Shopstix is being built by Abstraktion, a UK based web application company.  Here’s what Abstraktion says about Shopstix.

an eCommerce engine which is flexible but not too bloated. Shop owners can add any custom set of “fields” to describe their products, add “galleries” of product images and even add custom “variations” (such as size, weight, etc). Shopstix then creates a bespoke admin panel around these preferences, to ensure that adding a product to your shop is as effortless as adding a new post to your blog.

I am excited to see what Shopstix does.  In particular, the idea of a bespoke admin panel is intriguing.  This should allow for serious customization so that back end of each store is tailor made to the needs of that store.

Can they compete with WP e-Commerce?  I seriously doubt that their first release will be anywhere near as feature rich as Instinct’s shopping cart.  WP e-Commerce works with numerous gateways, has a bucket load of configurable options and after a couple of years of development is finally more than a plugin for selling the occasional t-shirt or cd from a blog page.  Having observed Instinct’s ongoing struggles to build a true e-Commerce solution for WordPress I know it isn’t as easy as it looks.  Will Shopstix be a serious ecommerce solution?  Only time will tell.

If you have a business name that could cause the search engine for Google local similar confusion, you should check to see if you’re showing up for terms you don’t want to appear for.  One easy way to do this is to go into your Google Local Business Center and see what terms your getting impressions for.  You can also, of course, look at your analytics.

To deal with the trackback spam go to Settings > Discussion and make sure that “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” is unchecked. If someone wants to link to a page or post on the site they can grab the URL and paste it in. Doing this prevents spambots from blitzing your site with trackbacks.

To deal with the comment spam make sure that you have activated Akismet, it’s one of the two plugins that comes with WP by default and it is really good at catching over 90% of the spam. For example, on my blog out of the last 4861 comments I’ve had 4,713 spams caught by Akismet, it let through 148 legitimate comments, and missed only one with an overall accuracy rate of 99.589%. That’s good stuff.

The other plugin I recommend for stopping spam comments is SI Captcha Ani-Spam by Mike Challis. This puts a captcha on the login and/or comments.

Gone are the days when you had to pay $10,000 a year to market in the phone book.  Today nearly everyone is turning to the Internet to look up local businesses.  That makes knowing how to show up where they’re looking absolutely crucial.  Just like the phone book there’s limited space on the first page of listings for your business.  Kelly and I constantly get our clients first page placements and frequently they show up multiple times on the first page of the search results.

In this course we’re going to teach you what very few businesses know.  How to show up in the top 10 of Google local listings.  These listings became much more important when Google started putting them at the top of pages for local based searches.  Now Google’s made them even more important by sticking these listings in the natural search results based on your IP.  For certain results you no longer need to type in your city as a modfier to get local results.  Just typing in plumber or electrican in many locations will get you 10 listings of local businesses and yours should be one of them.

In the six week webinar you’ll get a road map of how to capture great results for your business.  We’ll start with optimizing your site, teach you how to maximize your local listings for the three major search engines, show you additional sites that are worth having a free listing on, show you which social media sites are best suited to local businesses and show you how to track your results.

If you would like to learn more about the course go to LocalSearchAdvantage.com.  We’re severly limiting the number of participant openings because we want to make sure we can give you the attention and support you need, so if you need to build your online presence don’t put off signing up.

Join us on Wednesday, January 14th at 11:00 AM PST to learn:

* How the volume of travel research and booking activity changed as the economy has weakened
* How consumers are shopping for travel differently now than they have in the past, and what implications this has for travel marketers
* Consumer outlook on their plans for travel in the future and how travel sellers can take advantage of this

This webinar will run approximately 45 minutes, followed by a 15-minute Q&A session. Register here.

readme.txt
pxaccess.php
grid_view.old.css
grid_view.css
grid_display_functions.php
gold_shopping_cart.php
gold_options.php
gold_cart_readme.txt
gold_cart.js
gold_cart.css
extra_image_processing.php
arrowdown.gif

And these two folders:
merchants
ewaylib

If there are any other files or folders chances are that getting rid of them will take care of your problem.  Commonly getting rid of an error-log file if it exists in this folder gets rid of the problem.  Sometimes on install people get a gold-cart folder within the gold-cart folder.

