Shopping Cart Issues

bridgesphoto

I am having some issues with the new cart-- first of all, why does the default print paper have to be lustre on the batch add to cart? There should be a way to specify our own default print paper. It's tedious to have to "change product" every single time I get to the bulk add to cart page when I'm ordering 1000+ proofs for wedding clients.

Secondly, the shopping cart itself is SLOW. I wish I could use the old cart that you guys had finally worked out the slowness issues on. I used to be able to order thousands of photos so quickly! Not anymore-- and I don't want to break the order up into separate parts-- it's a complete waste of shipping $.

I have been trying all night to order a large number of photos, but when I get to the shopping cart, IE (and Firefox) both freeze up on me and won't let me get to the shipping screen.

Frustrating!!

--Karen
http://beyondthewell.smugmug.com

bwg

bridgesphoto wrote:

I am having some issues with the new cart-- first of all, why does the default print paper have to be lustre on the batch add to cart? There should be a way to specify our own default print paper. It's tedious to have to "change product" every single time I get to the bulk add to cart page when I'm ordering 1000+ proofs for wedding clients.

Secondly, the shopping cart itself is SLOW. I wish I could use the old cart that you guys had finally worked out the slowness issues on. I used to be able to order thousands of photos so quickly! Not anymore-- and I don't want to break the order up into separate parts-- it's a complete waste of shipping $.

I have been trying all night to order a large number of photos, but when I get to the shopping cart, IE (and Firefox) both freeze up on me and won't let me get to the shipping screen.

Frustrating!!

--Karen
http://beyondthewell.smugmug.com

Hi Karen,

orders that large are tough...realize that you're downloading 1000+ thumbnails on that page, and a browser can only download 4 things at a time. One of the things inherent in all browsers is the more things you put on a page, the slower it gets. Safari3 and Firefox3 handle this much better than other browsers.

I have found a bug where the page was requesting more thumbs than it needed to, but unfortunately the fix isn't live yet...and I'm not sure that would drastically speed up such a large order.

Are you timing out waiting for the inital cart page to load or is it timing out after the page has loaded and you click on the 'Checkout' button?

I can promise you this though...the new cart is many many times faster than the old cart.

bwg

I just found (and fixed) another possible slow point. This would have caused slow script errors when opening and closing the crop tool, bulk options panel and download license panel.

Hopefully the combination of these 2 fixes will help with large orders.

jfriend

bigwebguy wrote:

Hi Karen,

orders that large are tough...realize that you're downloading 1000+ thumbnails on that page, and a browser can only download 4 things at a time. One of the things inherent in all browsers is the more things you put on a page, the slower it gets. Safari3 and Firefox3 handle this much better than other browsers.

I have found a bug where the page was requesting more thumbs than it needed to, but unfortunately the fix isn't live yet...and I'm not sure that would drastically speed up such a large order.

Are you timing out waiting for the inital cart page to load or is it timing out after the page has loaded and you click on the 'Checkout' button?

I can promise you this though...the new cart is many many times faster than the old cart.

Couldn't the images also be loaded asynchronously so that if all you were trying to do is change one setting on an image that has already loaded, you'd be allowed to do that without waiting for all the other images to load? And shouldn't the thumbs be locally cached so they'd be darn fast to load?

bwg

jfriend wrote:

Couldn't the images also be loaded asynchronously so that if all you were trying to do is change one setting on an image that has already loaded, you'd be allowed to do that without waiting for all the other images to load? And shouldn't the thumbs be locally cached so they'd be darn fast to load?

Dunno how you want me to load them more asynchronously than they already are. They don't block the page from drawing or javascript loading/executing. HTML loads, javascript loads/initializes and you can do whatever you want while the images are downloading. Just like any other website.

As for the caching...the cart uses custom rendered thumbs for a few reasons: 1) if the image has square thumbs or a zoomed thumb, we need a proper thumb to display for cropping purposes. 2) if no-crop is specified, we may need a nonstandard size thumb.

The custom thumb rendering was one of the bugs I fixed. I stack 2 thumbs on top of each other for the crop preview. I had 2 different urls for the image so even though the thumb was the same, the browser saw it as 2 separate images and downloaded it twice. Should help in initial page loads where you have unique images that require cropping. Images that dont have a crop preview aren't stacked so they don't have the double thumb bug.

