Author: Extendware Team

Magento Affiliate Program Extension Released!

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Affiliate Program for Magento has been released! Do you want to take your sales to a new level? Then you need to start an affiliate program. No matter how many sales people you hire it will never compare to 100s of motivated, commission-based, individual affiliates that concentrate on selling your products to their existing contact lists. That is the power of an affiliate network.

We offer a complete solution that gives you the tools to manage your own affiliate network. Easily setup affiliate accounts and create banners so they can begin advertising your store. Your affiliates can easily view statistics and create links in their backend, so they can see the results of their campaigns.

Why is an affiliate program better? An affiliate program is better than most other forms of advertising as it is result-based. You only need to pay your affiliates when they produce sales. There is no risk to you as they will not be paid unless they generate revenue for your store. Compare this to google advertising and other forms of advertising where you have to pay whether sales are generated or not!

Have a look at the Magento Affiliate Program Extension to get started!

Quick Overview

Easily create an affiliate network, so that your store is promoted around the clock. Our affiliate extension is highly configurable. Easily create multiple campaigns / programs, multiple commission rates, multiple commission tiers, and banners. Start your affiliate network today so your store can grow!

Magento Full Page Cache Improvements

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Full Page Cache for Magento has made many, many improvements recently. We have made small changes such as increased form key support and secure cookie support and large changes such as multi-level cache backends and faster secondary cache. Here is a run down of the two most important changes:

Multi-Level Cache Backends – Do you want to use a fast memory based cache such as memcached / apc / xcache but you do not have enough memory to store the whole site in memory? Or, perhaps you need tagging support? Multi-level cache backends will come to your rescue. It allows hybrid caches such as a Memcached / File hybrid that gives you the benefit of a memory based backend with the large storage capabilities of the File backend. In addition, it will give Tagging support for memcached / apc / xcache.

Faster Secondary Cache – The secondary cache is the cache-level that displays dynamic content such as cart contents when using the full page cache. The latest page cache includes important changes to the secondary cache that allows it to be 2-3 times faster than it was before and further reduces database queries.

Quick Overview

Extendware’s Full Page Cache reduces your Magento store’s First Byte Time, Increases your web server request rate, reduces database load, and makes your store much more responsive. Extendware’s Caching solution is the best Magento Caching Performance Extension you can buy to speed up your store and easily pays for itself by saving you money rather than buying expensive hardware solutions to increase your Magento store optimization rates.

Magento Store / Currency Switcher Released

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Store / Currency Switcher gives your customers a more localized and personalized shopping experience by automatically redirecting customers to the proper store and currency based on their geographic location. If you sell to markets that use different currencies or different languages, then it is important that customers view the correct currency / store view.

Common auto-switching scenarios:

  • Auto-switch to your region specific stores. European visitors can go to your European store, Indian visitors to your Indian store, US visitors to your US store, etc
  • Auto-switch to language-specific stores. Customers from Spanish speaking countries will view your Spanish language store, English speakers will see your English language store, etc.
  • Auto-switch to the currency of your customers. US visitors will see dollars, Europeans will see Euros, etc.

Note: This extension is compatible with our Magento Full Page Cache extension. 

Quick Overview

Extendware’s Magento Store / Currency Switcher Make your store more personalized and easier to use by gracefully redirecting customers to the proper store and currency based on their geographic location and browser configuration. Easy and flexible rules give you full control on switching. Compatible with full page cache systems.

 

Magento Improved Indexing – Faster Magento Admin Backend

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Improved Indexing helps make the backend more responsive. Many stores will discover that in time the saving of products, categories, and other items becomes slow. The more products / stores that you have the slower it can become. This is a big issue because time is money. Employees will do less work in the same amount of time if the admin backend is slower.

Improved Indexing will perform index operations in the backend. Index operations is a large part of why product saving is slow. The end result is a more responsive backend that allows you and your employees to get more work done.

What are the expected results? This depends on a large variety of factors. Most stores will see around 2-18 seconds time-savings per saved product. The more products you have, the more overloaded your mysql database, the more stores you have, etc, will mean more savings.

