Author: Extendware Team

Optimizing the Shopping Cart: 12 Steps for Magento Users

Extendware Team

T he shopping cart is the most important component of your e-commerce business. In order for your business to survive, your customers need to be able to make their way to the “Complete Order” button easily and quickly. Magento enables users to create user-friendly shopping carts, allowing you to maximize ROI. Here are the best practices for creating a streamlined checkout process with Magento:

  1. Provide checkout buttons at the bottom and top of your site.

Today’s Internet users are more distracted than ever, and one checkout button just isn’t enough. Place checkout buttons at both the top and bottom of your website. That way, customers can begin the checkout process Checkout-buttonsno matter where they happen to be on the page.

Checkout buttons should be in contrasting colors that catch users’ attention. As with most elements related to shopping carts, usability outweighs aesthetics.

  1. Allow customers to continue shopping

Some customers want to continue shopping after adding an item to the shopping cart, and you need to make it easy for them to do so. Shopping cart pages should include a visible “Continue Shopping” button.

  1. Product-DisplayProvide a related products display

By showing customers products related to the items already in the shopping cart, you can increase the average purchase order. There are extensions available for Magento that automatically display products that are frequently purchased together.

  1. Minimize the number of steps that customers must take to complete checkout

There’s a reason why Amazon has established a one-click buy feature. It’s an established fact in e-commerce that more steps to complete a purchase means fewer orders. While most e-commerce businesses cannot implement a one-click purchase feature like Amazon does, streamline the process so that buyers go through only one or two screens before finalizing their purchase.

  1. Implement proper authentication procedures

However, don’t skirt on authentication procedures. Trust is critical to any e-commerce business, and customers appreciate seeing that basic security measures are in place. A two-factor authentication system is industry standard.

  1. Don’t ask for the same information repeatedly

Entering in the same information more than once is tedious, so don’t make customers do it. This means, for example, that you should provide a checkbox for customers who have the same shipping and billing addresses (as most of them do).

Also consider which information is truly vital to collect. While it may be useful to know demographic information about your buyers for marketing purposes, requiring users to enter in too much information is a turn-off. In addition to being tedious, many e-commerce buyers worry about privacy issues and become suspicious when they are asked too much personal information.

  1. Give customers a variety of shipping optionsShipping

When you are able to offer customers more choices for shipping, you increase your business’ credibility. Again, look to Amazon as a model. For most purchases, users can choose from at least three different shipping options, from more expensive selections that allow quick receipt of purchase to more budget-friendly choices.

  1. Better yet, offer free shipping for large orders

Studies of e-commerce buyer behavior have repeatedly demonstrated that many customers balk when they discover high shipping fees. In order to remain competitive, more and more businesses are offering free shipping in order to offset the effects of shipping price shock.

Setting a minimum order price for free shipping is particularly effective because it incentivizes customers to buy more items.

  1. Show customers their savings

If you’re providing customers with savings via special deals or a rewards program, show them exactly how much they’re saving. Knowing this information will make them feel confident in the purchase and more likely to buy from you again.

  1. Allow customers to register for reward programs

The moment of checkout is your best opportunity to gain a long-term customer. Make sure that buyers have the option to register for your site while checking out—and make the process easy.
While many customers are wary of signing up for fear of being spammed, offering future deals and savings provides a strong incentive for registration.

  1. Let customers provide feedback at time of sale

feedbackEveryone appreciates being heard. Providing an optional comments box at time of purchase starts off the customer-seller relationship off on the right foot by letting buyers know that you care about their input.

  1. Use a shopping cart recovery system

Among e-commerce experts, it’s no secret that abandoned carts cut into profits. In 2015, the estimated cart abandonment rate was an astonishing 68%. Implementing a shopping cart recovery system helps businesses to gain back some of this lost business. Sending friendly reminder e-mails to customers who didn’t complete the checkout process gains additional sales. If you can provide a discount to sweeten the deal, shopping cart reminders become all the more effective.