The second bug (and the one most likely to improve the experience) had to do with a behavior in the YUI javascript framework we use. I had experienced it before but it just didn't dawn on me that it could be causing issues in the cart.

jfriend

bigwebguy wrote:

Dunno how you want me to load them more asynchronously than they already are. They don't block the page from drawing or javascript loading/executing. HTML loads, javascript loads/initializes and you can do whatever you want while the images are downloading. Just like any other website.

As for the caching...the cart uses custom rendered thumbs for a few reasons: 1) if the image has square thumbs or a zoomed thumb, we need a proper thumb to display for cropping purposes. 2) if no-crop is specified, we may need a nonstandard size thumb.

The custom thumb rendering was one of the bugs I fixed. I stack 2 thumbs on top of each other for the crop preview. I had 2 different urls for the image so even though the thumb was the same, the browser saw it as 2 separate images and downloaded it twice. Should help in initial page loads where you have unique images that require cropping. Images that dont have a crop preview aren't stacked so they don't have the double thumb bug.

The second bug (and the one most likely to improve the experience) had to do with a behavior in the YUI javascript framework we use. I had experienced it before but it just didn't dawn on me that it could be causing issues in the cart.

If the cart is indeed live before all the thumbs have loaded, then you're already there. There are numerous image tools in the Smugmug UI that prohibit you from doing anything until all thumbs are loaded which is what made me think of that issue.

It's a bit of a bummer that uncropped thumbs are different URLs than the thumb images that are probably already sitting in your browser cache. Since I shoot a 3:2 camera and I know the most popular size people order from me is 4x6, their carts could be a lot faster if the thumbs could all come from their cache rather than a web server request and probably some processing for every one. Obviously once, they get cropped there's not much else one can do, but before they are cropped or if they are never cropped, browser cache = goodness.

bridgesphoto

Thanks for looking into that bigwebguy-- I haven't had time to go back to the cart and add a bunch of photos to try it out, but there's one more issue I forgot to mention. I can only get the "change product" button to work in IE and not Firefox, Safari (or Chrome!) when I am batch adding to my cart (say 600 or so photos). The box will pop up on the screen, but it never loads fully in any other browser other than IE for me so that I can actually select a product to change. This was also why I brought up the default print paper type-- if it was glossy or we could set it ourselves, I wouldn't have to hit "change product" every time.

bwg

jfriend wrote:

browser cache = goodness.

yes, and something we work VERY hard at.

Custom thumbs aside, jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/12345.jpg is not the same as secure.smugmug.com/photos/12345.jpg so the browser is not gonna have the thumb in cache first visit to the cart.

We'd like to Akamai enable secure.smugmug.com at some point to move the thumbs closer, but we're not there yet.

bwg

bridgesphoto wrote:

Thanks for looking into that bigwebguy-- I haven't had time to go back to the cart and add a bunch of photos to try it out, but there's one more issue I forgot to mention. I can only get the "change product" button to work in IE and not Firefox, Safari (or Chrome!) when I am batch adding to my cart (say 600 or so photos). The box will pop up on the screen, but it never loads fully in any other browser other than IE for me so that I can actually select a product to change. This was also why I brought up the default print paper type-- if it was glossy or we could set it ourselves, I wouldn't have to hit "change product" every time.

So are you talking about the cart or the buy multiples screen? I'm a bit confused.

jfriend

bigwebguy wrote:

So are you talking about the cart or the buy multiples screen? I'm a bit confused.

I was talking about the cart. I didn't realize that all the thumbs come from a vastly different source https://secure.smugmug.com/xxx. Are you stuck serving images over SSL because you can't mix http and https components in the page? Or is there a reason you think you need to serve the images over SSL?

If there was a problem with the buy multiples page being slow (which I don't know), the browser cache comments might apply to it.

bridgesphoto

bigwebguy wrote:

So are you talking about the cart or the buy multiples screen? I'm a bit confused.

