What not to do with your newsletters

Newsletter is a powerful communication channel – it keeps your customer informed, and even more, keep then engaged . Truth is, most of your customers won’t visit your website often, and newsletter is a very good way to keep they coming back. I myself – am an example of those customers – most of my purchases were made from newsletters. A good deal shows up and I just buy it – even thought I don’t really need it. Yes it’s not the best habit in the world, but it’s the way marketing works. You get a good sale, I get a product that I might need some day. Everyone is happy, well, might be except my wife.

However, like other channels of marketing, mistakes can be made with newsletter and drive your customers away. Make sure to avoid these:

Sending too many newsletters:

Unless your customers explicitly say that they want to get your newsletter everyday, it’s best to avoid to do so. Even if your site is full of interesting content, keep in mind that if customers received too much emails from you, their interests might wear out. It’s bad when customers start getting a habit of “Oh another mail from <blah blah>, just ignore it”. It’s even worse if they don’t open your newsletter at all, or simply create a rule to delete it.

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The quirks of coupons

If you have been using the promotion system in Episerver Commerce (or should I call it “old promotion system” – the “new promotion system” is almost out of BETA and it will soon be the promotion system), you should know about the coupon – which is an option setting for a promotion. When it is set, the customers will be required to input that special code in order to get the reward, even if their carts fulfilled all other requirements (the subtotal, the lineitems, the shipping method etc.)

The coupon in old promotion system is quite basic – you can set only one per promotion, or nothing at all. Advanced scenarios like customer-specific coupons (there are multiple coupons and each of them is valid for only one customer) are not supported. (This is one of reasons why you should consider to move to new promotion system ASAP). You can use redemption limits in combination to specify how many times a coupon can be used. But in this post we will talk about the quirks of storing it.

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Upgrade your website to Commerce 9

You know what – Commerce 9 is released. OK, I’m just kidding, it was released 6 months ago, in October 2015. Last week, Commerce 9.12 was released, and at this time of writing, Commerce 9.13 is ~~on the oven~~ just released. So it’s not so new – but with 6 months on the field, I think Commerce 9 has proven it’s stable and production-ready to be your next version. If you are looking for an upgrade to your website, Commerce 9 is the obvious choice. Many customers have successfully upgraded their sites to Commerce 9 – and the results have been very encouraging.

But it does not mean that upgrading is easy. Commerce 9 is undoubtedly a big upgrade, and getting there is not just an easy walk. So how to ensure a successful upgrade?

Plan ahead:

The catalog subsystem was rewritten almost entirely in Commerce 9, resulting in some very big migration steps. Depends on the size of your catalog, it can take from a couple of minutes, to hours (I would not be too surprised if it takes a day). So plan for the possible down time (even though in most cases you will be upgrading your site in staging first).

Commerce 9 is also a major release, so there were breaking changes – you will have to fix some of your code, to make it compiled. The amount of code that actually broken should be small, but it’s better if you check this list http://world.episerver.com/documentation/Items/Upgrading/EPiserver-Commerce/9/breaking-changes/ to see how much works you’ll need (tips: the less you use “internal stuffs”, the code you’ll have to change. The internal stuffs are, by convention, marked with special doc tag.).

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Episerver Commerce SearchProvider – demystifying

This post is an excerpt from my book, but it’s the short one. It looks like there is a confusion of where the searchprovider is used in Commerce

Many important features in Commerce Manager use index-based search provider to search for entries – it’s simply faster and more flexible to work with. They might not be truly “real-time”, but they’re close (with the right configuration). The only drawbacks are they require extra processing (for indexing entries), external files/configurations, but the advantages easily overweight any of those drawbacks.

There are three search providers provided by Episerver Commerce: LuceneSearchProvider, Solr35SearchProvider, and FindSearchProvider (four if you count SolrSearchProvider as well). LuceneSearchProvider comes as the default option with EPiServer.Commerce.Core, and it’s the only one does not require extra configurations.

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Import catalog: beware of warning messages

Recently I worked with a support case from a customer. They complained that the catalog import is too slow for them, it took them 6-7 minutes to import 200 entries. Their catalog is about 50k entries, which is not particularly big, but not small neither, and with that rate, it does mean they will have to wait for days for the catalog imported. This is of course not good and I jumped in when I became available. (In the end, I like performance tuning so much that I find it hard to refuse a case like this)

I did try to import their catalog on my development machine – a relatively powerful desktop with Intel Core i7 4790 CPU, 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSD on Windows 10/.NET 4.5.2. Everything went quite well – I achieved a rate of 200 entries per 9-10 seconds, which is, IMO, more than enough. (And this is on Commerce 9, on Commerce 8 then I would suspect it’s 3-4 times slower).

After some conversations with Episerver’s developer support team, it seems that the slowdown only happens with the re-import. I tried it again with re-import. Hmm, something is wrong here. The import is much slower and it eventually stops at some points. The debugger shows that it starts quite well, even faster than a new import (200 entries per 3-4 seconds, a very recent version of Commerce made an improvement of skipping the entries which are not changed to speed up the import), but it slows down by time. Profiling does not show anything obvious, most of the time was spent with loading the MetaObject:s – which is kind of expected.

