DavidP

@NorwegianRat It's SagePay we use, which is a UK based one. A lot of small companies use that in the UK as it's not as restrictive as Stripe and not as cumbersome as WorldPay. It just seems it's not well support by the module developers. There's also a problem with it not working with php 7.1+ due to the use of mcryptencrypt instead of openssl_encrypt.

I use it on one of my Prestashop shops and it's not very good. However, I spent ages looking for an alternative and unfortunately there isn't better out there to suits us for the UK. I did look at the Brazilian one (PresTeamShop I think) but it didn't support our payment gateway, which was a shame as it's meant to be the best. We had a lot of trouble with the module not working with our store and had to give them access to fix incompatibilities (the only other module we had installed was the JPresta page cache) but they sorted it out eventually. I did however have to provide lots of detailed examples explaining the problems with screen grabs. We still get lots of problems on the checkout with 'technical errors', which come from the user changing the quantity in the cart - it seems the module really struggles with people removing products, changing their quantity when auto-cart rules come into affect and entering quantities directly into the box. There's a delay in it processing and unfortunately customers can be impatient, which causes it to crash if they're too quick. If I didn't need our payment gateway support I'd jump ship from them.

I use the Knowband on one of my stores. I initially had a number of problems with it that took a couple of months to resolve, it ended up with having to give them access to patch it and those updates made it into a later update. At first they tried to charge me for their time to fix the issues but eventually they backed down and fixed them. The main issue was it didn't work with the 'move javascript to the end' and it had a number of timing issues. I'd say the checkout itself is quite good, though I've had to put in a couple of frigs myself in relation to default states/cities as I have variable shipping prices depending upon location. However, I'd say their support is 'cowboy' level as I've seen with a number of module developers. Saying that, I've been using it since then with no problems. That Presteam one sounds interesting, might have to take a look at that. When I bought the knowband I think it was the best available at the time.

A release creates a defined point in space that can be evaluated & tested on it's own merits, going with the latest version from GIT hub means introducing potential issues on previously tested sections of the code unless each submitted new bit of code has regression testing performed before it's allowed on the main branch. OpenCart suffers massively from this with most problems caused by bugfixes elsewhere. Even creating milestones in GIT hub to signify a release point in time that's been fully tested would allow people to grab versions that should work in an ideal scenario, without the need to work on the autoupdater. With regards to the 805 updates, the 1.04 on GIT has 13 open and 2 closed items, not 805, is there documentation & tests available for those 805 changes? I think the problem though for a lot of people is that TB is going down the route of developer orientated whereas some people coming from PS tend to be business / shop orientated with a lack of developer skills. They don't want to risk breaking their store with myriad changes, they just want the latest version that works and from the click of a button. Those type of shop owners will most likely stick with PS (even though it does tend to break stuff anyhow) because it gives them the safest route to keep their shop making money in their mind.

You're going to run into a wall when you try to have products that are free shipping and not free shipping in the same cart. There's no XOR type logic to knock out one rule in favour of the other, other than setting rules as incompatible with each other. It get much worse when you get into the realms of reduced shipping costs. The PrestaShop core cart/shipping rules are rubbish tbh. You need the ability to apply conditional logic to the rules.

@norwegian_rat I think a lot of people are 'letting their store be' because for many that chose PrestaShop there's no clear safe alternative that offers the same capabilities and they don't want to gamble their business on something that has too many risks associated with it. If there was a platform out there as good as PrestaShop 1.6 that didn't bring a lot of unknown issues along with it then I and many others would have switched last year. The closest alternative is OpenCart but that's really a hackathon with 1.5.4 being the most stable and 2.0 & 3.0 plagued with myriad problems, it's not something you'd switch to from PS 1.6 if you've got any sense.

Non-techie people don't tend to use the likes of slack and gitter and rely on forum updates / blog posts, a lot only work off the version released on Softalicious etc and only find the forums when they run into problems (unless they just give up). TBH I didn't even know TB had a gitter or slack channel, maybe I missed those posts! It does seem like TB is going down the route of dev orientated rather than business user, especially given the activity there. A few other ecommerce platforms I'm watching are also similar with most the activity on those chat boards and not on their forums. A fortnightly update from those channels of issues fixed / raised and stuff from github would appease a lot of people here that think TB has stalled. Something similar to build.prestashop with their weekly code updates might work.

