Easy Contact: Tips and How To's

The Customer.txt attachment which accompanies every contact request from a customer has a lot of useful information. Here you can view solutions to problems that Easy Contact and its customer.txt attachment has uncovered.

Problem: Customer Cannot Keep Items in their Basket

Solution 1: Commonly caused by the customer not allowing cookies. Cookie support is easily spotted in the Customer.txt file. Cookies: ON

Also check if they are using IE. Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0) in this case IE 10. If they are using IE, and have Cookies: ON, the may have corrupt cookies. They will have to delete their existing cookies for their site.

Solution 2: Another cause is from a change in domains. The cookies merchant uses to track customers are based on the site's domain name. For example: www.mysite.com. Some sites inconsistent domain names. For example: www.mysite.com
mysite.com
mysite.myhostsdomain.com

Domains must match exactly, even though they can be made to take you to the same place, they are all different domains as far as the browser is concerned.

This situation is easy to detect by looking at the click path in the customer.txt file: https://www.mysite.com/index.html https://www.mysite.com/catelog/widgets.html https://www.mysite.com/items/thisWidget.html https://www.mysite.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=BASK&Action=ADPR https://mysite.com/items/anotherWidget.html https://www.mysite.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=BASK&Action=ADPR

Note the change in domain name between the two links with the Action=ADPR in them. (Action=ADPR is Merchant's way of saying its adding something to the basket.) This can cause the first item added to NOT appear when the second item is added. Most likely, some link(s) on the Basket screen are pointing to an incorrect domain.

The Preview Feature is one of our customer's favorite feature for Easy Contact. However, certain web server configurations can cause Easy Contact to erroneously report that Popup Blockers are preventing the display of the preview. If this is the case, then a simple rule addition to your .htaccess file should solve the problem.

To Prevent Easy Contact Preview from being blocked:

1. First, make sure you DON'T have a popup blocker preventing the preview. Popup blocking can be controlled by the browser or by add ins. You are kind of on your own here. Sorry.
2. Next, get access to your .htacess file on your server. Typically you will need an FTP client and an FTP login to do this. If not, see if your web host can make the change for you.

3. Using a text editor like Notepad or something similar (DO NOT USE MS WORD OR SIMILAR WORD PROCESSING SOFTWARE), open the .htaccess file.
4. Locate the first set of Rewrite rules in your .htaccess file. Typically, they will start with: RewriteEngine on
5. Just after the RewriteEngine on, add the following two lines: # Easy Account Rewrite rule bypass
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
6. Save the file, making sure your editor does not add a file extension such as as .txt, and then upload it back to the web site.

If you have (or had) an existing Contact Us link on your web site, and removing it would alter the layout, the simple solution is just to link that item directly to the Easy Contact popup. (You can see this in action on phosphormedia.com's Contact Us link in the top menu.)

To link a Contact Us menu item to Easy Contact:

• Copy and paste the following href in place of the existing link: <a href="#" onclick="document.getElementById('ecContact').style.display='block'; document.getElementById('ecPrompt').style.display='none'; document.getElementById('ecOverlay').style.display='block'; return false;">

Similar to linking to Easy Contact from an existing link, you can also have it open the Easy Contact popup with a specific subject pre-selected. (You can see this in action on our Testimonials page with the link to "Have Your Own Testimonial?")

To open Easy Contact with a pre-selected subject:

• Use the following A HREF as the link to open Easy Contact with a pre-selected topic: <a href="#" onclick="document.getElementById('ecContact').style.display='block'; document.getElementById('ecPrompt').style.display='none'; document.getElementById('ecOverlay').style.display='block'; document.getElementById('ecContactSubject').selectedIndex=5; return false;">
  
  Where the 5, in document.getElementById('ecContactSubject').selectedIndex=5; is the order number of the subject you want starting with the number 0. (Meaning, in this case, it's the SIXTH subject. Sorry, that's just how Javascript rolls.)