The dpivision.com Ltd Weblog

By Kate Monteith

At Practical eCommerce, we are aware of more than 350 online shopping carts. And each week we feature one, interviewing both the cart’s developer or management and a customer. “Cart of the Week” is not a review or an evaluation, but rather an opportunity to learn about a shopping cart from the people who built it and use it.

This week, we’ll hear from Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, managing director of Tradingeye, a licensed shopping cart based in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the northeast of England. We’ll also hear the views of Deborah Miarkowska, founder of EcoChic, a Tradingeye customer.

PeC: Please provide some general background on the cart.

Baranoff-Rossine: “Tradingeye was born out a lack of fully-functional ecommerce software that would also comply with the UK DDA [United Kingdom's Disability Discrimination Act] and Section 508 [of the U.S. Disability Act]. With web accessibility such a great concern for us and many other web designers and developers, we decided to build from the ground up a fully-accessible ecommerce cart that would suit users as well as the web teams who would be supplying the software. As the software is built on a solid foundation of modern web standards, we’ve ended up with a product that is easy to use as well as customize. We currently have over 5,000 active licenses.”

PeC: What sort of server requirements are required to run your cart?

Baranoff-Rossine: “Tradingeye is licensed on a per-domain basis and can be hosted on Linux or Windows running PHP and MySQL. We offer web hosting ourselves as an additional service, with packages to suit every retailer’s requirements.”

PeC: How much does the cart cost?

Baranoff-Rossine: “It’s £299 [$493 USD] for a first license, with discounts available for those purchasing additional licenses. The pricing scheme makes Tradingeye very appealing to web teams who may offer ecommerce as an option to multiple clients, as great savings can be passed on to clients. We offer free local host licenses for those who wish to test-drive the software in a local environment, and also offer IP-based and server-wide licensing packages.”

PeC: What are the cart’s biggest strengths?

Baranoff-Rossine: “The software is very easy to re-skin and theme to any style, and developers can easily modify the functionality of the software to their preferences. And, as Tradingeye has been built with accessibility and ease of use in mind, the powerful system remains very straightforward to use from a customer point of view. Due to its foundation of modern web standards, the software is search engine friendly, fast and intuitive to use.”

PeC: What are some of its weaknesses?

Baranoff-Rossine: “The only real weaknesses revolve around the product’s supporting materials. The team is currently working on the accompanying documentation for version 6 of Tradingeye.”

PeC: What plans do you have for future cart development?

Baranoff-Rossine: “Some areas of development on the horizon include some new and innovative web marketing techniques, and our very own API, which will allow developers to link in to Tradingeye in new and inventive ways. Over the coming months we will be launching our Tradingeye Themes site, where we will be selling some beautiful themes for the software, many of which will be designed and built by guest web designers.”

PeC: How would your cart help an ecommerce merchant, versus the cart he/she is using now?

Baranoff-Rossine: “Many retailers have come to us for the intuitiveness, speed, reliability, and the features which our software provides. Many systems currently on the market simply do not adhere to current web standards, making them slow, difficult to update and confining in terms of the features they offer and support.”

PeC: Any other thoughts for our readers, who are ecommerce merchants?

Baranoff-Rossine: “A good ecommerce system is only one small part of running an online business. Tradingeye covers the online sales aspect, leaving you to concentrate on sales, marketing and promotion.”
A Customer’s View

Deborah Miarkowska is the founder and managing director of EcoChic, an online specialty boutique out of Hove, East Sussex, England. Miarkowska uses the Tradingeye cart, and here she offers her opinions and comments about it.

PeC: What is your store’s approximate total annual revenue?

Miarkowska: “EcoChic is a new business, but we have taken several thousands of pounds through the cart to date.”

PeC: What does your company sell via the cart?

Miarkowska: “We have a wide range of handmade and ethical and fair trade fashion accessories in our boutique and subscriptions to our EcoChic ethical living magazine. Each product holds a wonderful story of its origin and special features, and thanks to the Trading Eye cart, we can share these with our customers.”

PeC: How long has your company been using the Tradingeye cart?

Miarkowska: “Since July 2007.”

PeC: What are the cart’s biggest strengths?

Miarkowska: “It is exceptionally user friendly, and we find that the cart provides a content management system and enables the user to manage it in-house, which allows for real flexibility.”

PeC: How could the cart improve?

Miarkowska: “We are aware that the cart has very recently been upgraded to version 6, which looks even better as it has only one checkout page and even greater flexibility.”

PeC: How would the Tradingeye cart improve another merchant’s business?

Miarkowska: “It is easy to use, flexible, with the highest levels of security, and there is an online support system, should you have queries.”

PeC: Do you plan on continuing to use the cart?

Miarkowska: “Yes. We are looking to upgrade to version 6 to provide the most up-to-date and user-friendly system for our customers.”

PeC: Any other thoughts for our readers concerning Tradingeye?

Miarkowska: “Be assured that the security and payment options on the Tradingeye cart are configured to the highest levels. It is easy to use, and once the customer is signed up in the system, their details are kept secure, making it even easier for a future purchase.”

