Recently several CAMEO EZ clients have needed to call product images dynamically from another server, which is hosting their retail website with Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, etc. We have adapted the CAMEO EZ product templates so we can accommodate this need, but there are several things to keep in mind.

Steps to Call Images from Another Server.

1. When exporting product data, be sure to export the full URL (the address of the image on the server) for the product image, not just the Image Name. All URLs should begin with https:// or http:// .
   
2. The exported product data will be transferred to the CAMEO EZ product spreadsheet. The full URL of the product images will go in Column U.
   
   To obtain the URL directly from the site, right-click on the image and select “Open image in new tab” (Windows). Then you can copy the URL from the address bar of the browser.
   
3. If it is determined that the URLs are too long, in which case OmegaNet will add the first part of the URL which is common to all products to the code of the site and the remainder will be added to the spreadsheet. The maximum number of characters allowed for the Image field is 120.
   
   EXAMPLE, first part of URL common to all images:
   https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0041/4059/7337/
   EXAMPLE, second part of URL with unique information for a specific SKU to be included in spreadsheet, column U:
   products/JB61121.jpg?v=1536745789
   products/JB61271.jpg?v=1536745845
   files/JW338WranglerChecotahDrapes.jpg?v=1737405187
   
   In the event that a preferred image is not on the retail site server, the image can be uploaded to the CAMEO EZ server by the usual methods, but the full URL to the image must be included in the spreadsheet or added to the product information in the Item Manager in the Admin Console. Code is already in place to differentiate between the images hosted on the retail server and those hosted on the CAMEO EZ server. The difference will not be noticeable to the customer.
   
   EXAMPLE, URL format for CAMEO EZ server
   https://[YourAdminConsoleUsername].cameoez.com/images/import/[TheImageName].jpg
   (Replace “[YourAdminConsoleUsername]” with the username you use to log into your Admin Console AND replace “[TheImageName]” with the actual image name.)
   
   To obtain the URL from the Admin Console, click on “Image Manager” > “Browse Images.” Find the image for which you need the URL and click it once. A new browser tab will open, and you can copy the URL from the address bar.
   
   NOTE: When uploading images to the CAMEO EZ server for use with the URL, image names can be anything because the system will NOT automatically find images by their SKU numbers.
   
   
4. OmegaNet may be required to do some work on the stylesheet to ensure that the images being pulled from a different server are displayed correctly for all screen sizes/devices.

A few considerations to be aware of when calling images from another server:

1. If the image URLs change on the other server for any reason, the image will no longer be shown on the CAMEO EZ website until the URLs are corrected. It will be up to the site owner to be aware when changes have been made to the retail site that affect the CAMEO EZ site.
   
   
2. In the event that the URL on the retail site server is too long, OmegaNet will add the first part of the URL that is common to all of the URLs to the site code and the remainder of the URL which is unique will be added to the spreadsheet (column U) or in the product information in the Item Manager.
   
   
3. If additional coding is required because of special requirements, an additional charge for special programming may be invoiced. This would be unusual, since the coding already in place should accommodate most situations.
   
   
4. Alternate images (images of different angles, packaging, etc.) cannot be called from a different server but must be uploaded to the CAMEO EZ server the regular way and named according to the naming convention described on the Support site, support.cameoez.com.
   
   
5. The images displayed on the CAMEO EZ B2B site will all be original images, not the small, medium and large images produced by the Image Processor. This will be true of both the images hosted on another server and those hosted on the CAMEO EZ server, which reside in the /images/import/ directory.
   
   
6. Category images will need to be uploaded in the usual way and will be affected by the Image Processor.
   

If displaying images from another server would be helpful to you, OmegaNet will need to put the appropriate CAMEO EZ page templates in place and test to be sure it will work as expected. Ongoing testing may be necessary, depending on your server setup.

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Announcing, a new Admin Console feature: You can now upload images by dragging and dropping.

The Admin Console now has two drag-and-drop file uploaders, one in the Image Manager and the other in the Page Builder. The Image Manager uploader sends images to /images/import/, which is the directory for original product images. The uploader in the Page Builder uploads to /images/. The latter can be used to upload other types of files as well as images, such as PDFs. You can also drag-and-drop multiple images at one time.

To use the uploader in the Image Manager, click on Image Manager and then “Drag & Drop Upload”. To use the uploader in the Page Builder, select a page to edit and scroll to the bottom of the page.

Did You Know CAMEO EZ Can Do This?

Inventory: Did you know you can upload your product inventory information and have it display on the page? We have a support site article and video tutorial to explain how it works.

Group Pricing: Did you know you can display different prices for different classifications of customers? It’s called Group Pricing. Tutorial article and video.