I was starring at the import tab, and wondering what can be wrong, and suddenly I realized the answer is what I was looking at:

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What not to do with your login/register page

This post is strictly my personal opinions, it does not represent my employer’s views in any way.

Login/register page is essential to any site, especially any Commerce site. You should always follow the proven, established practices, but yet many sites still have issues with their login and register page. Make sure that you do not do anything mentioned below:

Use HTTP for login/register page.

You might say “What?”. It’s 2016 already and certificate is cheap as hell (even free, if you count Letsencrypt). Still, there are Commerce sites use HTTP for login/register. This, sadly, happens to one of my favorite sites, itsajten: NonHttps (1)

In case of itsajten, there is not much of sensitive information an attacker can get if he sniffs the network and gets my password. I’m in Sweden and almost everything is transparent, even my income. But still, it does mean that I’m subject to social engineering attack. I notified itsajten about this but never heard from them since – which is a pity. They are otherwise very nice and they offer some of the best prices on the item I interested.

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Diagnose your Episerver site: find and fix the issues

It’s quite often to see some questions related to issues posted in Episerver World forums. While I (and most of people there) are willing to help, it still takes time for you to write the question and wait for an answer. Sometimes, the answer can be incomplete or even incorrect, because the people answering your question do not have the full context as you do. The truth is, you’re the person who know the most about your site, and you can do something to diagnose it. Those steps below are in the order you should take to diagnose your site:

Browser console is your friend. It’s the thing which seemingly ignored the most. When something does not work in Edit UI (CMS) or Catalog UI (Commerce), make sure to open your Browser console and switch to Console tab. If their was a network issue, such as a 500 “Server error” response, make sure to open it. (Right click and choose “Open in a new tab” in Chrome). More often than you might think, it can reveal the underlying problem. If it’s a JavaScript error, how does it look like?
Logging is your (another) friend. When something seems to be wrong, check your log file, or turn down your logging level to see if you can see any trace there. In some case, no log found can also be a trace to solve the problem.
Does iisreset solve your problem? No I’m not suggesting you to run iisreset every minute on your production site, but it might isolate the problem – if it does, then the problem might relate to cache, or initialization modules. If it does not, well, it can be anything else. But at least it’s not caused by certain things – the key is to narrow down the causes of problem. You can also try to call

ISynchronizedObjectInstanceCache.Clear();

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How Episerver Catalog content versions work

This is an excerpt from my book – Pro Episerver Commerce. Use http://leanpub.com/proepiservercommerce/c/Easter2016 to get 20% off the book during Easter holiday (Mar 24th – Mar 28th)

One of the most important features in CatalogContentProvider is it bring versioning to catalog content. It was somewhat limited with Commerce 7.5 (the languages handling was a bit sloppy), but it has been much more mature since Commerce 9. The versioning system in Commerce 9 is now more or less on par with versioning in CMS, and it’s a good thing.

If you’re new to Episerver CMS/Commerce, then it might be useful to know how version and save action work in content system. Of course, you can skip this section if you already know about it. The version status is defined in EPiServer.Core.VersionStatus. When you save a content, you have to pass a EPiServer.DataAccess.SaveAction to IContentRepository.Save method.

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Episerver Commerce routing internals, part 2

This post is a second post after http://vimvq1987.com/2016/03/episerver-commerce-routing-internals-part-1/ . The third part in the series can be found here: http://vimvq1987.com/2016/03/redirecting-your-product-urls-in-episerver-commerce/. (I know, I should have published the post in the right order.) They are all excerpts from my book – Pro Episerver Commerce.

The hierarchical approach:

This “new” approach (today it’s not new anymore, perhaps we can call it newer?) was introduced in Commerce 7.5 to make the routing of Catalog contents inline with CMS content. The core concept of this approach is to reflect the structure of contents to the structure of the Uri, for the discoverability. With SEO Uri approach, customers will never know how to get to the parent node, to see the other items in same category. With the partial routing, they can. To allow that, every catalog content has a piece of information – RouteSegment. This is saved in CatalogItemSeo as UriSegment, but is hidden for editing in Commerce Manager

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Episerver Commerce routing internals, part 1

Routing is important for any sites, and it’s even more important for a Commerce site – it can help driven sales. People nowadays search for everything, and ranking higher in the search results yield much better chance of your products being purchased. There are two routing systems in Episerver Commerce (as always!). The old one is based on SEO URI, has been there since Commerce R1, and the new one, HierarchicalCatalogPartialRouter, which is a partial router, was introduced in Commerce 7.5.

The SEO Uri approach

This approach is based on the SEO Uri, so the link to your product will be in form of http:///yourproduct.aspx. Note that .aspx is the default, but you are free to choose another extension, or even no extension at all. The SEO Uri can be edited in both Commerce Manager and Catalog UI

SEOCommerceManager — SEO Uri editing in Commerce Manager

Those information are stored in CatalogItemSeo for both Nodes and Entries, which each row represents the information of one node or one entry in one language. Note that only the Uri is unique and is used by the system, it’s up to your site implementation to utilize other information such as Title, Description – just follow best SEO practices.

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Sending too many newsletters:

Plan ahead:

Use HTTP for login/register page.