Quick Extension Overview

Increase the speed of your administrative backend. Do you have a slow admin backend when saving products, categories, etc? Improved Indexing will speed up your admin backend by making the saving of products, categories, etc more responsive. The end result is that you can get more work done in less time.

Magento Lucene Search Released

Extendware Team

Your Magento store product search allows customers to find the products they want quicker. Customers will leave your store if they cannot find the products they want. Around 43% to 50% of e-commerce customers use site search to find the products . Your store is losing a lot of potential sales if your search is slow or returning poor results.

Magento Lucene is a fast and precise search backend that is compatible with shared hosts. It includes lots of features and comes with a 30 day refund guarantee – we are that confident.

How important is fast site search?

A customer will not be able to order products from your store if they cannot find them. Relevant results matter and Lucene Search will make your results more relevant and faster. According to Gomez, every second delay in site load time results in a 7% reduction in revenue. Forrester research has found that 52% of people consider speed to be important to their site loyalty. It is well-established that faster and more relevant search results will improve a stores revenue.

Quick Extension Overview

Extendware’s Magento Lucene Search increases revenue and customer satisfaction with faster, more relevant search results. Lucene Search is a powerful and flexible search solution that helps ensure your customers can always find the products they want. Plug and play configuration and compatible with shared hosting environments.

 

Magento Abandonded Cart Reminder Blacklist

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Abandoned Cart Reminder is a powerful extension that enables you to capture lost sales by e-mailing customers automatic followups after abandoning their cart. Based on feedback from customers, we have added two new features recently to make this extension even more powerful:

  1. Unsubscribe / E-mail Blacklist – nothing is worse than when a customer receives unwanted e-mail and they become annoyed. In addition, not allowing customers to unsubscribe might be illegal in various jurisdictions. As a result, we now allow customers to unsubscribe from cart reminder e-mails so they never receive them anymore. In addition, you may place emails on the unsubscribe list in the backend. This ensures only customers who want to receive the emails (and potential discounts) will receive them.
  2. Customer Group Disabling – some customers have both a retail and wholesale shop. Abandoned cart reminder most likely should only be used on the retail shop. Now you can disable some customer groups from receiving reminders, so that wholesale customers will not receive the reminders.

To learn more about Magento Abandoned Carts review our Magento Extensions.

Quick Extension Overview

Our Magento Abandoned Cart Email extension allows you to capture additional sales by emailing customers who have abandoned their shopping cart without making a purchase. You can send an unlimited number of follow-up emails to the potential customer and even attach an automatically generated coupon to the follow-up email in order to incentivize a new purchase. Learn more about Extendware’s Abandoned Cart Reminder Extension at our website.

 

Magento Product Feeds Updated

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Product Feed allows store owners to create feeds for various shopping sites (google, shopping.com, yahoo, etc) with ease. Over the last month we have been making a lot of under the hood changes to the extension to bring even more ease of use and capabilities to our valued customers.

Here are some recent changes to our Product Feed extension:

  1. Multi-attribute fields – sometimes you need to combine various product attributes to create a search optimized field value for a shopping site. The most common use case would be creating better product names which enhance visibility in the product search engine. For example, you could combine the manufacturer, category, and more with the product name. Here at Extendware we could do something like this “{{var name}} for {{var platform}}” to make a feed field look like this for Feed Creator Pro: “Feed Creator Pro for Magento”. The possibilities and flexibility are endless!
  2. Filtering on dynamic attributes – Dynamic attributes allow the creation of new product attributes that change based on the value of other product attributes. Now it is possible to exclude products from the feed based on the value of a dynamic attribute
  3. Price output types – you can now set the output type for a field to be “price”. This will ensure the outputted number has no more than 2 decimal places and if desired will also format the price with the currency symbol.
  4. Filtering on empty – if you filter a product attribute and leave the filter value empty, then it will both match empty values and null values. Previously there was not way to match null values

We highly recommend upgrading to the latest releases and be sure to check back as we are constantly adding new features! Also, be sure to check out the Magento Product feeds page for full feature details.

Quick Extension Overview

Extendware’s Magento Product Feed easily creates product feeds for a variety of services such as Google, Yahoo, Shopping.com, and more. The end result is increased exposure for your products and increased revenue as a result. Compatible with XML and CSV / TXT feed formats.

