Hi everyone,

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!

Four months have passed since the launch of our new network of servers which host Click2Sell Affiliate Network system and serve your needs there. That was the first major upgrade of our used servers which were set up before Click2Sell launch three years ago. The old servers performed really well and managed to serve thousands of users without any major issue. During the first three years uptime of the old servers were ~99.87%, and what’s even more impressive is that most of the downtime were just planned system updates (sometimes we naturally had to temporarily close the system in order to update Click2Sell code).

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.

My favorite type of post again! I really like to write about new features, tweaks and changes in Click2Sell system, so I’m glad to write this one. This time I’ll tell you about one of our most recent tweaks in the system: modified buy button’s code.

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

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In the previous post I introduced our new improved checkout page to you and told you its benefits over the old checkout style. I mentioned there about enriched checkout page customization briefly and promised to talk more about it in a dedicated post. Here we go.

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.

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Today I want to tell you about our newest change in Click2Sell.

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.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Time for a new feature again!

This is yet another step to make Click2Sell system friendlier to 3rd party software, scripts, automated services and so on. Perhaps the first major step in this area was an introduction of Click2Sell API service which allowed merchants to automate important parts of their business or just make them more flexible.

Now let’s talk about the fresh feature which definately will help you to increase your sales – Click2Sell Marketplace XML feed! Click2Sell marketplace already has about one thousand products. We are very pleased that there are more and more products. However, quite many people asked for some way which would allow them to easily take the content of the marketplace. Being able to get such information easily let various 3rd party software, scripts or services to make various things. Just some examples of what they can do:

• Deep analysis of the marketplace. Using such service allows affiliates easily find out the best affiliate programs;
• Remote usage of the marketplace in any 3rd party software. This let users quickly do their things without browsing the marketplace in their browsers.
• "Adsense-style" text ads. Some scripts can automatically create text ads with embedded affiliate link according to webpage content (thus making an ad very relevant).
• Lots of other things…

As you already see, all such products/services essentially need easily accessible summary of marketplace.

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Dear Click2Sell.EU members,

All this past month we at Click2Sell.EU were working really hard to prepare a new system’s version. There were a lot of new improvements and tweaks made that makes Click2Sell.EU an even better system to sell your digital and material products online and of course – run your own affiate program and your whole affiliate marketing business. After new update we have faster Click2Sell reports!

But, let’s start from the major features and new tweaks.

As more and more new merchants and affiliates join and start using Click2Sell.EU system to sell ebooks, software or any other products online, we get higher workload on our side – especially the servers. We put a lot of development hours to make Click2Sell.EU not only a user-friendly system, but we were also constantly improving the overall website’s and member area speed.

Some of the most active Click2Sell.EU merchants noticed that the more affiliates promoted their products, the slower the reporting section became. This reporting section includes all the in-depth statistical Click2Sell reports:

• General Report;
• Daily Report;
• Conversion Report;
• Referral Report;
• Keywords Report;

and Tracking Channels report (can be found by navigating to For Merchant –> My Products –> Tracking Channels).

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Dear Click2Sell blog readers,

It’s almost a month since we posted our last update in this blog… It’s summer… Well, I must admit that the summer is quite slow month compared to other periods of year. Many people go on vacations or just spend time with their families, staying away from their computers and that’s normal.

However, this summer is not slow for all of us – Click2Sell.EU. Even though most of people have their vacations during the summertime, we worked and work hard… really hard on Click2Sell.EU. So now I have some great news to report.

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