Special Product Templates: The default is showing three or four products per row and several rows per page, but did you know there are several alternate product-page layouts available?
a. Group Layout – Display an image with multiple products in it and show the product information and ordering field underneath. You can have multiple group images per page.
b. Thumbnail-Group Layout – Display products three or four-across as usual, but display multiple products and order quantity boxes under each thumbnail.
c. Swatch Layout – Display color swatches for products with different colors and display the product in each color when the swatch is clicked.

Each of these special layouts requires set up by OmegaNet.

EZB2C CAMEO EZ/WordPress Integration: If you have a CAMEO EZ site AND a WordPress/WooCommerce retail site, OmegaNet has created a plugin called “EZB2C” that will pull your product information, images and even categories from your CAMEO EZ wholesale site to your retail site with the click of a button. Tutorial and video.

If you use FTP to upload image files (or other files) to your website, you need to know about a change that is necessary, now that OmegaNet has moved its servers to a new data center.

To make your transfers more secure, we are now using SECURE File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). This means a small change to the host name you enter when you use FileZilla (or other FTP client). The old way looked like this:

ftp://images.cameoez.com

The NEW way looks like this:

sftp://username@images.cameoez.com

where “username” is the actual Admin Console username for your site.

It should connect without a port number, but if it doesn’t, try entering “22” in the Port blank.

If you have trouble with “Quick Connect” you can create a connection by going to File > Site Manager. Click “New Site” and enter your information as outlined above. It will save your information, but it will require you to enter your password each time you connect.

Jump to: Defining Terms | SPF | DKIM | DMARC | Getting Help

This message is for OmegaNet website clients. The topic is email deliverability. You are affected if you have an OmegaNet/CAMEO EZ website or you send email marketing to your customers.

This message is long, but is very important for those using branded email (somebody@mydomain.com). If you DO NOT use branded email, but designate somebody@gmail.com or whatever as the email for your email notifications, you may still have problems with deliverability of your email notifications.

A recent change in policy at GMail and Yahoo may adversely affect the deliverability of marketing and transactional emails you send to GMail.com and Yahoo.com email addresses. This change, which took effect February 1, 2024, could be causing ALL transactional and/or marketing email you send to GMail.com and Yahoo.com email address to be marked as spam and/or not delivered.

This article will detail how you can solve the problem caused by this change in policy.

Marketing and Transactional Email

MARKETING EMAIL: Many of you send marketing emails to your customers via MailChimp, Constant Contact or a similar service, but solving the problem is not their responsibility. It must be put in place by you or OmegaNet or whoever manages your domain name.

TRANSACTIONAL EMAIL: Transactional email is the email notification that is sent when a customer registers or places an order on your website, whether on your CAMEO EZ wholesale site or on your retail site, which OmegaNet may or may not host.

Both marketing and transactional email are affected by the change in policy.

As you know, OmegaNet offers email advertising services. We have taken the necessary steps to ensure that the email address from which we send email “blasts” will get through the spam filters. Below is a description of what needs to be done to ensure email deliverability.

Defining Terms

There are three components to ensure email deliverability and they all must be entered as records in your domain’s DNS zone file. First let’s define some terms:

DOMAIN REGISTRAR: Usually this will be where you originally registered your website domain, such as NetworkSolutions.com, Godaddy.com, CheapDomains.com or any of many others out there. It is possible to move to a different registrar, in which case your registrar would NOT be where you initially registered. If you don’t know who your registrar is, go to one of the registrars above and scroll to the bottom of the page and find the link to “WhoIs” and enter your domain name.

DNS (Domain Name Service): This is a text file that tells the web browser where to find your website domain, that is, the server on which your website is located. The DNS zone file also specifies the mail server where email for the domain is hosted. The email server and the web server will often, but not always, be hosted in different places. Servers are designated by IP addresses. You can find the IP address where your site is hosted on a Windows computer by opening the CMD window or the “Windows PowerShell” and typing “ping mydomain.com” where “mydomain” is your actual domain name. The DNS zone file will often be at your domain registrar, but may also be at your official host.

NAMESERVERS: The DNS zone file will include information about the nameservers which host your domain. These nameservers (there must be at least two) will be where the DNS zone file is hosted. If your nameservers are ns1.omeganetinc.net and ns2.omeganetinc.net, we have done what needs to be done to ensure email deliverability from your domain.

Three Components of Deliverability

Now here are the three components that need to be present in your DNS zone file.

