trademark gives him complete 100% control over everytime someone ever utters his name, or;

2. He thinks I am stupid enough to be scared by believing that.

Manish, that’s not how a trademark works. A trademark protects you from people trying to pass themselves off as you. Ask a first year law student if you need help. If my page was somehow pretending to be a GoECart page, then it would be a legitimate claim. It’s very obviously not a GoECart page.

As I’ve said to you numerous times Manish, spend less time on legal action, more time on improving your product. I wish you and your business well, and genuinely hope you improve your product and increase your customer satisfaction. I look forward to seeing genuine positive reviews from your customers in the future.

To whom it may concern,
This is a notice of request to takedown the following website. We consider this notice a formal “Cease and Desist”:
http://www.shopping-cart-reviews.com/carts/Go-E-Cart.aspx

GoECart has many federally registered trademarks which provide prima facie evidence of its trademark rights (and for those marks that have obtained incontestability, the registrations are conclusive evidence of GoECart’s rights. The above listed URL is currently infringing on our registered Copyright and Trademarks (Trademark numbers: 3376888, 3371337, 77572916 and 77572899). We ask that any and all references to GoECart and MachroTech LLC including all logos are removed immediately.

If we have not received written confirmation of your agreement to these terms by January 30, 2012, GoECart will not hesitate to take appropriate action to enforce its legal rights in its valuable intellectual property. GoECart is prepared to recover any damage that is fallen on our clients or liable damage of name that might result from exposure to unmitigated risk arising from the above domain name. Please note that this letter is not meant to be a complete statement of facts, and nothing contained herein should be deemed a waiver of our rights or defenses.
We appreciate your cooperation in this matter and do not hesitate to contact us for information.
Sincerely,

Manish Chowdhary
CEO

That’s changing.

About 2 weeks ago I kicked off a project to build my own site. As you can tell by the title, it’s built on Magento. This is not an endorsement of Magento as the best shopping cart. I’ve always said to pick the best cart to meet your needs. For the majority of people Magento is not the best cart. For my particular needs, I believe it is. Let’s see in 6 months time if I’m cursing Magento

My role in the project is business owner/project manager. What I’ve done so far:

• Written a functional specification.
• Found and briefed an experienced Magento developer who I believe it a good match to my needs.
• Hired a social media strategist to create a social media strategy. That’s already been done. It’s someone I’ve worked with before (she helped with some of the social media for this site a while back).
• Written a content brief. For me, high quality content is one of the, if not the, most important type of marketing. I’ve found one writer and am in talks with a few more.
• Created an information architecture. I did this myself as it’s relatively straight forward and I have IA experience. I did hire an IA consultant to review my work. She did a good job and added to and refined my thinking.
• Started work on a customer service plan. Still a way to go on this, early days.
• Found a magento template I liked. I bought it because I really liked the structure/layout. I didn’t like the colours and images, so I have found and briefed a designer to just work on the style elements. Once done, my programmers will integrate it.
• I haven’t done a specific marketing plan. I’m leading with social media and content as the primary marketing channels. I’ll also do some SEO but I have a lot of experience with SEO so that’s fine, don’t need a detailed plan for that. I will probably also do a little PPC, but for reasons I won’t get into now I don’t expect to do a lot of that.

So that’s where I’m up to so far. I don’t endorse this as the best way to run a project, or even a good way. A lot of it is very much tailored to me and my experience. For example, I have a lot of experience managing developers. For someone with less experience I would suggest a more detailed plan than I’ve done. There’s definitely bits I’m winging.

I’ve also done a lot of stuff related to legal, suppliers, financial structures, fulfilment, etc, but I won’t be covering that in this blog as that is all very specific to my business and not applicable to anyone else. At this point I don’t plan to disclose the site, but I might change my mind.

Look for rather infrequent updates on this project. It’s keeping me very busy so not a lot of time. Also working on a major upgrade to this site, the biggest single upgrade in a few years. Already got a stable beta version, just sorting out some data issues. It’ll be live in 2 weeks at most.

http://www.kavoir.com/2011/09/magento-go-test-drive-review.html

However, it’s hard to get a straight answer as to what it actually is, which is unfortunately pretty typical of such products. After all,

It’s more than e-commerce. More than marketing automation. More than mobile transactions. It’s the first end-to-end, multi-channel commerce technology platform designed for all the ways consumers choose to shop today. And it’s the only platform that combines the power of eBay, PayPal, Magento, and all the ground-breaking commerce capabilities within the eBay Inc. family.

Doesn’t exactly say a lot. Best I can tell it’s a series of cloud based APIs that enable a bunch of common and growing ecommerce functions such as authentication, payments, mobile payments, checkout, reporting and more. I think it’s the evolution of the PayPal API, but not really clear.