The above has worked for me and it has also been noted as a solution on the cart’s developer forum.

Adding products from WP e-commerce to non shop pages on your Website
One function that many WP e-commerce users would like to have is the ability to add a product from their store on a single page of their site with the use of a shortcode.  To that end Ralf posted this solution:

To add a new shortcode to view a specific product you have to add
the following (dirty) function to ‘homepage_products_functions.php’

function nszhpcrt_product_tag($content = ”) {
global $wpdb;
if(preg_match_all(”/\[wpsc_product=([\d]+),*(full)?\]/”, $content, $matches)) {
foreach($matches[1] as $key => $product_id) {
$product[$key]['id'] = $product_id;
$product[$key]['display'] = $matches[2][$key];
$product[$key]['original_string'] = $matches[0][$key];
$output = single_product_display($product[$key]['id']);
$content = str_replace($product[$key]['original_string'], $output, $content);
}
}
return $content;
}

And you have to add the following new line (2316) to ‘wp-shopping-cart.php’.

add_filter(’the_content’, ‘nszhpcrt_product_tag’, 12);

After this you can place a shortcode [wpsc_product=xx] to each post.

WP e-Commerce 3.6.9 Editing Meta Tags
Beginning with WP e-Commerce 3.6.9 you can now add Meta Tags to your products.  However, a user noticed that he couldn’t go back and edit these.

“when creating a product with meta-data it gets displayed correctly, but when trying to edit that product the meta-data fields cannot be changed (they don’t show up). The same goes for product tags.”

You have to delete line 415.
At line 350 you have to add
$custom_fields = $wpdb->get_results(”SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->prefix}wpsc_productmeta WHERE product_id IN(’{$product_data['id']}’) AND custom IN(’1′) “,ARRAY_A);

And line 361 have to change to
<textarea class=’text’ name=’custom_meta[$i][value]‘ id=’custom_meta_value_$i’>{$custom_field['meta_value']}</textarea>

There is also a HTML-Bug in line 373. Theres a missing </div> tag.
So you have to change this line to

</div></td></tr>”;

Credit goes to ralf for that one too.

404 Errors in WP e-Commerce with WordPress Version 2.6

WordPress created a new problem for WP e-Commerce when it introduced revisions in the release of WP 2.6.  After this users started finding that they would get seemingly random 404 errors.  The first thing you need to do is get the plugin Remove Revisions, install it and activate it.  Here are the steps to take after you’ve done that.
1) In the admin panel click Manage.
2) Click Remove Revisions in the secondary panel
3) Click the remove revisions button in the panel
4) With the upper Menu still set to Manage click pages
5) Click catalog
6) Click HTML and copy what is there.
7) Delete the page
Click Write
9) Create a new page
10) Title it Catalog
11) Publish it
12) Click e-Commerce
13) Click Settings
14) Click Admiin
15) Go to bottom and click Update Page URLs
16) Check that the front side is working fine again

PayPal Unable to Process Payment Error

Using PayPal with WP-Ecommerce you’ll often find that on your first test trial (you should always test) you’ll get an error saying: “Return to Merchant. Unable to process payment. Please contact the merchant as the shipping address provided by the merchant is invalid, and the merchant has requested that your order must be shipped to that address.”

To fix this go to merchants/paypal_multiple.php

Find this line:
$data['address_override'] = ‘1′;
(should be line #46)
and delete it or comment it out.

Anyone know how to clear up this warning?  Please leave a comment answer.

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/shopgree/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/merchants/paypal_multiple.php on line 82

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/shopgree/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/merchants/paypal_multiple.php:82) in /home/shopgree/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/merchants/paypal_multiple.php on line 237

Adhamox answers this below in comments.