Frightcatalog.com Re-Launch First Impressions

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We’ve had the new version of FrightCatalog.com up for a week now. We’ve had lots of great comments and feedback, but success is never really gauged by that. To that end, its good to see that a lot of hard work has paid off and I think we’re starting to see that from the numbers in Google Analytics

The first half of the month (July 1 – July 18) we saw 83,796 uniques, 9.27 pages/visit, and a 0.33% conversion rate.
The last week (July 19 – July 25), with the re-launch, we’ve seen 41,673 uniques, 12.00 pages/visit, and a 0.75% conversion rate.

Almost half the uniques in a 1 week period than we had in the first 18 days of the month. Page visits are up by almost 3.5, and our conversion rate has more than doubled. Good initial numbers after week one.

This is starting to prove that our de-facto framework for our e-commerce sites is pretty solid (all software can always be improved and we’ll continue to do so), and has a lot of promise. It’ll be nice to see how we do through the entire Halloween season with some new marketing initiatives in place. I hope this is a sign of good things to come in the coming months.

New FrightCatalog.com – 2007

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Its been quite a long week. Late last night saw the coming of the latest edition of FrightCatalog.com. I think you’ll notice the more product centric slant its taken on this year. A little less glitz, a little more practicality. It should be MUCH faster too. Same framework as YumDrop.com and the soon to come ImportCostumes.com. Thanks for Kyle’s help, even though he’s moved on to a new venture.

My Poor MacBook Pro

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I’m a huge fan of Apple products. I’ve owned 3 computers (PowerMac 8600/300, PowerBook Pismo, MacBook Pro 17″), convinced my brother to get 2 (PowerMac G4, MacBook Pro). The 8600/300 and PowerMac G4 both still run today (I sold the Pismo)!

I think Apple, in general, do things better than other computer manufacturers and Microsoft. The products a sleek and the OS is solid. Except for my MacBook Pro. About 6 months after I got my MacBook, I started having issues with the battery. It wouldn’t power on without the AC cord plugged in and I’d always see a black X through the battery icon. I called Apple and they sent me a new battery. Everything was fine for a few days, then the same thing. So I had to send it in. All they did was put another new battery in it. Got the MacBook back and again, it was fine for a week or so. Now I’m sending it in again for a second time for the same issue.

It’s nice that Apple reps are pleasant on the phone and are understanding of my situation. I hate being without my MacBook as I use it for work all the time. In fact, I probably use it for work more than I do just browsing the internet. Hopefully they get it right this time around. Which makes me wonder. At one point will they just send me a new MacBook if they can’t fix it?

Movie Review: Transformers

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One of my favorite toys and cartoons growing up was Transformers. All the kids were into it. Some had more toys than others, but everyone was nuts about the cartoon. Then they made the animated movie and killed off a lot of kid’s hero, Optimus Prime. Transformers faded away until recently, and now we have the full action movie in theaters, which opened July 3rd.

I just got home from the theater and I have to say, they did an excellent job with it. The only downside I thought was that they used a Mustang as a bad guy, and I’m a huge ‘Stang fan so that didn’t sit well. Anyway, the acting was decent, the animation for the robots was excellent, and it seemed that they tried to stick to the old Transformer story the best they could. Even my fiancee, who was a little skeptical about seeing it, enjoyed it. I’ll give it an A, one of the better movies I’ve gone to see recently.

Update: SpeckProducts MacBook Hard Case

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A while back I wrote about SpeckProducts MacBook Hard Case and how great it was. Well, I went on my first airplane trip with my MacBook and I’ve got to say, the hard case comes in handy. Since you have to take you computer out when going through airport screening, not worrying about TSA scratching it up on you is great. And, when you’re on the plane, you can easily close it and not worry about anyone spilling ice or drinks as they’re passed over you. One added bonus I found was, since I have a 17″ MacBook which takes up the entire seat tray, I could simply close it and put a drink on it and not worry about my MacBook. Water or soda easily wipes off and cleans up off of the hard case. Well worth the $50 if you don’t have one yet!

Larry King Live & Lite-Brite

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I’m in California this week for work and after my day was over, I was sitting in my hotel room flipping through random channels. I happened upon the Larry King Live interview with Paris Hilton. The first thing I noticed, as I don’t watch Larry King (nor do I pay much attention to Paris Hilton…though her homemade movie is neat…), was that the backdrop of his set looks like a complete Lite-Brite pattern! Anyone else ever notice this?

