Skip to main content

osCommerce here we come

osCommerce is another one of those amazing internet collaborative ventures that we have explored and made use of from time to time.

It provides a secure open source e-commerce solution that can be implemented on the most commonly available hosting platforms by using PHP and MySQL. Having decided to move in this direction yesterday we now have the basic system set up and now have to populate it and integrate it with our existing pages.

This presents quite a few tricky choices - my instinct is to retain the existing simple html site structure and create a separate shop for customers who are uncomfortable with BitPass for whatever reason. The main usability issues relate to movement between the two parts of the site and maintaining session continuity. To start with, I think we will assume that visitors will complete their visit in the shop once they have moved into it and if they return they may have to sign in again.

There are also going to be some pricing decisions - low value credit card transactions are expensive and so we will have to look at handling fees as well as volume related discounts.

In the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - No 4 First Movement by JS Bach.

Popular posts from this blog

Worldwide audience

In the last month Download2MP3 was reached from 169 countries with the remaining gaps being a few countries in North Africa. These days most visits are going direct to one of the big name composer pages although the ragtime category is holding it's own. The last twelve months or so have been a dry patch interms of producing more recordings but I'm pleased to report that the technical issues which been related to various software upgrades. I have been using Cubase for at least 25 years not on an Atari but an Acorn with an external roaland Sound Canvas synthesiser which was purchased in London's Tin Pan Alley. Some of the steps that have got us to 10.5 have been very disconcerting but the truth is that there is nothing to campare with it for the work that I do. I have also acquired some exciting new instruments in the last few months to augment the stalwarts which saw this site get underway. So the Covid19 Lockdown is giving me the time to produce more recordings wh...
Read more
Persistance does it It is now 15 years since this website was launched. In that time we have had ups and downs - some associated with Google algorithm changes but this year we seem to have seen steady growth in visits and some dramatic download volumes. It looks as if we might reach 1000 giga bytes of download this month for the first time ever.  Our global reach is wider - although Indonesia and India still account for over 25% of visits we had visits from 126 countries in the last week exceptions include Uragauy and some sub sahara countries. The bulk come through organic Google searches with the next largest share coming from our daily tweets. 
Read more

Mozart is powering our growth

For years our Mozart arrangements failed to achieve the recognition they deserved but in the last few months this has changed. Our Mozart page has move up the Google and Yandex search results and now benefits substantially from the high level of interest in this composer. Just wondering what I need to do to help Bach keep up. There are some odd features to the usage of our site - some of it almost looks like streaming as gigabytes are down loaded or there are thousands of page hits from what is reported as a Russian search index robot. No, perhaps Google just badly underestimate how popular we are in Russia because they are not so popular there. According to Google India and Indonesia are still the mainstays of our audience with Nigeria and South Africa nudging in just below the USA. So it seems we are supporting developing countries just not in the way orgiginally envisaged.
Read more