Optimizing the shopping cart is critical for the success of any e-commerce business. All of these tweaks can be made with Magento. Investing in expert-designed Magento extensions makes it easy to create a great checkout experience, thereby maximizing your ROI.

We hope you find these tips useful to enhance the checkout process of your Magento Store, until next time!

Shopping Cart Price Rules Extension Overview

Extendware’s Magento Shopping Cart Price Rules, you can create new promotions that are not possible in default Magento stores. With 24 different price rule actions, you will be able to create much more powerful promotions to attract customers to your store and products. For example, you can create rules like, “Buy a shirt and get a discount on a tie” or “Buy 2 of a product and receive the 3rd for free”. Why wait? Take action now and create much more powerful promotions to make your online business successful!

Benefits of the Magento Delete Orders Extension

Extendware Team

Delete Unwanted, Spam, and Old Orders with Magento Delete Orders Extension

Uh oh…Your mailbox is full.

Your Magento Storage has reached it full capacity. Your mailbox is full. “This person can not receive any more messages.”

All of these phrases are familiar and are just about the last thing you want to start your workday with (well, not worse than the dreaded “Magento White Screen“). They mean you need to clean and organize and DELETE!

Fraudulent, test or fake orders can take up major space and the Delete Orders extension can help make the clean up quick and easy.

Delete? I Don’t Want To Delete Anything!Character-order

Delete can be a scary word for people, especially with multiple admins. Extendware’s Delete Orders extension will allow you to give access only to those permitted to delete orders as well as toggle the deletion capabilities on and off so you wont have to worry about losing valuable transaction information on accident.

Easily and completely delete orders from your Magento store. Great for deleting your old test orders and other orders you do not want cluttering your reports and taking up space in the database.
Easily and completely delete orders from your Magento store. Great for deleting your old test orders and other orders you do not want cluttering your reports and taking up space in the database.

single-order

 

Another great benefit to the Delete Orders extension is that you can delete single orders or in bulk and all of the credit memo and shipment info will also be deleted and not left to clutter database. This simple extension will save you a ton of time weeding through old orders and give you more time for the new ones!

Important Features of Delete Orders Extension

  • Easily Delete Any Order
    Simply click the “Delete” button on the order page and any order can be deleted.
  • Bulk Delete Orders
    Select any number of orders in your order grid and then select “Delete Permanently” from the grid actions to delete orders in bulk.
  • Disable Deleting for Certain Administrative Users
    Deleting orders is a powerful feature that not every admin should have access too. You have the ability to ensure only specific admin users can delete an order.
  • Delete Your Test Orders and Fraudulent Orders
    Test orders, fake orders, fraudulent orders, etc, should not take up room in your database. Now you can easily delete these orders.
  • Easily Enable / Disable to Ensure no Accidental Deletes
    Turn the deletion capabilities on and off, so it is only enabled when you want to delete. This will prevent any accidental order deletions.
  • Corresponding Invoice / Credit Memo / Shipment / etc Values Deleted
    When the order is deleted the corresponding invoice, credit memo, shipment, etc, data is also deleted so these items will not be orphaned in the database.

If you can believe it, the above list is not a complete list of features. Please try the online demo or install as a free trial  and take 30-DAYSadvantage of our risk-free 30 day refund guarantee to fully see the power and elegance of the Delete Orders extension.

Delete-Orders-(for-web)Quick Delete Orders Extension Overview

Easily and completely delete orders from your Magento store. Great for deleting your old test orders and other orders you do not want cluttering your reports and taking up space in the database. You can delete one order or delete multiple orders at the same time.

 

Why is Extendware Full Page Cache Better than Varnish Caching Services?

Extendware Team

Full-Page-Cache-(Web)We get the question quite often in our Extendware Support channel, “Why can’t I just use Varnish* caching services instead of the Extendware FPC solution?”

