Following my Twitter stream I saw a tweet by @Shopify that said one of their stores have customers texting in questions. This struck me as a bit odd at first, but after reading it’s implementation I find it quite genius.

The company name is Baby Melons. You can see right up top on their customer service page they have a number ready for your text question. Here is the best part about it:  you could have this setup for free and implementation is just signing up for a Google Voice number. Post the number on your website. Then receive and reply to text messages in the same way you do emails.

This is something that as a customer I would do just to try. If the experience was good I would be even more likely to purchase from the company. On the business side a customer service rep can only handle one phone call at a time. In theory now the rep could now handle multiple clients at a time with more time to respond.

Benefits: Save labor expenses, give better responses, show off a new side of technology to customers.
Negatives: Some customers may not understand how to text.

I’m always looking for more  innovative ways to close sales or communicate with customers. Do you have any? Comment below.

Direct link to the original blog article: http://blog.shopify.com/2010/5/5/let-them-text-us-for-customer-service

Here is one problem that was a simple Magento fix, but took me hours to understand. Of course many of my products require bullet points – it’s like a standard on eCommerce products. When I imported or even manually inserted them into my Magento website it would never display correctly. I searched the forums, google, and even asked a few people. There was no easy answer. I gave up and came back the next day. I luckily stumbled on this quick and simple fix in the Magento wiki:

Add this code to the bottom of your boxes.css: (/skin/frontend/default/-YOURTHEME)/css)

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.product-specs ul li { list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; margin-left: 20px; }
.short-description ul li { list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; margin-left: 20px; }
.product-specs ol li { list-style-type: decimal; list-style-position: outside; margin-left: 20px; }
.short-description ol li { list-style-type: decimal; list-style-position: outside; margin-left: 20px; }<a href="http://www.robbiehodge.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/bullets.jpg"><img src="http://www.robbiehodge.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/bullets.jpg" alt="" title="bullets" width="127" height="71" class="alignright size-full wp-image-156" /></a>
.description ul li { list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; margin-left: 20px;}
.description ol li { list-style-type: decimal; list-style-position: outside; margin-left: 20px;}

Now open up view.phtml (app/design/frontend/default/-YOURTHEME-/template/catalog/product/view.phtml)

Find this code:

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<div class="short-description"><?php echo nl2br($_product->getShortDescription()) ?></div>

Replace with:

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<div class="short-description"><?php echo $_product->getShortDescription() ?></div>

Do the same for description field and now you have bullets and ordered lists..

Hopefully one day this will be fixed/patched in. I really enjoy the wysiwyg editor, but sometimes it just causes more problems then its worth.