For those of you currently running v5.05 of our Tradingeye shopping cart software, we now have upgrade scripts available to take you to the latest v6.0 version.

The scripts will upgrade your software to the latest release, giving you all the features of the current version without having to perform a fresh install.

http://blog.dpivision.com/2009/05/introducing-tradingeye-v6-e-commerce-for-everyone/

Please do bear in mind that due to the changes in the front-end markup, your design will have to be tweaked slightly in order to accommodate the new features such as the CSS-based drop-down menu, product/attribute sorter, grid layout, amongst other new introductions to the system.

Get the scripts

You can buy and download the upgrade scripts from our online order forms:

http://www.tradingeye.com/upgrade.php

Connect from Internetware is a business automation tool which allows you to seamlessly download customers and orders from Tradingeye into Sage 50, Sage 200 or Sage Instant accounts as well as Sage Act! CRM

The new Tradingeye integration has just been launched and supports the download of Customers and Invoices (or Sales Orders) in your accounts software.

Order in Tradingeye

Invoice automatically created in Sage 50 Accounts

Customer in as shown in Tradingeye

Customer in Sage 50 Accounts – The Account Ref is auto generated by Connect and associated to the Tradingeye customer.

Installation

Simply copy the Sage plugin into a /sage directory on your Tradingeye site, and just run the installer script from http://localhost/sage

Complete the settings in the configuration screen and click Save

Now, setup Connect with the supplied URL’s (Your URLs may be different to the ones shown above).

What’s coming soon in Connect for Tradingeye~

We will continue to expand on the Tradingeye integration and here’s a list of what we’ve got planned

•    Support for Invoice discounts
•    Upload of Products and Images from Sage to Tradingeye
•    Upload of Product categories from Sage to Tradingeye
•    Upload of stock levels from Sage to Tradingeye
•    Upload of Supplier records from Sage to Tradingeye

Pricing

Tradingeye Plugin for Connect – Free to all Tradingeye customers
Connect for Sage 50 / Instant Accounting – £25pm or £300pa
Connect for Sage Act! – £25pm or £300pa
Telephone and Email support – £25pm or £300pa

The annual or monthly license fee for the software includes all future updates to the software. All prices are quoted excluding VAT (EU only).

By Greg Kirk, gregkirk.com

About Greg Kirk

Greg Kirk is 27 and lives just outside of Leeds in the North of England. Greg is a web designer and has been working in web design since 2005. Greg graduated from The University of Huddersfield with a BSc in Multimedia Techonology. Greg got his first break in the industry at Moving Media Marketing. In 2006 he joined WPA Pinfold, and currently heads up all their digital media work.

Tell us a little about your company.

EVODESIGN is a small Liverpool based design and new media marketing agency specialising in brand development, graphic and web design.  Our web design philosophy is creating standards based, cross browser compatible and accessible online experience for our clients and their customers.

Why did you choose Tradingeye as your ecommerce platform?

In many ways, once we discovered Tradingeye existed, the decision was made for us.  We had been longing for someone to develop an XHTML / CSS compliant solution that could easily be engineered to our own requirements.  It seemed to defy logic that of all the cart solutions available none seemed to be lightweight, responsive, scalable, manageable and XHTML / CSS compliant.

Once we began looking into Tradingeye it became clear it had everything we’d need for the majority of our clients requirements.  When we started to get a look at V6; how beautifully engineered the back-end was and the additional features on offer we were desperate to get to grips.

Could you please let us know about your project?

The Omega Changing Rooms site was originally developed using V5 of Tradingeye back in November 2008.  The project changed in scale a few times which created some delays.  The delays proved to be a blessing as they allowed us to re-engineer the site using V6.

The benefits of additional front-end features, as well a great back-end were clearly evident.  However, most compelling was the ease with which the client understood the conceptual framework of Tradingeye.  We had previously struggled getting the organisational structure of the site across to the client, under V5.  The completely re-designed interface of V6 removed all of these problems – creating an extremely intuitive end-user experience.

We anticipate over the coming weeks the store will scale seamlessly, all with very little input from our side.

Do you have any future plans for the site?

We hope our client will begin to harness the full potential of content management available within Tradingeye.  Linking specific articles to products, creating downloads and datasheets.  The new SEO features of Tradingeye are already reaping improvement in search engine indexing and we expect this to grow.  As Tradingeye v6 begins to offer detailed usage reports, augmented with analytics data we expect the store to present some unique opportunities for further enhancement (new products, landing pages, offers and promotions.)

Do you have anything else you would like to share?

Choosing which technologies to invest in as a web developer can be a gamble.  There simply aren’t the resources to try every conceivable option; at some point a decision must be made.  The friendly, skilled and rapid response of dpivision.com Ltd in relation to their products and services coupled with a vibrant and helpful user community go a long way in establishing confidence.  This kind of support is worth its weight in gold when your client’s business is dependent on the infrastructure you are providing.