@mdekker Sorry I can't give you the test keys as you'd need access to our merchant account as well, which I'm not allowed to provide. SagePay are very helpful if you've got a merchant account but when it comes to non-merchants they can be somewhat lacking :/

@mockob 1.0.4 has been delayed a bit as they're concentrating on the GDPR, I've just had an email with a blog about it: https://thirtybees.com/blog/thirty-bees-and-gdpr/

I'd not recommend this as your database can quickly become massive. Magento 1 has this sort of thing in place and I've seen sites with over 20,000 records for re-directs in it as even slight changes to the url / structure creates new re-directs. You can end up in the situation with redirect -> redirect -> redirect ... etc in a long chain, which is very bad for Google. Best way to do it is 301 any that are linked to via .htaccess (if you can't get the original source changed) and re-submit the new url through Google Console. Try to get Google to re-index the new url, it usually sorts itself out within a month. Most of your urls won't be linked to unless your site is very old so re-submitting through Google Console for the new url is a better method.

@lesley you might want to make the donate button change when you hover over it so people know it can be clicked.

@mockob Google has recently pushed out an update to the Search Console, which is in Beta. If you go to the Index Coverage page under Status then click the valid tab it shows you links that are submitted and indexed. If you then click that link it'll show all of your urls, from there you can click the download button and get the complete list in a csv file. It also shows you when the page was last crawled. If you've not already been sent an email from Google for it then just search for Google Search Console beta and login from there.

@alwayspaws whilst it's good at looking at competitor on-site SEO, it can't tell you about backlinks. Also the price of it is a one year licence, after that it expires and you need to re-new it. I'd suggest sticking with the free 500 url version and just running that on some competitor sites, it's enough to hit most of the comparable competitors to you. I'd also highly recommend SemRush, it's very expensive but you get 5 free uses a day though this shows only 5 to 10 bits of info but it's free and you can sort it to view the data differently. It's worth paying for a one month go at this at $99.95 and just spidering the hell out of your top 5 competitors and putting it all in a spreadsheet - it gives you a good snapshot of where you stand with them and most importantly, what information you need to steal from them :) Obviously SEO changes constantly but a 1 month go will give you a lot to get your own website in order.

@alwayspaws you can export your urls from the Google Search Console, it's got every indexed page there, just go onto the indexed page section and download them. Screaming Frog is a fantastic tool but it's really more suited in that scenario to downloading competitor urls, for your own the search console is the best bet. I know you can use the sitemap as well but the Search Console is better as it shows you what's actually indexed, rather than just submitted.

@lesley I'd like to see a donation button on the site as well such as via PayPal. My company (and myself) are old school in that we hate to have recurring subscription costs going on but are willing to donate to the project, especially given the whole security issues with card details stored around the web and the amount of hacks that are ongoing. I know it's paranoia but a lot of people are paranoid about their data, that's part of the reason for the GDPR in the first place. I honestly believe that if you asked someone to pay $1 a month to Patreon they'd say no but if you asked them to donate $50 then there's a much higher chance of that happening because there's very little information stored about them in the latter case.

@lesley I would never put test software on a live site, I'm even reluctant to touch any PrestaShop release after 1.6.1.12 as they've all introduced lots of bugs! I hate to think what the imminent 1.6.1.18 will break. Now that I know there's not going to be a version for the updater but just via the download then I'm OK doing that, I just figured initially on waiting on the official. I run WAMP 3 on my machine anyhow for WordPress so adding in a PrestaShop virtual won't be too much of a problem. I know @mdekker tried helping me out in the past with Vagrant but unfortunately my Windows 7 machine doesn't have the necessary updates to allow it to work so I gave up trying local stuff at that point. I don't do GitHub, it's too faffy so can I assume I'm OK to just take a download of the repository on Git of 1.0.x and copy it over a local TB 1.0.3?

What's the easiest way to get the current 1.0.4 code from GitHub?

@wakabayashi a lot of issues are raised on the forums here and they're promptly fixed, a lot of merchant people don't use the likes of github, even that disqus system is a pain to use, which is probably why the blog posts don't get comments! I can't comment for others but for me, I've tried 1.0.3, I know there's issues with it but trying to get 1.0.4 going means an FTP over, uninstalling a load of modules, disabling stuff, removing code etc - I can wait till I can upgrade from 1.0.3 or PS to 1.0.4. I could do the update myself but seeing what @SLiCK_303 has gone through I worry I'd spend a lot of time resolving issues. A 1.0.4 updater would do all that so you're testing out the system rather than worrying if you've done the update right. I know the devs need to make money to keep this thing going, I'd be more than happy to pay in for crowdfunding a proper updater that migrates from PS1.6.x and resolves the file / settings side than some module that only a handful of people will use.