The simple answer is, the Extendware Full Page Cache does not need or use Varnish because Varnish is not well implemented for the Magento platform. In fact, there are two specific reasons that FPC is a much better solution for a Magento store than using the Varnish caching solution.

Reason 1: Few Database Requests and a Higher Cache Hit Rate

One of the reasons that Extendware’s Full Page Cache (FPC) is a better solution than Varnish is that – like Varnish – FPC does not use the database for most requests, so it reduces load on the database.

However, unlike varnish, FPC has a high cache hit rate (percent of requests served by cache) that Varnish can not match, due to the design of FPC and its native use of Magento’s platform.

Not-integrated

 

Since Varnish is a general caching solution – and not built for specifically for Magento – it is not well integrated into the Magento platform. This allows Extendware’s FPC – a Magento customized solution – to outperform Varnish in almost every caching scenario.

Reason 2: Varnish Flushing Limitations

In addition, Varnish has severe limitations with flushing. For example, the whole varnish layer cache needs to be flushed when there are any changes on your store. On the contrary, our FPC can flush selectively and not affect the cache of your entire store for when only one category or page needs to be changed.

As a result of these Magento specific capabilities that come out-of-the-box with Full Page Cache that are unavailable in Varnish, customers using FPB on their Magento stores generally have better overall speed and experience.

These two simple limitations with the Varnish solution make a custom made Magento-specific Full Page Cache solution a no-brainer.

* Varnish is a cache server technology: https://www.varnish-cache.org/

Quick Overview

Full-Page-CacheExtendware’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.

Continue reading “Why is Extendware Full Page Cache Better than Varnish Caching Services?” »

Maximize Your Marketing ROI with Irresistible Product Pages

Extendware Team

If you’re like most e-commerce business owners who use Magento, you invest in paid advertising to drive targeted traffic to your store.

So it’s very important to receive strong ROI (Return on Investment) on your marketing campaigns. Here’s how to optimize every product page to receive great ROI on each dollar you spend on advertising.

Show stunning images of your product

The quality of a product image can make or break a sale. E-commerce experts strongly advise against using stock images of a product, or images with poor resolution. Take original, high-resolution photographs to sell your product. We recommend 4-6 different shots per product for most industries. While some e-commerce entrepreneurs invest in professional photography, a less expensive alternative is to buy or make a lightbox to take better, more detailed photographs. Once you post images to the product page, make sure that viewers have the option to zoom in.

Don’t just show the product as a still object. Whenever possible, use shots that show the product in action. Photographs that include children and pets are known to be particularly high-converting, so if appropriate include these adorable models in your shot.

If your product requires a demonstration, include instructional videos (or links to videos) on the page itself. Like this one for our Full Page Cache Demo. People want to know that they will be able to use your product with ease.

Make sure products are catalogued properly

Screen Shot 2016-05-16 at 8.51.06 PM

You want to make it easy for customers to navigate the storefront. Maybe the specific product page they first clicked on isn’t for them, but you still have a valuable potential customer. A well-organized catalogue allows customers to find similar or complimentary products easily, maximizing your sales.

 

Write a Product Description that is Easy to Read and Informative.

Interested buyers will read product descriptions in part or in full, so make sure that yours are engaging. A good rule of thumb is to emphasize benefits over features. To explain further, let’s say you’re selling a cellphone with a 5.5” screen. The screen dimension is a feature. But the benefits of a 5.5” screen are that users will be able to read messages more easily, use a range of other applications, and play Angry Birds better.

Even for selling technical products, avoid large blocks of text that are nothing more than technical explanations. You can place the product specs at the bottom of the description, but the description itself should be readable and relatable for buyers. Also, make sure to avoid typos and other errors that damage your company’s credibility.

Create a Layout that Maximizes Sales

Studies show that web users generally read content in a pattern that graphic design experts refer to as an F-Pattern: First users look at the main horizontal line, then the main vertical line, followed by any secondary headings (horizontal lines).

