wizardsandwars Posted January 4, 2003 Share Posted January 4, 2003 Often, a shop will have customers who will come to the shop, create an account, but for some reason, they do not place an order. Since we are often developing on our webshop, we thought it was useful to automate an email to these customers, asking for feedback, and trying to try to find our why they decided not to order. This data is very useful in attempting to tailor your website or shop to meet the needs of your customers. This script is scheduled in 'Cron' or 'Winat'. It will keep track of what customers it has emailed using a static data file. Keep in mind that this is my first contribution, so please go easy. However, that being said, I'd like any feedback anyone could offer. Quote ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: As of Oct 2006, I'm not as active in this forum as I used to be, but I still work with osC quite a bit. If you have a question about any of my posts here, your best bet is to contact me though either Email or PM in my profile, and I'll be happy to help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wizardsandwars Posted January 10, 2003 Author Share Posted January 10, 2003 Never got any feedback on this one, and I thought I's specifically ask for some thins time. Quote ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: As of Oct 2006, I'm not as active in this forum as I used to be, but I still work with osC quite a bit. If you have a question about any of my posts here, your best bet is to contact me though either Email or PM in my profile, and I'll be happy to help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trailz Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 Well for me I dont get alot of people signing up that don't do anything. Mainly those people use fake email address's. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rseigel Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 One word - SPAM. Honestly, if I go to a site and don't buy anything the last thing I want is an email from the merchant asking me why. What makes that merchant think it's any of his bloody business why I don't want to buy his stuff. Erm...you get the picture. :wink: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wizardsandwars Posted January 10, 2003 Author Share Posted January 10, 2003 Here is an example of what I send them. Keep in mind that this is approx. 15 minutes after they register for an account. Hello rseigal, I noticed that you were interested in purchasing a game on our website. Since we're a relativly new company with new software, I just wanted to drop you a quick line to make sure that you didn't encounter any problems, or have any questions. Also, if you have any ideas or suggestions for us, your feedback is always appreciated. Chris Bradley Wizards and Wars www.wizardsandwars.com I usually get about a 60% response from these emails, and I end up talking about 1/2 of them into ordering. I actualy get alot of complements from customers that I was concerned that they were having problems. I didn't know that they were, but I know that people often have questions when they shop, and can get frustrated easily and leave. I had one guy today that said he wanted to order, but couldn't find the "add to cart button". This product had a very long product description, and you had to scroll a long ways down to see it. He was appreciative of the help, and ended up ordering after all. I have sent about 700 of these emails out, and have yet to get a complaint. Quote ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: As of Oct 2006, I'm not as active in this forum as I used to be, but I still work with osC quite a bit. If you have a question about any of my posts here, your best bet is to contact me though either Email or PM in my profile, and I'll be happy to help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rseigel Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 I'm probably not the best one to comment on this since I'm so much of a anti-SPAM kinda guy. I like my privacy on the web and this IMHO invades it. On the other hand, I suppose most people would find that helpful (or at worst pushy) rather than SPAMISH. Dunno....hard to argue with a 60% response. If it works for you I'd say keep on doing it (and I'm sure there are probably others that would like to use it as well). :wink: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wizardsandwars Posted January 10, 2003 Author Share Posted January 10, 2003 I appreciate it Ron. And I'm with you as far a Spam in the traditional sense goes. Can stand pop technology either. In this case, though, I think of it more like the sales rep in the department store that comes by and asks if everything is ok. The only time I get irritated is if I have to say "no thanks" twice. Besides, this can help tremendously, if the customers that leave tell you why they left. Quote ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: As of Oct 2006, I'm not as active in this forum as I used to be, but I still work with osC quite a bit. If you have a question about any of my posts here, your best bet is to contact me though either Email or PM in my profile, and I'll be happy to help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dreamscape Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 I'm probably not the best one to comment on this since I'm so much of a anti-SPAM kinda guy. I like my privacy on the web and this IMHO invades it. if you sign up for an account on a website/webstore