Both, actually-- the "change product" button in the buy multiples screen and then the "bulk options" button in the cart as well-- neither of them fully load in anything other than IE. The box pops up on the screen and even lets you click the "x" to get rid of the box, but the options to choose never appear in the box. This only happens with a lot of photos being added to the card (about 500 and on up from there).

bwg

bridgesphoto wrote:

Both, actually-- the "change product" button in the buy multiples screen and then the "bulk options" button in the cart as well-- neither of them fully load in anything other than IE. The box pops up on the screen and even lets you click the "x" to get rid of the box, but the options to choose never appear in the box. This only happens with a lot of photos being added to the card (about 500 and on up from there).

can you give me a gallery where this happens on the buy multiples screen?

very odd that it would only work in IE since we develop everything in Firefox and Safari

bwg

jfriend wrote:

IAre you stuck serving images over SSL because you can't mix http and https components in the page?

bridgesphoto

bigwebguy wrote:

can you give me a gallery where this happens on the buy multiples screen?

very odd that it would only work in IE since we develop everything in Firefox and Safari

It happens in all the galleries. See image below for what my screen looks like in the Buy Multiples screen with Firefox. I've selected all the images (there are 784 in this particular gallery) and clicked "change product" so I can change the paper type from lustre to glossy. The screen pops up, but not the selections for changing the product. I can click out of the screen via the "X" but that's about it.

bwg

bridgesphoto wrote:

It happens in all the galleries. See image below for what my screen looks like in the Buy Multiples screen with Firefox. I've selected all the images (there are 784 in this particular gallery) and clicked "change product" so I can change the paper type from lustre to glossy. The screen pops up, but not the selections for changing the product. I can click out of the screen via the "X" but that's about it.

so what it looks like is that you've run out of connections. See how the status bar at the bottom says its still transferring data? You've likely still got thumbs loading, which are taking up all your connections. When you open the 'change product' panel it tries to make a request to get all the available products, but it cant because there are no open connections to use.

Try waiting until all the thumbs load before trying to change a product. I'll see if there's anything we can do to get around the connection limit.

bridgesphoto

bigwebguy wrote:

so what it looks like is that you've run out of connections. See how the status bar at the bottom says its still transferring data? You've likely still got thumbs loading, which are taking up all your connections. When you open the 'change product' panel it tries to make a request to get all the available products, but it cant because there are no open connections to use.

Try waiting until all the thumbs load before trying to change a product. I'll see if there's anything we can do to get around the connection limit.

That worked this time-- it just took a long time to get those thumbnails to load. (I know there are a lot of them.) I wish there was an easier way to breeze through the shopping cart without having to wait for all those thumbnails to load. I almost wish there were two different carts-- a simple cart for bulk purchases like mine where all the options are the same on each photo (same paper same size, true color, no crop) that you could by-pass all the options and an advanced cart like the one now that lets you adjust the crop color size etc on each of the photos.

I give *all* my customers 4x6's of all their images (about 35 weddings per year)-- it's something that sets my business apart from other photographers-- it's also good for you guys because I'm constantly purchasing large amounts of prints from you. I am just hoping for an easier way to continue to do this. :-) Thanks for your help.

bwg

bridgesphoto wrote:

That worked this time-- it just took a long time to get those thumbnails to load. (I know there are a lot of them.) I wish there was an easier way to breeze through the shopping cart without having to wait for all those thumbnails to load. I almost wish there were two different carts-- a simple cart for bulk purchases like mine where all the options are the same on each photo (same paper same size, true color, no crop) that you could by-pass all the options and an advanced cart like the one now that lets you adjust the crop color size etc on each of the photos.

I give *all* my customers 4x6's of all their images (about 35 weddings per year)-- it's something that sets my business apart from other photographers-- it's also good for you guys because I'm constantly purchasing large amounts of prints from you. I am just hoping for an easier way to continue to do this. :-) Thanks for your help.

glad that worked for you. We've discussed some changes to the buy multiples screen that would make things easier for workflows like yours. Thanks for your input (and patience)

Montec

bigwebguy wrote:

very odd that it would only work in IE since we develop everything in Firefox and Safari

Just curious why you do this when 70% of your customers use Internet Explorer?

Andy

Montec wrote:

Just curious why you do this when 70% of your customers use Internet Explorer?

Monte - he was joking. Note the

We develop for and test in all of our supported browsers.

Montec

Andy wrote:

Monte - he was joking. Note the

We develop for and test in all of our supported browsers.

I was wondering! I use FF but I know IE still has the largest market share by far.

bwg

Andy wrote:

Monte - he was joking. Note the

We develop for and test in all of our supported browsers.

I for one don't do any active development in IE. I develop in FF and Safari then during testing, make the fixes/hacks/compromises to make sure things work in IE.

Thats what I meant by "we develop in FF and Safari". It would be very rare to have something work in IE but not FF and Safari.

Andy

bigwebguy wrote:

I for one don't do any active development in IE.

Yeah I know, the tools are much better in the other browsers. I was just trying to reassure Monte that stuff has to work in IE before it goes out