Slow Magento Checkout / Product Editing? It’s the cache!

Extendware Team

How many times have you you experienced a slow down from your Magento store when :

  • Checking out (specifically the last step)
  • Saving products in the administrative area

If so, you are likely suffering from a bloated, inefficient cache. You need Performant Cache Backends for Magento to resolve this issue.

Why do these areas of store operation slow down?

These areas attempt to flush the cache by tags. The problem with the cache implementation in Magento is that a flush by tags will cause a full scan on the cache directory in order to find cache items matching the tag. For smaller stores that only need to scan a few hundred files this is no problem. Larger stores, with thousands of cache objects, will experience major slow downs. Sometimes as a high as 30-60 seconds. With our Performant Cache Backends flushing by tags will take a fraction of the time.

Is there any way to confirm that my store is being slowed due to this issue?

Yes. If these actions are faster when the cache is disabled or close to empty, then this indicates that part of the slow down is the result of this issue. Once the cache is full, then more files will need to be scanned, and checkout / product editing will become slower.

Quick Extension Overview

If checkout or product saving is slow, you need Redis support, or flushing by tags is slow, then you need our Performance Cache Backends extensions. You will receive an improved file based cache and a redis based cache that is optimized for tag flushing.

 

Performance of Merging Javascript / CSS in Magento

Extendware Team

Minify-Js--Css-(Web)Summary: Built-in merging of Javascript / CSS will slow down your store. You need Magento Minify Javascript / Css to properly merge files

Many store owners are enabling Javascript / CSS merging in Magento in order to “increase performance”. You can go to System -> Developer and look under Javascript and CSS Settings to see if your store is currently merging Javascript / CSS. If you have enabled merging, then we recommend that you disable this setting now. If you need proper merging, then you should purchase Minify JS / CSS.

Why is built-in merging of Javascript / CSS bad?

It breaks the browser cache. Merging is not done in an intelligent way. It is done too aggressively as all files are merged into one css and one javascript file. This is effective one a single page, but is not effective for a site as complex as Magento. As your customers change page types (home page -> catalog page -> product page) then it will generate new merged URLs which breaks the browser cache and causes the redownloading of all your CSS / JS files.

Why does the default merging generate different URLs for different page types?

Different page types have different CSS / Javascript requirements. Your home page may include 10 javascript files while your catalog page might include 12 javascript files. As a consequence, the merge URL for the 10 file merge will be different than for the 12 file merge.

Does this mean it is better to disable merging?

Yes, your site will be faster if you disable merging. Alternatively, you can use Minify JS / CSS for Magento, which merges intelligently. Your Google Page Speed will decrease if you disable merging and do not use Site Optimizer. However, Google Page Speed only measures page speed. It does not measure site speed. An individually loaded page will be faster with merging enabled, but your entire site will be slower. So, if your customers visit more than one page, you want to disable merging.

Is there a way to verify merging is done properly or not?

Yes, go to the home page of your site and record all javascript / css urls. Then, do the same for a catalog page and a product page. Next, verify that the urls are all the same if the same content is shown. With default merging enabled, you will notice different urls and when you go to the urls you will notice that 90% of the javascript / css is duplicated among the different urls.

Quick Extension Overview

Speed up your site, improve your search engine site rankings and conversion rate, and improve your user experience in the process. Minify Js / CSS extension reduces page size, bandwidth, request count, and server load without anything more than installing this easy to use and feature-full extension.

 

Magento Full Page Cache Auto-flushing / Tagging

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Full Page Cache has an exciting new addon feature – Auto-flushing / tagging. The problem with many full page cache systems is that you must flush the entire cache after changing a product / category. This reduces the usefulness of the cache for quickly changing stores. Our Magento cache warmer / crawler extension alleviates this problem by periodically crawling your store to ensure pages are re-cached.

However, crawling is not a complete solution because it is not sufficiently real-time. Auto-flushing / tagging is the complete solution as it will delete affected pages after a product / category changes. With our tagging addon you can select the tagging level and auto-flushing events that will trigger the flushing of specific pages. This provides maximum flexibility and ensures content freshness for your store. Refer to the Extendware Magento Full Page Cache (FPC) product page for more information.