Any seen a good summary?

Ebay has just announced they are purchasing GSI Commerce, which powers some of the largest ecommerce sites in the world including Adidas, DKNY, Ralph Lauren, HP and QVC.

I’m curious to see what Ebay does with this. Will they keep it as is? Make a shopping mall type product? Will this change Ebay’s ProStores product? Interesting times ahead.

Avactis have just released v2.1. While they have always focussed on usability more than most, v2.1 has tried very hard to completely eliminate dependency on developers to deploy and customize the product – an ambitious undertaking indeed!

In particular, most stores require a theme to be made – hire a designer and developer and you are easily out of pocket for a few thousand dollars before even launching. Avactis attempts to beat this by having several built in templates, a visual template editor, and more templates on the way.

They’ve put together this neat demo of how the template editor works
(video only, no audio)

I’ve also got some good screenshots of the themes interface to get an idea of how it works:

Click image for full size



Click image for full size

If you want to play with it, there’s a demo on their site.

Have a look and let me know your thoughts in the comments.

This post is probably not ideal for those just starting in SEO, contains a few more advanced concepts.

As a way of getting inspired, I chose 5 sites with high conversion rates and converted their homepage, category page and product page into wireframes. This is a great way to get inspired and, uh, “borrow” ideas to help you with your designs. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!

Note some of the data I based decisions on is a bit old as it’s the best I could get.

Here’s the 5 sites I chose and the rational:

• Amazon.com: do I really need to say why? It’s the site everyone compares themselves to. Arguably it’s a bad idea to copy from Amazon, but there’s no denying they do a lot right. In January 08 Amazon had a 9.6% conversion rate.
• Proflowers: I personally find this site inspiring, the attention to detail is amazing. With a 14.1% conversion rate, their attention pays off.
• Schwans: ok, so they cheat, being an online grocery store attracts a lot of repeat ready to buy visitors. Still, a staggering 40.60% conversion rate is hard to argue with, no matter how they achieve it!
• Vitacost: More of a “typical” ecommerce site (whatever that means) than the others, with an atypical 16.40% conversion rate.
• WomanWithin: There’s no doubt that apparel is a huge and growing industry online. Woman Within’s staggering 25.30% conversion rate positions them very well to capitalise on this market.

No doubt all of them have some advantage – ProFlowers email aggressively, Schwans have their repeat business, Amazon their brand, etc. The question is: what edge do you have that you can capitalise on?

Below are thumbnails, full size versions, and downloadable AI (Adobe Illustrator) files for you to take home and play with. If someone is kind enough to convert them to another format (OmniGraffe, Axure, any other format) please email me and I’ll add links.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the wireframes.

Amazon.com

Homepage Download AI

Category Page Download AI

Product Page Download AI

ProFlowers

Homepage Download AI

Category Page Download AI

Product Page Download AI

Schwans

Homepage Download AI

Category Page Download AI

Product Page Download AI

Vitacost

Homepage Download AI

Category Page Download AI

Product Page Download AI

WomanWith

Homepage Download AI

Category Page Download AI

Product Page Download AI

While this post isn’t meant as an introduction, I’ll cover it very briefly. A split test is where you show some people one version of a page and others another and measure which one produces the best results. It’s arguably the single most effective way to improve your conversion rate. It doesn’t matter what your customers say about your shopping cart (your friends will almost always so “oh it’s so easy to use”), and what your opinion is. What’s important is to measure what people actually do. Even the experts pick the best performing version incorrectly much of the time, which they will readily admit, so testing real performance is critical.

The Challenge of Split Testing Templates

Usually when people talk about testing, they are talking about testing a single landing page, or a page in your checkout. Technically they are easy to test. Where it gets tricky is when you want to test your product template in your shopping cart, or a page template in your CMS. In most systems, it’s very hard to create a second version of the template and test. So what’s the solution? That’s what this blog post is about.

How to Split Test a Template Based Site

We’ll talk about testing with Google Website Optimizer. It’s an excellent tool, widely used, and free. Win!

1. Log into Google Website Optimizer with a Google Account at https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt.

2. Choose “Create a New Experiment”

3. You are given the choice between an A/B test and Multivariate test. Google Website Optimizer informs you that A/B Experiments are simple and Multivariate tests are robust. However, ignore the suggestions Google Website Optimizer makes, included the recommendation that you need at least 1,000 page views per week. We are abusing this tool to get it work the way we want so that isn’t relevant. That’s the first trick.

4. Next, we are at the “New Multivariate Experiment” page. Fill in the fields as follows:

“Experiment Name” – give the experiment a meaningful name. In my case, I’ll call it “Product Page Add to Cart Button”.

