Turns out the same thing is true of online product marketing. There’s a fascinating article about decoy marketing in an equally fascinating blog (to which you should totally subscribe). (It’s from last month, I know, but our friend at The Cart Blog recently drew our attention to it.)

Here’s an interesting except that hopefully makes you want to read the entire article:

So, jumping back to the shaving gel topic, if a drug store received a shipment of promotional cans with an extra 20% of product inside, their first reaction might be to remove the regular cans from the shelf until the promotional stock was gone. What customer would be dumb enough to buy the small can when the bigger cans were the same price? According to decoy marketing logic, however, the store would be well advised to leave a few of the small cans on the shelf with the bigger ones. As counterintuitive as it seems, the presence of some small cans so would likely boost sales of the larger promotional cans – perhaps even taking market share away from competing products that came in the larger size to begin with.

This is potentially a very profitable concept to grasp. Perhaps FoxyCart should offer our normal $15/mo plan, and a $15/mo plan without support for email receipts. It’d be interesting to see the effect.

Brett: hmmm…
did you just build a hardcoded table of users, hoping nobody would notice?
haha that’d be classic

Fred: shhh
this is the complete list of users

Brett:
haha

Fred: I bet I know
yep
their stuff isn’t getting copied over

Brett: once you’re done with that see if you can do the other ticket. should be pretty super quick.

Fred: listen, did you sacrifice the goat this morning?
that was really important
now we have broken code
see what happens WHEN YOU DON’T SACRIFICE THE GOAT?!?

Brett: haha dude i gotta blog that…

Fred: sheesh, I thought that you knew enough about software to know that

And that, dear FoxyCart user, is how the magic happens at FoxyCart. Just don’t tell PETA ;)

One of the constant frustrations with web design is the lack of fonts. When you switch to Arial for a project just because you’re tired of Verdana, Trebuchet, or the Lucida variants… you know you’re in bad shape. For the past few years the most trouble-free method for using the font of your dreams has been sIFR and it’s offspring, and while that’s still arguably the most solid option, there are some other methods available now that are making me get excited about the future of type on the web.

Embedded Fonts with @font-face

Even though this is currently Safari 3.1+ and IE7 only (and they do it differently, but that’s another discussion), it’s still interesting. Ralf Herrmann has a list of 10 fonts that might pique your interest, even if only to know what’s on the horizon.

Facelift Image Replacement makes me happy

I recently discovered Cory Mawhorter’s FLIR, Facelift Image Replacement, and I’m quite excited about some of the possibilities it opens up. While sIFR can do much of what FLIR can do, it’s always good to have options, particularly when they can look as good as this. That FLIR is built with a plugin architecture is brilliant as well, and it seems to be silly fast.

In case you’re not tempted to check out that link, it allows:

• anti-aliasing
• transparent backgrounds (with alpha transparency, even)
• gradients in the letters (yeah, for real… I’m really excited about that)
• drop-shadows
• borders on letters
• word wrapping and blocks of text

Check out the examples. Quite interesting. We may use it on the next version of FoxyCart.com, and if so I’ll do a more complete writeup.

If you haven’t used Constant Contact yet, you probably will eventually. It’s a nice offering that clients usually love, and it has some additional features like surveys that can come in handy. So when you do need to use Constant Contact with FoxyCart, we now have a Constant Contact ecommerce integration for FoxyCart. Next time you have a client that’s comfortable with Constant Contact you can quickly and easily add their customers to their lists.

(As with almost all the code on our wiki, it is not an official FoxyCart integration, but we do know it’s working on at least one site so far with solid results.)

¹ Don’t get me wrong. phpList is really amazing, and we recommend everybody at least know it’s there. But it’s not for everybody. But we love it. Please don’t get me wrong on that point.

So without further ado… FoxyCart’s Featured Sites!

Firebug still reigns supreme (though the Web Developer Toolbar is critical as well for it’s CSS live editing capabilities, in my opinion), but what about when you need Firebug for other browsers? Luckily there are now options that are useful in a pinch.

Our friend Chris Coyer at CSS-Tricks wrote a nice comparison of the available browser development tools. We’ll just quickly add our own additional thoughts below.

Firefox: Firebug isn’t complete without the Web Developers Toolbar

As we mentioned in our previous post, Firefox + Firebug isn’t complete without the Web Developers Toolbar. There’s a screencast there too that shows the power of these two tools combined.

Internet Explorer (still kind of sucks)

The IE Developer Toolbar leaves a lot to be desired, which you know if you’ve ever used it. It’s better than nothing, but if you need to debug JavaScript… it’s not really better than nothing, since it doesn’t do anything for JavaScript. Luckily, there is a workaround for debugging JavaScript in IE. It’s not the easiest, but it works, and is the best option we’ve found.

I’m going to repeat myself here, in case you weren’t listening. You should go to that link and bookmark it or something if nothing else, because if you do any javascript work you probably will need that sooner or later, and it’s not particularly easy to find in Google.

Safari’s Web Inspector is actually really neat

Chris makes this pretty clear, but Web Inspector is actually quite neat and very capable. If you have Safari issues that you need to debug, or if you just prefer to work with Safari instead of Firefox, you should definitely play around with this.

While I’m thrilled that so many of our users like our default “standard” red+black theme enough to use it on their sites, it’s really easy to tweak the CSS and create your own customizations. I know what you’re thinking: “Brett, there are like 2 gagillion IDs and classes in the checkout HTML. It’s impossible.”

It’s not impossible. It’s actually pretty easy if you have the right workflow. So, what better way to illustrator that workflow than with another screencast by our good friend Kris of My619, San Diego web design.

Some Notes

• This is a 2 part tutorial. If you already are familiar with Firebug and the Web Developers Toolbar you may want to skip directly to part 2.
• More screencasts will follow this one. If you have an idea for one you’d like to see, let us know using the contact form on this page.

Special Thanks

A very special thanks to My619 for putting this screencast together.