Welcome to Curious Business

Every Friday, I post a small insight into running Curio City and/or Blue Hills Editorial Services. My most recent posts are directly below. You can also start with the first post, or use the subject labels to the right to home in on particular topics. Feel free to comment on anything that interests you.
Add to Technorati Favorites

Friday, February 17, 2017

Broken Apples?





Another caller complained about being unable to check out because my site delivered an error message instead of postage rates. As usual, I placed her order myself without incident. It still reinforced that nagging hunch that something might be wrong, though. This woman offered that she's using a Macintosh with Safari, which might explain why I can't reproduce the bug. I neglected to ask if she's using an iPhone or a proper computer...I'm always suspicious of mobile devices, but a Mac is a computer.

AFAIK my checkout page doesn't use any scripts that aren't ubiquitous across the Net. Analytics shows Apple devices still contributing sales, so it's not a general Apple incompatibility.

Over the past 30 days, Safari users made 33% of my visits but placed just 24% of my orders...which might or might not mean anything; a general technical error should lead to zero sales. In the PC/Android universe one might suspect that a specific hardware/software configuration isn't working right, but Apple's walled garden is supposed to eliminate such variations. I don't own any Apple devices so I can't conduct any testing. I have a feeling it would be fruitless anyway. 

More fun from Google Analytics: Chrome is the most popular browser with 40% of visits/54% of sales, Safari was second, Internet Explorer third at 14%/12%, and my own favorite Firefox had just 7% of both visits and sales. Microsoft Edge, the Windows 10 version of IE, barely registered. Mobile devices accounted for 29% of all sales despite my efforts to discourage those paid clicks, with iPhones and iPads together accounting for 49% of mobile sales. 

************************

The Blue Hills website is about 90% done. I have a few fiddly graphical and layout details to clean up and some placeholders to swap out, and the content needs my wife's input. I won't announce it to the world until those things happen...probably this weekend. But you could click the link in my banner if you want a sneak preview.  

2 comments:

  1. Matrix12:43 AM

    Hope you not planing to use old image of typing machine as your main.... Nothing screams obsolete, as type writer. Not sure what brand you want to show. Even stock image of people working would be better.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Matrix12:44 AM

    I would do something latest, digital, or sleek blog, or some arrow going up. I mean anything really but type writer.

    ReplyDelete

What do you think? Leave a comment.

Google Search

Google