Many users will not read every word of a page, but rely on these markers to determine their interest. Design your product pages so that the most important information is conveyed in these critical junctures. A compelling image on the sidebar can have a big effect.

You can learn more about the F-Pattern and how to implement it here.

Test your Product Pages and Track your Conversion Rates

While this post reviews general best practices, every market is unique. To ensure that you’re not missing out on possible conversions, try making use of A/B testing so that you can find out what your audience responds to best. Only through careful tracking can you deduce the ROI on your marketing efforts, and work to optimize it.

Before publishing a product page, e-commerce business owners should ask themselves these questions:

  • Are the images high-quality and compelling?
  • Is the product catalogued in a way that makes sense?
  • Does the product description sell the product’s features?
  • Is the page layout conveying the most important information in the right places?
  • Do you have a system in place to track conversion rates?

If you said yes to all five questions, your product page is ready to go. Making these tweaks to your product pages can have massive effects on your business’ bottom line.

 

Starting a Store on Magento: Time-Saving Tips

Extendware Team

For businesses looking to establish an e-commerce store, Magento is an indispensable tool. As an open-source platform, Magento can be adapted to meet the needs of individual businesses. Big brands and small businesses alike can use Magento to create a profitable and user-friendly online storefront.

But while anyone can go to Magento’s website and set up a basic store, creating a successful e-commerce business can be considerably harder.

Magento offers so many different options for customization that many new users feel overwhelmed and intimated. So many different tasks go into running a successful online store:  SEO, web design, marketing, and many more. Magento extensions help online business owners to complete necessary tasks on time and without hassle. Here are some common problems that Magento users encounter—and how extensions can help solve them:

Lagging Loading Times

All research suggests that today’s web users are more impatient than ever. If an online store takes too long to load, visitors to your site won’t buy. While you can’t always control the speed with which users browse your site, there are ways to lower your load times. An extension such as the Full Page Cache will speed up your site by caching it whenever a user visits. This extension serves as a replacement to expensive investments in hardware.

Google Analytics Overload

Traffic is essential to the success of your business, so it can be tempting to visit Google Analytics constantly. But this is an inefficient use of time. With the Google Analytics Dashboard extension, you can see your Google Analytics data right from your dashboard.

Spam, Spam, and More Spam!

There are bots looking to spam your inbox. If you have a contact page on your website, you may be vulnerable to spam. The Anti-Spam Captcha prevents this annoyance, requiring users to enter a short string of characters before their message goes through.

Conversion Confusion

E-commerce is a global phenomenon, but international customers may be turned off if they can’t easily figure out how much they will need to pay for a particular item. Customers also may be unaware that you have separate storefronts for buyers from different countries. The Store/ Currency Switcher extension will enable your Magento store to redirect to the correct storefront.

Abandoned Carts

The bane of every online retailer, abandoned carts can seriously reduce your profits. In 2015, the average rate of cart abandonment was a whopping 68%, meaning that more than two-thirds of online orders were never completed. For e-commerce business owners, few things can be more frustrating. But with the Abandoned Cart Email extension, you can send a friendly reminder e-mail to customers who abandon their carts on your store. The e-mail sequence can be completely customized. You can even include a coupon for customers to incentivize them to complete their purchase.

 

Running an online store is already difficult. By making strategic use of Magento extensions, you can make better use of your resources and increase the profits of your online store.

All ExtendWare extensions come with the option to return within return within 30 days and receive a full refund —making this investment risk-free.

Increase the Speed of your Administrative Backend with Improved Indexing

Extendware Team

Improved-Indexing-(for-web)When saving products, categories, and other entities to your Magento store, the Magento platform must update its various indexes, which can cause a huge delay that reduces your productivity.