and give them your email... well I don't really think you can consider it SPAM if they send you an email after signing up... I mean c'mon... if you really didn't want to get emails from them, you either wouldn't have signed up or wouldn't have used your real email address. Quote The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing - Edmund Burke Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dreamscape Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 wizards maybe u haven't gotten any feedback cause there is no link to the contribution to download it Quote The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing - Edmund Burke Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rseigel Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 Sorry but giving anyone my email address for the purpose of signing up for an account does NOT give them the right to send me email for the rest of my natural life. Until I have actually purchased something I HAVE NOT entered into a business relationship with said company and I personally do not expect to get anything from them. C'mon yourself! :roll: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TB Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 For all those interested, here's the link to the contribution here: http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,860 I haven't gotten around to trying it out yet, though I would be more than pleased to get an e-mail like the example. It's calm, soothing and isn't pushy about sales... good effort! Quote "The price of success is perseverance. The price of failure comes much cheaper." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dreamscape Posted January 11, 2003 Share Posted January 11, 2003 Sorry but giving anyone my email address for the purpose of signing up for an account does NOT give them the right to send me email for the rest of my natural life. Until I have actually purchased something I HAVE NOT entered into a business relationship with said company and I personally do not expect to get anything from them. C'mon yourself! :roll: we are not talking about sending email for the rest of your natural life... we are talking about like 15 minutes after you sign up for an account... do you even know the definitino of SPAM?? I really doubt it... check your good friend webster... he can help. Quote The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing - Edmund Burke Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rseigel Posted January 11, 2003 Share Posted January 11, 2003 I really wish this forum had an ignore feature. :roll: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TB Posted January 11, 2003 Share Posted January 11, 2003 I'm sure you're not the only one who wishes there was an ignore button! :wink: Quote "The price of success is perseverance. The price of failure comes much cheaper." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TB Posted January 11, 2003 Share Posted January 11, 2003 Chris, I've downloaded the contribution though I think it's missing some files... or at least one: feedback_data.php there is a feedback_data.txt though it only has one character in it. I look forward to using it once I've got the full download. Also, how essential is it that the files go in the root directories on my server? Quote "The price of success is perseverance. The price of failure comes much cheaper." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tbiser Posted January 11, 2003 Share Posted January 11, 2003 W&W, I think that's a great idea. I'm a small shop too, and I'm always looking for ways of giving the customer something that the big guys can't - personal service. I would imagine, with a little imagination, this could be the ticket! Hey, who can argue with a 60% response rate? I'll give it a whirl, sometime. Keep us posted on any updates. Thanks! Thad Quote Consulting - If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wizardsandwars Posted January 11, 2003 Author Share Posted January 11, 2003 TB, there should only be 3 files. feedback_date.php should only contain a 0 in it. This just keeps track of the last customer_id that we emailed. feedback_request.php is the script you will scedule to run in Cron every 15 minutes. feedback_tester.php - a simple little interface that will execute the program iwth a click. You can place the files anywhere you want( That Cron can get to), as long as you alter the path at the top of the feedback_request.php. Additionally, you should probably redirect the output from the script in the cron entry. Depending on the interface you use for cron, your cron entry should look something like this: 15, 30, 45, 00 * * * * /home/username/feedback_request.php > /home/username//feedbackrequest.log Quote ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: As of Oct 2006, I'm not as active in this forum as I used to be, but I still work with osC quite a bit. If you have a question about any of my posts here, your best bet is to contact me though either Email or PM in my profile, and I'll be happy to help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tbiser Posted January 11, 2003 Share Posted January 11, 2003 Oh, yeah... rsiegel wrote: Sorry but giving anyone my email address for the purpose of signing up for an account does NOT give them the right to send me email for the rest of my natural life. Until I have actually purchased something I HAVE NOT entered into a business relationship with said company and I personally do not expect to get anything from