Hello Everyone,
This could take a bit of explaining to do so I will get right to it. Our website is
appliancecenterdirect . com we use php/mysql and Smarty Templates or whatever you call them. We
also use X-Cart for the shopping cart process. During the day we will be seeing about 150 people online at
once and a few of those people will be adding stuff to their shopping cart but thats all they will do. Next
thing we will notice is that their shopping cart is empty. Some people will even get as far as the checkout
process to enter their credit card information and then they will leave.
We are beginning to wonder why people are not buying anything from us. We have had a few people call and
say when they put stuff into their shopping cart and then went to the next step it would say their shopping
cart is empty. We tried to run the same tests on our side and we were able to get thru the entire process
just fine. Could it be their browser, cookies, java? I mean this is something that we need to get figured
out asap so we can start running sales thru our website.
If anyone knows anything please let me know. Maybe some of you can register on the website and test it out
yourself! You dont have to enter you're credit card information. Just let us know if you can get to that
part and any other reason why you think people might not want to complete the last steps of the process.
To register you can go to: appliancecenterdirect . com/register.php

Please get back to me asap
Thanks!

Hello Everyone,
This could take a bit of explaining to do so I will get right to it. Our website is
appliancecenterdirect . com we use php/mysql and Smarty Templates or whatever you call them. We
also use X-Cart for the shopping cart process. During the day we will be seeing about 150 people online at
once and a few of those people will be adding stuff to their shopping cart but thats all they will do. Next
thing we will notice is that their shopping cart is empty. Some people will even get as far as the checkout
process to enter their credit card information and then they will leave.
We are beginning to wonder why people are not buying anything from us. We have had a few people call and
say when they put stuff into their shopping cart and then went to the next step it would say their shopping
cart is empty. We tried to run the same tests on our side and we were able to get thru the entire process
just fine. Could it be their browser, cookies, java? I mean this is something that we need to get figured
out asap so we can start running sales thru our website.
If anyone knows anything please let me know. Maybe some of you can register on the website and test it out
yourself! You dont have to enter you're credit card information. Just let us know if you can get to that
part and any other reason why you think people might not want to complete the last steps of the process.
To register you can go to: appliancecenterdirect . com/register.php

Please get back to me asap
Thanks!
I ran into a few issues that I think might make a user leave your site without buying anything. Plus I have a couple of recommendations that I feel would improve your site tremendously. Plus I found a few annoying things. I think it would be best not to discuss here in a public forum. Please PM me or e-mail me at dave@brillianthosts.com and I'll give my short list of items I found.

Regards,
Dave :peace:

I got as fas a the payment page but I didn't know any US zipcodes so couldn't proceed any further.

The site is very slow to load! The home page alone weighs in at around 300k, and the checkout pages also loaded very slow - if I was buying and it was that slow I would leave.

x-cart is notorious as a processor hog, and requires some serious tweaking to behave itself (mysql optimization, eaccelerator, etc). I have a client using it on a pretty busy site and it wasn't working well until we got a low(ish) end dedicated for it. Shared or a VPS didn't quite do it.

Just tried ordering, and it was indeed really slow. the products remained in the cart after registering, however. If you'd like to see what the speed *should* be like on x-cart, PM me for the link.

Using Internet Explorer you get ssl secure/not secure popups when going through checkout. This is always a huge issue for consumers. They really like to see the little gold lock in the browser. This is also very easily fixed.

Ryan

x-cart is notorious as a processor hog, and requires some serious tweaking to behave itself (mysql optimization, eaccelerator, etc). I have a client using it on a pretty busy site and it wasn't working well until we got a low(ish) end dedicated for it. Shared or a VPS didn't quite do it.

Just tried ordering, and it was indeed really slow. the products remained in the cart after registering, however. If you'd like to see what the speed *should* be like on x-cart, PM me for the link.
Oh no! I just purchased X-Cart to develop a shopping-cart solution for a client. I really spent a lot of time researching shopping carts, and this is the first I have heard of this "resource hog" and "lots of tweaking to behave itself" issue. How serious is this? Should I kiss that license money goodbye and look for a different cart?

I'd fallen into the same trap myself for a client. They wanted to get off a PERL cart they'd been using, and x-cart was highly recommended. Unfortunately until you spend a little time on their customer-only forum or actually using the product, you don't see the slowdowns. Use the login to sign up for thier forum, and do some reading. Look especially for mySQL tweaks and eAccelerator use.

I just did some theme work on an x-cart site for a client of a client. Talk about a convoluted mess. At least it's based on Smarty, but it really wasn't much help at all.