we still haven't told you about custom forms in product checkout pages, but let me rectify that right now. "Custom forms" is a very useful, flexible, yet simple to use feature.

Many of vendors need to get some information from their customers before allowing them to use their purchased products or services. Some vendors need buyers to specify their preferred usernames and passwords, others need phone numbers and preferred call hours, color/style choices and so on. Usually this "problem" is solved by using scripts which generate forms to be filled before purchasing products/services or by simply sending emails to customers asking about their preferences. Unfortunately, both ways are fairly inconvenient as they require special coding knowledge or a lot of manual work.

You can avoid all this hassle by clicking just a few times in "Custom Form" page at Click2Sell. This way you can have a form of several questions (or hundreds of questions, if you wish!) displayed in your product checkout page. Every single question can be made as mandatory or optional, be of very different types (not just text fields; see below for examples), they can also have symbols validation (e.g., it can check if a customer entered a real email address or numeric phone number). In just 5 minutes you can have a fully working, self-validating and unmissable form for getting additional information from your customers.

So what exactly question options are available in our "Custom Form" feature?

You can add such things to your form for asking various information from your customers:

• Checkbox (for questions like "Send me the additional tips");
• Multiple select box ("Select which things you want to be included in the package");
• Password ("Enter your password");
• Radio button ("Choose your preferred color");
• Single select box ("Size: S, M, L, XL");
• Text ("Enter your phone number"); Validation options:
  • accept any symbols;
  • accept only numeric symbols;
  • accept only dates (dd-MM-yyyy);
  • accept only email address;
  • accept only website URL address.
• Text area ("Additional comments")

Such a wide variety of question types will let you create any type of form you want, even the most complex one if there is a need. So you are fully covered in this area.

I'm sold, where can I get this stuff?

"Custom Form" is a product-level feature. This means that each of your products can have a unique form. You will find the page to create the form in this way:

1. Log in to your Click2Sell account;
2. Go to "For Vendor" section;
3. Click on your product name there;
4. Click on "Configure basic settings" link;
5. Go to Step 4: "Custom Form";
6. Start adding your questions!

There you will find full explanations about each option, so you will not get lost. Quick preview panes will help you to understand and see everything immediately, so it won't take long for you to set up the first question form for your customers.

Your customers' answers to your additional questions will be inserted into our sale notification emails and API notifications.

As always, if you need further explanations, have some questions or a feedback, please do not hesitate and contact us at any time!

However, growing numbers of users and sales-per-day clearly indicated that it might be difficult for the old servers to handle amount of sales and users in the end of this year. We didn’t wait for the old servers to start mildly choking, because we wanted to provide a top notch reliability for our users. At Click2Sell there’s no place for worries like “do my placed Click2Sell buy buttons work? Can my customers order my products without any noticeable delay?”. We take our responsibility very seriously to make sure that your customers could order your products at any time. Thus even the old servers worked sufficiently, we decided to make another step forward.

Let me tell you how our new network of shiny servers will help you to sell products online or promote them:

• Better uptime ratio (yes, you may be giggling that improving the ratio from the previous ~99.87% to idealistic 100% will save just 2 minutes every day, but who knows what might happen during these two extra minutes? Maybe an additional sale for you?).
• Improved data back-up service. Now servers monitor each other and distribute their information much more efficiently, thus your sales data is extremely safe. Even if one or another server irreparable crashes, your data won’t be lost or affected at all. Rest assured, your data is safe.
• Better distribution of load among servers in the network. Theoretically it was possible that, considering such sales growing tendency as ours, some of your customers might experience a bit slower order processes than others in the end of this year. That’s because sometimes the bigger part of customers might be visiting just one of our servers, leaving other servers empty-handed. But don’t worry, such theoretical scenario won’t be possible any more as we took preemptive actions by re-configuring our new servers.
• Can serve a lot more sellers and affiliates. How many times have you seen such thing that once some website becomes very popular, it also becomes awfully slow as its server(s) can’t handle increased traffic and usage? Well, it won’t happen here at Click2Sell (unless every man and his dog start selling products via our system).

Although it may seem that such things won’t increase your sales significantly, but it will give you a feel of bigger security and reliability. It will also be somewhat more comfortable to browse in your Click2Sell Affiliate Network members area. I just want to notice again that we have improved our network of servers not in order to fix some imaginary worsened Click2Sell condition. No, building state-of-the-art network of servers which is always more than sufficient to serve its users is part of our striving for excellence.