them. C'mon yourself! That's not true. Just entering an e-commerce site gives them the right to use your e-mail address. You should read the "Terms and Conditions" and "Privacy Statements" of the sites you visit sometime. According to privacy laws, so long as the site clearly posts in its privacy statement their intensions on using the information you provide, and give you a means of backing out of it, they can do it. Besides, I'd hardly call this SPAM. And as annoying as SPAM is, its no more annoying than reading posts from some bonehead who has the audacity to bash the contributions of others, when he probably doesn't have the skills to make contributions of his own. Nuff said. Quote Consulting - If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rseigel Posted January 11, 2003 Share Posted January 11, 2003 its no more annoying than reading posts from some bonehead who has the audacity to bash the contributions of others, when he probably doesn't have the skills to make contributions of his own. Nuff said. Did that make you feel like a tough guy? :roll: I wasn't bashing.....I was offering my opinion. If you don't like it then skip on to the next thread and get over it. That's "nuff said". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blueline Posted January 11, 2003 Share Posted January 11, 2003 Excuse me...aside from the OBVIOUS difference of opinions that have been expressed in this topic....what exactly is Cron? Thanks, -Chris Quote Chris Sullivan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blueline Posted January 11, 2003 Share Posted January 11, 2003 Thanks burt. I don't suppose you have a url for it? I guess I could always search for it as well. Thanks, -Chris Quote Chris Sullivan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trailz Posted January 11, 2003 Share Posted January 11, 2003 WW how many people on average do you get signing up compared to the amount of total visitors? Like 1 /100 people that come to your site signup and out of 100 that signup 1 buy a product? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arames Posted January 12, 2003 Share Posted January 12, 2003 First a big thanx for this great contribution... it is just what I have been looking for, since I have now round 192 customers and only 13 % of them did order. So I guess that this contribution will help me a lot. The problem is that this will be my first time to use cron job. Therefor I hope you read the step by step I did and corrct me if I did something wrong... :cry: 1- Downloaded and Unzipped the contribution 2- Opened "feedback_request.php" an changed the line "$datafile= "/homepages/47/d691694/htdocs/catalog/feedback_data.txt";" 3- Saved file "feedback_request.php" 4- Opened "...english/create_account_process.php", changed the file and added the 2 lines of contribution, saved and uploaded file back to my catalog online. 5- Uploaded all files to www.mydomain.com/catalog 6- CHMOD files to permission "777" 7-went to www.mydomain.com/catalog/feedback_tester.php 8- It took me to www.mydomain.com/catalog/feedback_request.php Result: Nothing! a white page. Did it work? did I do something wrong??? Please help me :oops: p.s: I asked my host and he said that I can do cron jobs on my server. Thank you in advance for your help..... :cry: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wizardsandwars Posted January 13, 2003 Author Share Posted January 13, 2003 WW how many people on average do you get signing up compared to the amount of total visitors? I find that about *about* 1 out of every 45 people that visit my website create an account, and that *about* half of those place an order. arames, You have it okay until step 6. after that, if you wnat to stest this, you need to open the datafile, and change the number in there to a number sammer than the greatest customer_id in your database. for example, if the greatest customer_id in your database is 410, you should change the datafile to the number 405 or something close to that. When this program runs, it the number in the dataftile is still zero (what it comes with), then all it will do is set the datafile to the number of the greatest customer id. This is to keep people from accidentally emailing all of their customers in the database. Also, I don't see where you saved the datafile to your document root. Blueline, if you use a webhost, you should have a 'link' to your 'cron' in your 'cpanel'. If you have your own server, cron shgould come standard with *nix. If you are running Windows, you should not use 'cron' but instead use "Winat" a program in windows that does the same thing as Cron. Quote ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: As of Oct 2006, I'm not as active in this forum as I used to be, but I still work with osC quite a bit. If you have a question about any of my posts here, your best bet is to contact me though either Email or PM in my profile, and I'll be happy to help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TB Posted January 19, 2003 Share Posted January 19, 2003 I still haven't gotten this one to work? :( When I click on 'HERE', all that happens is my browser SLOWLY attempts to load some page, and then times out. My latest error is one saying 'error connecting to mySQL database'. Has anyone else had these problems installing this mod? Any solutions? Cheers, Tony Quote "The price of success is perseverance. The price of failure comes much cheaper." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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