AgoraCart Free User Forums

Thanks for a great forum. So far all of my questions have been answered by other postings... until now.

My Agora cart went "live" five days ago. I'm using off-line processing and there are 76 products in the store. I checked our Webalizer this morning and noted the following: We had 22,000 visits and 57,000 hits. Of those 57K hits the file agora.cgi had 40,000 hits! We've had four actual orders. Should I be concerned about this?

you went live 5 days ago and had 4 orders so far? cool. not bad if this is anew domain and not promoted yet.
if this is a new domain then you're in the "sand box" and google and others will hammer your site for updates for the next month or so. then, the frequency will drop off and your placement will drop in the search engines unless you promote the site appropriately. also, make frequent changes to the home page and other key pages to keep the search engines coming back so when you make really important changes they will show up on the search engines as soon as possible.
depending on how you link to the store then some search engines will only parse out the first dynamic page and not follow links within that page. so link to product categories and some P_IDs also add some links with search in the query string. agora.cgi?keyword=Most_Impact where most impact will find products similar with the best keyword impact.
promote your site by getting pr4 or 5 links to your site. dmoz, google business directory, other directories relative to the theme of your site. so if the site is crafts then find a crafts directory online and have them link to you. get non competing websites within the theme of your domain to link to you. do some recip. linking too. you must link out to someplace for good seo as well as have high pr oneway links coming in.
don't wait until you're out of the sandbox to start promoting. do it now and keep it up. this will keep placement as high as possible.
d

Thanks for the good info. I was concerned that some sort of bot was hacking for CC numbers.

be sure to check your stats to make sure search engine hits match the hits on your site. if getting lots of hits from unidentifyable sites or from proxies or RU or Asian countries then you maybe headed for trouble.
if you have next day delivery and everyone is choosing that then better run a check on the purchasers.
what gateway are you using?
d

Hits have slowed during the last few days. I'm not worried about getting ripped-off. We use off-line processing and are selling tickets to an event in September. One of the things that I really like about Agora is the way the off-line method splits the numbers. We clear the order log each day after we print the orders.
We used SalesCart last year. It has very nice forms but stores the entire CC number on the server. Two customers had a fraud problem after making purchases (have theories about that but cannot display them publicly). Anyway... If you're interested in seeing who has been hitting us I've published our June stats here:
http://www.roundbobbin.com/roundbobbinJun07stat.pdf

the most hits originate from qwest. does any of this look familiar? most likely it's hits from ppl who have been working on the website being the site or store is so new...
OrgName: Qwest Communications Corporation
OrgID: QCC-22
Address: 1801 California Street
City: Denver
StateProv: CO
PostalCode: 80202
Country: US

NetRange: 67.40.0.0 - 67.42.255.255
CIDR: 67.40.0.0/15, 67.42.0.0/16
NetName: QWEST-INET-116
NetHandle: NET-67-40-0-0-1
Parent: NET-67-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: AUTHNS1.MPLS.QWEST.NET
NameServer: AUTHNS2.DNVR.QWEST.NET
NameServer: AUTHNS3.STTL.QWEST.NET
Comment:
RegDate: 2001-11-27
Updated: 2006-02-09

OrgAbuseHandle: QIA2-ARIN
OrgAbuseName: Qwest Abuse
OrgAbusePhone: +1-877-886-6515
OrgAbuseEmail: *****@qwest.net

OrgNOCHandle: QIN-ARIN
OrgNOCName: Qwest IP NOC
OrgNOCPhone: +1-877-886-6515
OrgNOCEmail: *******@qwestip.net

OrgTechHandle: QIA-ARIN
OrgTechName: Qwest IP Admin
OrgTechPhone: +1-877-886-6515
OrgTechEmail: *******@qwest.com

look like your isp or the isp of anyone associated with the website?

107 hits from the us gov?
top hits from network. that's kinda odd.

aha. are you hosted by yahoo by any chance?
Top 15 of 243 Total User Agents
1 58556 68.53% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/
you or soemone working on the site have the yahoo tool bar?
d

Our ISP is desm.qwest.net. Our host is Bluehost. I have the Yahoo toolbar, don't use it - can't figure out how to get rid of it. I figured the US Gov hits were bureaucrat(s) surfing from work.

During July so far, things have slowed considerably. The googlebot is still active but Yahoo has stopped Slurping. Agora.cgi is still the most popular entry page, 2-to-1 over the home page.