1. SPF

SPF (Sender Policy Framework): The first of the three email deliverability components that should be present in your DNS zone file is an SPF record. SPF refers to a method of authenticating emails that is designed to spot forged sender addresses during email delivery. SPF allows the server on the receiving end to check whether an email appearing to come from a given domain is actually originating from an authorized IP address of that domain. The list containing all the authorized IP addresses and/ domain hosts for a specific domain can be found on that domain’s DNS records. There may be more than one server authorized to send mail on behalf of your domain.

Your DNS Zone file can only have one SPF record, so all IP addresses will be included in the same SPF record. Here is an example:

@ TXT “v=spf1 include:omeganetinc.net ip4:169.53.82.88 include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:spf.mandrillapp.com -all”

The “@” indicates the domain name of the zone file.
The “TXT” indicates the type of record. Other major DNS record types include “A”, “MX” (mail exchange) and “CNAME” (there are many more).
The information in quotation marks, beginning with “v=spf1”, is the list of approved sending domains and/or IP addresses (The IP address “ip4:169.53.82.88” is redundant with omeganetinc.net, but is included as an example of an IP address in an SPF record).

In the example above, if your branded email is hosted by Microsoft, your SPF record should include the email address Microsoft supplies for their email sending server (SMTP server), in this case “spf.protection.outlook.com” (the correct server name for your domain must be obtained from your email host). If you have a CAMEO EZ website, your SPF record needs to also have OmegaNet’s server IP (ip4:169.53.82.88) or “omeganetinc.net” as part of your SPF record. If you also have other sites sending transaction email, such as a retail site at Shopify, you may need to include an IP address for that as well. The reference to “spf.mandrillapp.com” is a MailChimp mail server (if you use a mass email service, the server name has to be obtained from the service).

2. DKIM

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail, pronounced “D-Kim”) is the second component of email deliverability which needs to be in your DNS zone file.

Unlike SPF, you can and should have multiple DKIM records in your DNS, one for each sending server for your domain. Here is an example of a DKIM record using the public key for OmegaNet.

default._domainkey IN TXT “v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQC7d5HLLOuFkI8j/WgrxO/psXT5P7SvZQxoZcSBhWMd6EKSI6jtUoylYCd232qoLrxeF6bFN/MZlFTglJ54kmaJuxhJDSJByqms6S4JvPeyMCLioWaTJBhuzFT1rDgFkbBJexq+vZO7tPUvLnuxGpW1h/LeY16MShN+f6Rfi+7AOQIDAQAB”;

Note that if you have a CAMEO EZ wholesale site or a retail site hosted by OmegaNet, your DNS should have the DKIM record exactly as shown above in your DNS zone file.

3. DMARC

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting, pronounced “D-Mark”) is the last component that should be present in your DNS zone file for email deliverability. SPF and DKIM must be in place for DMARC to work. Here is an example of a DMARC record:

_dmarc.mydomain.com. 3600 IN TXT “v=DMARC1; p=none; pct=100; rua=mailto:somebody@mydomain.com”

“_dmarc” indicates this record is DMARC information.
“.mydomain.com” needs to be your actual domain name.
“3600” is the “time to live” (TTL) in seconds. 3600 seconds is one hour (This parameter is optional).
“TXT” indicates the record type.
“v=DMARC1” indicates the version number.
“p=none” indicates that no action should be taken. This is usually an initial value. Other possible values include “reject”, which means the receiving server should reject emails from domains which fail the DMARC check, and “quarantine” which means emails failing DMARC should be quarantined or flagged as suspicious but still delivered.

If your nameservers are ns1.omeganetinc.net and ns2.omeganetinc.net, that means OmegaNet hosts your domain and we have already taken the steps outlined here, adding the three components to your DNS. If your nameservers are elsewhere, these components (SPF, DKIM and DMARC) need to be added by you or whoever manages your domain.

Need Help?

If you want OmegaNet to make the changes in your DNS and your domain is not already hosted by OmegaNet (has OmegaNet’s nameservers) you will need to provide access to your domain registrar or official host. Contact gary@omeganetinc.net.

One more note: If for your notifications you are using an email address from one of the big email providers, like GMail.com, Yahoo.com, ProtonMail.com, Outlook.com, AOL.com, Zoho.com, etc., rather than your own branded email (you@yourdomain.com), you risk those emails not being received, because we cannot modify the DNS for those domains. Most of the services listed above also offer branded email.

PLEASE NOTE: NEW OMEGANET MAILING ADDRESS
Beginning immediately, Please send ALL mail (including invoice payments) and packages to:
OmegaNet Inc.
P. O. Box 611
Snellville, GA 30078

Phone numbers and email addresses remain the same. Please address all mailed correspondence to this address. Please share this information with others in your organization who may be affected. Thank you.

A new “Strategy” has been rolled out for the CAMEO EZ Inventory System. You can read about it and/or watch the video tutorial here.