WP e-Commerce 3.8 Review: Why WP eComm code is still broken

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011
wordpress 312 wp ecommerce 383
wordpress 312 wp ecommerce 383

This week I had an interesting conversation with Dan Milward, the marketing guy and co-founder of the WP e-Commerce WordPress shopping cart plugin.

Let's start with the facts. WP eComm is now on version 3.8.4. Currently, the reports in from front line users are: 4 say it works, 12 say it's broken.

Why People Hate WP eCommerce so much

Dan told me that sources inside Automattic had revealed to him that in the past as soon as Instinct Entertainment publish a new version there are five reports of the plugin being broken on current WordPress. His sources then erased that feedback.

This is a very bad sign: when you need insider help to erase negative feedback. Not the first time I've seen this happen at Automattic: Mark Jacquith has had to warn plugin database maintainers off deleting plugins which compete with their friends plugins. Second bad sign: people who hate your plugins enough to wait for a new version to mark it as broken.

Dan manages it. There are three strategies he uses which bring Instinct Entertainment to such grief.

Keep reading WP e-Commerce 3.8 Review: Why WP eComm code is still broken

Alec Kinnear
By Alec

Internet Marketing, WordPress | 18 comments

Review: Distilled & SEOmoz Expert Training London Day Two

Friday, October 23rd, 2009
Rand Fishkin SEOmoz
Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz opens day two of SEO Pro Training in London

Quicklinks to Day Two Presentations:

  1. Head to Head: Keyword Strategy - Will Critchlow
  2. Head to Head: Keyword Strategy - Rand Fishkin
  3. News site SEO - Rob Ousbey
  4. The Pacman Chunk of the Piechart: Getting Links - Tom Critchlow
  5. SEO is Nothing Without Content - Rand Fishkin
  6. Google Local Search - Tom Critchlow
  7. Universal Search - Patrick Altoft
  8. The limits of automation - Dave Naylor
  9. The right strategy for your organisation - Will Critchlow
  10. International Companies: How to handle multiple countries/languages - Duncan Morris
  11. Question and Answer Day Two SEO Expert Training

Quicklinks to Day One Presentations:

  1. Advanced analytics - Will Critchlow
  2. Getting SEO done against the organisational odds - Richard Baxter
  3. "ROI from social media" - Lucy Langdon
  4. "Diagnosing and fixing penalties, understanding guidelines" - Jane Copland
  5. Scalable site architecture - Duncan Morris
  6. Ranking Models - Ben Hendrickson
  7. Live linkbuilding - Tom Critchlow & Rand Fishkin
  8. Conversion rate optimisation - Ben Jesson and Dr. Karl Blanks
  9. Some of the Q&A

Keep reading Review: Distilled & SEOmoz Expert Training London Day Two

Alec Kinnear
By Alec

SEO | 4 comments

Web 2.0 Product Pages Done Right

Friday, October 26th, 2007

He talks about the same old tired question of ecommerce websites badly organised for SEO with:

  • image navigation
  • image text
  • badly formatted URLs
  • session-cookie dependent content
  • no content

All true, but old news. Spender suggests Web 2.0 has just made it worse. Perhaps. But the real value in the entry are in the two following screen shots.

The first is a tabbed web interface of a good looking Web 2.0 ecommerce site.

REI tabbed content sections on product detail pages.
Standard tabbed Web 2.0 product page

Keep reading Web 2.0 Product Pages Done Right

Alec Kinnear
By Alec

SEO | No comments