I see there's blog posts going up about migrating from Magento to Thirty Bees, migrating to Thirty Bees with support and now new crowdfunding stuff. Also I've been offered help with omnipay payment methods stuff (which I appreciate) but don't you think for the benefit of all that you concentrate on getting 1.0.4 released before looking at these other side projects? There's a lot of people want to go to 1.0.4 via the updater and I suspect a lot of them are holding off doing a migrate until this is out given that 1.0.4 is going to be such a big update from 1.0.3. By crowdfunding some new stuff you're taking your time away from the core product. Please don't turn into Prestashop with the 'well the core's broken but here's some new sparkly stuff', that's the reason a lot of people are leaving PS in the first place!

@annafjmorris make sure you've only got one GA on your site, having two will give the exact scenario you describe of bounce rate down and page views up - because you're recording the data twice it's effectively not seen as a bounce. One guess is you created a new GA for your https rather than just changing the existing GA and then put the new one on your page? I've seen that done in the past on sites I've looked at. It's difficult to see though with that image if that's the case or not as it's too zoomed out. If this isn't the case and there's only one GA then rather than looking at your overall bounce rate, try to narrow it down to pages, usually there'll be a few high traffic pages that are affecting the overall results rather than lots of low traffic pages.

@annafjmorris check your Google webmaster tools to ensure there's no external links to the page first, if there is and you do delete it then you'll need a 301 in your .htaccess. If you just disable it though you can set up a re-direct from the product page itself. Also that page may be indexed for certain keywords so you don't want to just give those up, especially if they're bringing in traffic. Check your Google Analytics and Search Console to see what keywords are linked to the page. Also use Semrush if you've got it. It can be better to rework the page to keep the traffic if it's got a lot.

@mdekker the token system is something used by the server and direct methods but not the form. Use of the token system entails customer accounts and doesn't apply to guest orders. I think you'd want the two options of server for logged in customers to allow for quick payments and the form to cater to guest customers or those customers who don't wish to store their card details on the SagePay server. So you're right that I'd need to combine the server / form depending on the needs of the customer. The existing Prestashop SagePay module is definitely not server / direct and only form.

@baarssen fantastic looking site! I see it's Magento so it'd be very interesting to see that replicated in TB.

@mdekker that sounds a fantastic idea with the OmniPay! When I last looked at it it seemed unsupported and I think you mentioned there were issues with it. I've looked at the OmniPay Github and it seems there is a SagePay implementation for both direct and server but there's no reference to 'form'. Given the PCI requirements for handling bank card details I suspect nearly everyone would use the form method with SagePay performing the card processing. Even the server method is risky as it entails communication to/from the website and a SagePay server. This page has the stuff for SagePay on github: https://github.com/thephpleague/omnipay-sagepay but it needs composer on the system to install it, which I don't currently have. It seems that branch was last updated in September 2017, like you say, there's been recent updates. This is the page on SagePay for all 3 methods: https://www.sagepay.co.uk/support/15/36/integration-methods-explained This is from SagePay explaining the form method: https://www.sagepay.co.uk/support/12/36/sage-pay-form For the form method you pass over to SagePay the users name, address, currency and amount and it does all the processing / validation then returns the user back to the website - there's no interaction back and forth like there would be with the server method. This makes it clear now why we can't do refunds from the website. Our module is very basic in that it doesn't allow entry of a success & fail url, it just returns the user to the last page they were on regardless of status. From looking at the PS module code my issue could be related to PSVERSION_ though I'm not 100% sure. Does Thirty Bees update this to a new value? I found something in header.tpl about re-assignment of var PSVERSION_ = '{$smarty.const.TBVERSION_|@addcslashes:'\''}'; but I don't know what this is doing. I notice there's also some hard-coding in there of http that needs to be changed to https.

@hfxracing waiting till next year isn't an option as PrestaShop 1.6.x is supposed to have support ended in October / November this year though given by PS current progress it's pretty much ended now! The risk is if they suddenly find security issues that need to be fixed, that's the thing to worry about - fortunately as it's not Magento / WordPress / Joomla there's a lot less to worry about since those seem to be the platforms hacked the most. Most security issues on PS are third-party modules. Unfortunately for us we need some complex stuff that is partly only available on TB/PS unless we want to go to a paid solution at $25k+ per year so it's really not an option. I'm mainly marketing / sales side as well though I've dev'd in the past (non-web) and given the options available I'll probably go back to doing some dev to add features we really need. There's a lot of work required in the B2B side so I'll try working on that towards the middle of the year. The dev guys here are working their ar$es off sorting out their own clients and the 1.0.4 issues so I'm not going to impose on them unless I absolutely need to. Once 1.0.4 is out I'll have a good go at it before I put my hands up :)