We changed the code a bit: split some areas of it and rearranged them. The older one looked like this:

[script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.click2sell.eu/js/buy_now_butt.js"> [script type="text/javascript" >[!-- generateBuyNowButton("https://www.click2sell.eu/buy?testerespa", "http://www.click2sell.eu/images/paynow_v3_5.png","www.click2sell.eu","3692"); –>

Here is an example of new button’s code:

<a id="c2s_bn_lnk_5192" href="https://www.click2sell.eu/buy?testerecha"> <img src="http://www.click2sell.eu/images/paynow_v3_5.png" border="0" title="Buy now!" alt="Buy now!"> </a>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.click2sell.eu/js/buy_now_butt_v2.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript"> c2s_bn_initializeBuyNowLink(‘www.click2sell.eu’, ’5192′);</script>
 

See the difference?

Yes, yes, I hear some of you asking "so what? what’s the point of wasting time on such little thing?". Let me answer this question. The main benefit of this change is that the buy button will be shown even then when Javascripts are disabled. That’s where the old button’s code failed as it was entirely wrapped in Javascript "clothes".

The other important aspect is somewhat easier reading of button’s code. Now the visible side of button is clearly separated from Javascript code and is put into common HTML tags that most of you know. You can clearly see what is responsible for what in non-java part of the button’s code, so you can edit it knowing just basics of HTML language.

What happens to buttons or links of old format that are already put into webpages or sales-pages? Nothing. They will keep working without any problem. Although we don’t provide old format code anymore, however they will keep working if you already have put some of old buttons to your website. Internal working principle of old and new button’s codes are identical.

It’s up to you if you want to update your current buy buttons to the new format codes or keep the old ones. Just keep in mind that the number of people who browse in the internet with scripts disabled is growing.

In this post about checkout page customization there will be two main parts and a tiny third one which is worth to be mentioned. Let’s see the first one.

Modifying text in the checkout page

Briefly speaking, you can just modify any word or sentence used in the checkout page. If you don’t like our chosen phrasing, you can easily change it. Of course, in most cases changing any English word to another English synonym in the checkout might not be really breath-taking, however its true power lies in helping to translate the default English checkout page entirely to any language: be it French, Russian, Italian, Zimbabwian or even Chinese with all its hieroglyphic.

You know, if you are selling a product/service to a specific non-English language market, then with the ability to translate the whole checkout page into necessary language will save your customers from fumbling in the checkout page while ordering your product. It will definitely improve the number of sales from each hundred of visitors. You know, not everyone will buy your product, if he/she would need to enter their credit card data in "something" that they barely understand or have no clue at all.

How to do that?

Just navigate to "Checkout Page customization" page which can be accessed this way:
"For Merchant" -> click on product name -> Customize product pages -> click on "Checkout Page" link.

In the opened page just go a bit down. Under WYSIWYG editor you will see several large text fields which are full of lines of duplicate phrases. Let us take just one line for example:

<Enter Your Information>=<Enter Your Information>

As it is said right above the text field (<ORIGINAL TEXT> = <YOUR CUSTOM/TRANSLATED TEXT>), the left side is original text which you have to leave untouched, the right side is the one where you can write whatever you want on top of already existing phrase. So if you want to change the phrase, just delete Enter Your Information on the right and write something in place of it. Leave "<" and ">" marks intact. For instance, if you want to translate it to French, then your line should look like:

<Enter Your Information>=<Écrivez votre information>

(autotranslator was used here, so maybe the translation is not really good).

Well, that’s all! Go through each line (that’s not a lot of work) and you’re done! As you have noticed, there are three big text fields: one for editing the checkout text, another one is for editing CVV page (the one which is opened when you click on "What is CVV?" link in the checkout) text and the last one is for editing purchase confirmation email text. The latter one is a bit different from others: there you can change everything (of course, everything has to be written in HTML), but just don’t change anything what is inside $(…) brackets (like ${billFirstName} ). If you want, you can drop some parts of the email, that’s perfectly fine.

Adding custom content

Frankly speaking, it is not a new feature, however it got no attention so far in this blog, so it’s a good time to talk a bit about it.

This feature allows you to add some extra content to your product’s checkout page. You can add text, pictures, tables, links. Just a few examples how our merchants use this feature:

• a nice image with "<ProductNameHere> secured checkout page". It just improves your customers’ impressions upon the checkout page.
• Additional order information. You know, it is better to place some information in order page than in any other place ("your order will be shipped in two days", "if you have any question regarding the product, contact us", etc.).
• some merchants add there some even more promotional text to maximize their efforts to encourage a customer to finish an order. They use various testimonials, delicious facts about a product and so on.

