Total Blue System Ecommerce

How to respect opt-out requests from email offers

Total Blue System's email marketing module permits a customer visiting your ecommerce website to opt out or unsubscribe from the email marketing list. When this happens, a demographic called "Please don't send me any promotional emails" is set to "on".

As a good practice, a retail merchant needs to ensure that email marketing messages are not being sent to customers who have unsubscribed. This is done through the segment (formerly called filter). Each email marketing message which is sent should have a segment associated with it.

Each segment should include as part of its logic statement a demographic restriction of "Please don't send me any promotional emails" is blank. That means that the customer has not requested to unsubscribe.

The following is a screen shot of what a segment might look like as well as a screen shot of the fields to check to achieve this result.

We would be happy help if you need assistance in checking and explaining your segments. Or, if you prefer, we can update these for you as a billable service.

Minimize risk of denial-of-service hosting attacks

If there's a risk to an e-commerce website's up-time or performance that's hard to eliminate, it's the periodic instance of what's known as a denial of service attack (DOS). (In short, it means someone floods your server with so many requests that it chokes -- and prevents your site visitors from viewing your pages.) Refinements of Total Blue System's hosting infrastructure released this week ought improve your e-commerce site's ability to weather such an attack.

We'll spare the details, suffice to say there are configurations at the Linux kernel level (we use Red Hat Enterprise as our Linux distribution), as well as tuning of our connection management for our database, MySQL. And more.

The DOS attack, if even inadvertent, represents the majority of instances recorded in our Status blog which identifies our server cluster's unscheduled hosting downtime.