Paying for College

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I’ve noticed on television lately (the little that I actually do watch) that there are an increasingly number of advertisements for college loans. When I was in college, you got a loan through the school, the government, or Sallie Mae. Now, you can get one from pretty much anywhere. The latest one I saw from Chase. Another I saw the other day from a company I didn’t recognize. What I’m wondering is in this day and age of borrowing until you’re blue in the face, have things gone to far? Do credit companies really need to target people with NO income at all to make a buck? I realize college is getting more and more expensive (for what reason I’m not sure), and with Sallie Mae recently being bought out, are college students going to get a raw deal? Back when I finished school (only 7 years ago), I had classmates who graduated with $50,000 in debt, which I thought was incredible. Now, it looks like students (non-med students that is) will graduate with potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

It seems to me that someone needs to take a hard look at the state of affording a college education. My guess is that less and less kids will go to college (that is if someone educates them that at some point, being $300,000 in debt is insane) because they can’t afford it. And I’m not talking about inner city kids or minorities, I’m talking your regular good to do, got good grades students. At some point we, as a community, need to say enough is enough and we aren’t going to pay for this stuff.

PayPal Web Payments Pro Testing

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It appears that testing PayPal’s Web Payments Pro in their Sandbox doesn’t work like it would in a live environment. It won’t return error codes for address verification failures out of the box unless you set it up to do so. I was lucky enough to get a response in the developer forum that showed me this blog post on how to test AVS failures.

Also, it doesn’t look like you can test Discover Card or American Express credit cards in the Sandbox either. If there are any PayPal developers out there that come across this blog post, that’s a feature I’d like to see! I need to know that my code works 100% before it goes live!

Building an Ecometry Shipping Station

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For this upcoming Halloween, we’re moving the Morbid Industries warehouse out to California. It was a business decision a long time coming. Shipping product from China to the East Coast and then back across the country was getting expensive. A lot of our customers are on the West Coast too, so we were basically shipping product in containers across the country for nothing. So, because we were doing this, and we use Escalate Retail’s Ecometry for order management, I needed to build a shipping station to send out there. Ecometry sends you to Agilysys, for pre-built shipping stations, however, they’re really expensive and we were looking to save some money. I had read on the Ecometry Google newsgroup that people had built their own, so I decided to brave it and do the same.

I’d like to thank a couple of people for there help right off the bat. Paul, a support engineer from Datalogic/PSC was a big help getting the right interface cable I needed and helping with programming the scanner to read our barcodes properly. Also, Daniel Lively for his suggestions on the Ecometry Google newsgroup. Thanks guys!

Here’s the list of parts I used:

  • Dell Optiplex computer
  • Zebra Z4MPlus Thermal Printer
  • Mettler Toledo PS60 scale
  • SIIG Cyber 2S1P (model #JJ-P21012-S6) Dual serial port and Parallel port card
  • PSC Powerscan PSSR-1110
  • PSC AT keyboard wedge Y cable Model #8-0738-03
  • AT to PS/2 adapter
  • PS/2 to AT adapter

Pretty much you can hook up the entire thing and it will work. For the scale, you need to set your COM port to the following settings:

  • Baud Rate: 9600
  • Databits: 7
  • Parity: Event
  • Stop Bits: 2
  • Flow control: X on X off

For programming the scanner, you can find documentation on Datalogic’s website here. The programming guide that I needed for the model scanner I purchased is here. Depending on the scanner model you use, you’ll need a different programming guide so that you can scan the right bar codes for your application. We enabled Code 39 and Code 128 since we scan FedEx bar codes.

A couple of additional notes. I’m not sure I actually needed the SIIG Cyber 2S1P card as I would have had enough ports to hook up all the equipment. It was recommended on the newsgroup to get one for the scale. I was also told an easier setup with the PSC Powerscans is to use PSSR-7000 and a USB interface. They’re really easy to set up I guess. Also, in place of the Zebra Z4MPlus thermal printer, you can supposedly use a Zebra S600 or a S400, which are cheaper.

Most of the parts I sourced on eBay. I think all said and done, we paid less than $1,000 for the entire shipping station. The computer was free as we had one kicking around, but you can use pretty much any computer running Windows 2000 or Windows XP. I just recommend having a bit of memory in it so it isn’t a complete slug. I believe this is significantly less expensive than buying a pre-built shipping station through Agilysys. It’s faster than the one we originally bought from them too!