How to do that?

Just navigate to "Checkout Page customization" page which can be accessed this way:
"For Merchant" -> click on product name -> Customize product pages -> click on "Checkout Page" link.

The first text field with a lot of buttons is the place where you can add your custom content. It is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, so you might be already familiar with it.

Add or write there whatever you want. Just keep in mind that scripts added this way won’t work. It is so for security reasons.

A tiny nice feature

And the last customization that I want to tell you is being able to show your business/company name instead of your real name. In this way you can separate your personal life from your business.

In "My Profile" page you will see an option to setup your Business/Company Name. If you write something there, then it will be displayed in your product’s checkout page instead of your real name.

As you see, the new checkout page is fairly customizable, so catch the opportunity to make your product’s checkout page even more appealing to your customers. Perhaps it’s time to think about translating your product into a foreign language and start selling it to a local market? This is a great way to expand your current customer base! Don’t limit yourself with just English speakers!

We have totally revamped Click2Sell checkout pages in order to make them:

• look much better.
  Our old checkout version looked very "so-so" (especially compared to our new checkout page). It wasn’t compact, used a lot of space in the page. Its style was very simple, perhaps even too simple. However, it hardly fit the overall look of our merchants websites and it was quite hard to edit, add your own images and additional text without disrupting the code and checkout page look. 
  In the new checkout page version we used the page’s space a lot more efficiently, so that customers could see more at a glance. Various sections (product information, payment options, billing information, credit card information) were clearly separated to make checkout review process easier.
  The new design elements will make customers feel more comfortable at this page as it looks more modern, up-to-date and solid. It just looks less cluttered than the old version.
   
• faster;
  Checkout page code was completely rewritten, leaving only the necessary bits of code. Several different parts (that were saved separately before) were joined into one file to reduce checkout loading time. Thus customers’ browsers won’t download anything unnecessary in a checkout process.
   
• more suitable for various payment options;
  The main difference here is that there are two different checkout page versions:

  a) for products which can be bought using a credit card directly from Click2Sell checkout page.
  If you accept direct credit card payments (which is available if you get Authorize.net, Worldpay or PayPal Website Payments PRO account), your customers will see such checkout page layout which is designed specifically for payments by credit cards. Alternative payment options are left in a secondary "role", so that they wouldn’t unnecessarily catch attention of customers going to pay by credit cards. That’s the essential thing of the new checkout page: we tried to create the page in such way that various customers wouldn’t need to read or fill anything unrelated to what they are going to do.

  b) for all other products that can be bought via PayPal, Moneybookers or Google Checkout systems.
  This version is extremely light-weight. If you don’t ask your customers for additional information like living address, they will just see a product’s summary and the available payment options. There is nothing else that could waste your customers’ precious time.
   

• have more modification options.
  Here is a killer-feature: you can modify any text and fields on the checkout page. This feature requires its own dedicated post to it, so I will tell you more about this feature in the next post. Briefly put, this feature allows you to translate the whole checkout page into any language! This saves you from comical situations when you sell, let’s say, an ebook written in German and on your German product’s website you finally persuade a customer to purchase your product. And then he/she enters an English checkout page which is unknown foreign language for your customer… I guess you get the point.
   
• less checkout fields to fill in!
  While the actual number of text fields for a customer to fill in did not decrease, however we made it much simpler and easier for a customer. Once a potential buyer enters the new checkout page, Click2Sell.EU system automatically detects the customer’s country andautomatically selects that country from the Country: list. In addition to this, the State field is automatically selected with ‘Select a State’ – for US or Canada residents, or ‘Outside US/Canada’ for all other countries. So in this case the customer doesn’t have to fill in these 2 additional fields at all. This makes the checkout process simpler.

We have already got some very positive responses regarding the new checkout page. The new version was created after a very long research, considering a few different layouts, analyzing the most popular and widely used checkout pages, making the whole checkout process as easy as possible.

Transition from old checkout page to the new one was completely smooth, so no action is required from you regarding the new checkout page.

We always say that carefully created sales-pages, promotional materials, ads, rigorous split testings help to increase your products conversion rates. This is our new-year gift for you as the improved checkout page will also have a beneficial effect for all your products’ conversion rates!

I hope you will like it and see you in the next post about the new checkout’s feature – improved modifications!