“Identify Your Test Page” – in this box, put in the URL of any page that’s using the template you want to test. In my case, I’m testing the product template, so I add any product page, it doesn’t matter which one. For example, you’d put in www.mystore.com/brand/red-widget.html. We are testing the template, not just this page. We just need to trick Google.

“Identify Your Conversion Page” – put in the conversion page, that is, the page that users will reach when they’ve achieved the goal you want to boost. For an ecommerce site, this is often the “thank you” page after completing the purchase. In this case I am testing the “add to cart” button, and the shop doesn’t have a huge amount of sales per day, so it would take a long time to know whether the button was improved or not. So instead, I’ll put the conversion page as the page you are shown after clicking the add to cart button. There’s all sorts of clever customizations you can do around tracking the conversion page, but they are beyond the scope of this post.

5. Next you are asked who will be installing it. For the purposes of this post I’ll assume it’s you. The process is pretty similar if it’s not you.

You’ll be shown a few snippets of JavaScript with instructions on how to put them in.

What you want to do is to put this in your template file. In this case, where I am talking about making a change to a product page, I’ll find the products template and put it in there. So to be clear, we are making the change to every product page, not just one. This is just what we want! Remember how on the last screen it asked us for one specific page? Don’t worry about that. It’ll work.

The instructions can be difficult to implement in some template systems. For example, “Paste the follow at the beginning of your test page’s source code”. What you ideally need to do is put the code directly after the <head> tag in your template (detailed instructions are in the Google Help site if you want to read more). With some shopping cart templates it’s hard to control the exact place you put the code – it could be the <head> section is in a generic template that controls the whole site. In that case, just put it as close to the top of the product template as possible. Even just after the <body> tag will work. While this isn’t officially supported, I’ve put the scripts in all sorts of odd places depending on the shopping cart or CMS, and never had a problem.

Page Sections

The next interesting section is the page sections.

This is where you define the section(s) you want to test. This is the crucial piece of code. Multivariate tests are designed to test different parts of the page simultaneously. However, unless you have a lot of traffic and a lot of sales, then multivariate is impractical. So you need to decide what the test is. This could be something very simple like my test where I’m just trying different “add to cart” buttons, all the way through to testing complete new layouts. I’ll cover how to do some of this trickier stuff at the end, and stick with the simple example for now.

Here’s what my code looks like:

I’ve named the snippet “CartButton”, and put the code for the current button inside the snippet. The name “CartButton” will show up in the Google Website Optimizer later, so make sure the name is obvious. To stress again, unless you have a lot of sales (at least 50+per day) I recommend testing only one thing at a time.

When you go into Website Optimizer, you’ll see it appear there.

What you do now is click the “Add new variation” and put in the code you want to test. In this case, I’m putting in another add to cart button. You can add as many variations as you want, but be warned again, the more variations you have the longer it will take to test. Unless you know what you are doing, first time around stick to one variation.

That’s it! You have created your test! Just go through the preview and launch and your test is live.

Check back next day to make sure it’s all working. You should be seeing conversions coming in and with time you’ll be able to tell which is the winning version.

How to Test Layout Changes

So you say “ok, that’s fine, I can swap out an image or whatever, but I want to try more advanced stuff”. No problem! It gets slightly trickier, but not too bad. Some tests you might want to try:

• Changing the layout of the page
• Changing a style e.g. making the headline more dominant
• Testing the presence or absence of an item, for example, a testimonial, security seal, or similar

How do you do this? Let’s start with testing whether an item makes a difference by being there. This is pretty simple. Let’s say you have a testimonial section on your page:

<div id=”testimonials”>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur euismod adipiscing eleifend. In non justo velit, aliquam tempus tortor. Aenean mauris sem, faucibus nec venenatis ac, faucibus eu mauris.
</div>

Simply add a test section to the page, and add some CSS to turn it off.

<script>utmx_section(“testimonials”)</script>
<style type=”text/css”>
#testimonials
{display:none;}
</style>
</noscript>

Then when you create a page section variation in Website Optimizer, simply leave it blank. By not showing the CSS that turns it off, then it’s on.

How about making a headline more dominant? It’s basically the same as above. Instead of testing CSS to turn off a section, just use CSS to change the style.

Changing the page layout is a bit trickier. Ideally this would be done with an A/B test. However, that’s tricky to do with many shopping carts and content management systems without some major code hacking. The solution is to insert a great big chunk of CSS similar to the two examples above, but use that CSS to significantly override the main style sheet and replace it with the new test style. You may need to use the !important declaration at times if needed. If your layout is still done using tables, this might be so difficult as to be in practice impossible. So, sorry, you’re out of luck! Time to get your code up to scratch!

If you are doing advanced CSS tests, don’t forget to preview your tests across different browsers to make sure all users have a good experience.