Having a Slow Magento Administrative Backend can be a real waste of your time

Not only for you, but also your employees if you have them. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to save categories and products with ease? If these issues sound familiar then Extendware’s Improved Indexing is the extension for you!

Magento Improved Indexing Extension

More Great Features of Improved Indexing

Increase Responsiveness of Admin Backend
Saving products, categories, and more will be much faster, which will allow you to get more work done faster.

Optimize Catalog URL Rewrites 
We include optimizations that optimize the slowest index for large stores: catalog URL rewrites.

Save Time and Save Money
The faster you can get work done in the admin area means you will be able to do more work or have more free time. If you have employees, then the increased employee productivity will enable you to save employment costs.

View How Much Time You Have Saved
You can easily view how much time has been saved as a result of using Improved Indexing for Magento.

Re-Index Manually or On Schedule
Re-indexing events will be processed periodically with a cronjob or you can manually force the processing of events if desired.

Full Page Cache Support
If you are using Extendware’s Full Page Cache, then deferred indexing is compatible out-of-the-box.

Quick Improved Indexing Extension Overview

Improved-Indexing-(for-web)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.

Imagine 2016 Magento Conference

Extendware Team
Imagine 2016
Imagine 2016

Imagine 2016

Extendware is excited to say that we got to attend the Imagine 2016 Magento Conference. Now in its 6th year, Imagine 2016 brought together 2,500+ merchants, partners, developers and commerce experts from 45+ countries to network, exchange ideas and build relationships.

Speakers such as Earvin “Magic” Johnson of Magic Johnson Enterprises, Mark Lavelle of Magento Commerce, and Jamie Clarke of LoveOutThere.com took the stage along with many other informative entrepreneurs, business owners, and Magento’s top professionals. Magic Johnson, spent lots of time in the crowd answering questions. It wasn’t hard to find him.

Magento 2016
Magento 2016

Magento News

Magento 2 Momentum: 228,000 downloads of Community and Enterprise Edition, over 800 sites live, and 100+ Magento 2 Trained Partners

Magento Enterprise Edition 2.1: The next release will include enhanced staging and preview, ElasticsSarch, and payments functionality

Magento Marketplace Launch: A better place for developers to show off their best work

Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition Launch: New PaaS environment built to power innovative commerce experiences

Conference Goers
Conference Goers

 

The conference began with awards recognizing the 20 most active users within the Magento developer community, recognizing the exceptional creativity, innovation and success of merchants across the global Magento ecosystem.They also unveiled the Inaugural Magento Trailblazer Award to Vandy Santos, Global Omnichannel Solutions Leader for Nestle and A.J. Nahmad, President of Watsco, Inc.

Schedule Imagine 2016
Schedule Imagine 2016

It is no wonder that the Community itself, is what makes Magento so special and unique. Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento, used the words “We Are Magento” to acknowledge the community of developers, system integrators, merchants, and partners that make up the powerful ecosystem.

We are happy to congratulate the Magento team on the release of Magento 2.1 and the announcement of the Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition. Both are examples of exciting new tools for the hundreds of thousands of Magento merchants from all over the world.

Recapture Lost Sales By Using The Abandoned Cart Email Extension

Extendware Team

It can seem defeating when customers add products to their carts and then suddenly abandon them without completing the purchase. Perhaps they decided to comparison shop, or maybe they became confused by the check-out process, or they could have become distracted and figured they would push the task off until another time.

Instead of losing customers, bring them back to your store! Extendware’s Abandoned Cart Email does just that. You can now send an email to any customer who has abandoned their cart. You can send incentives or coupons or simply remind them what they were shipping for. It couldn’t be easier and it will save a lot of lost sales!

There are many great benefits to the Abandoned Cart Email Extension

Increase Store Revenue
Easily increase store revenue in an automated way. Abandoned Cart Emails can pay for itself very quickly!

Recover Lost Sales
Abandoned carts are lost sales. Sending followups and incentivizing purchases with coupons will give you a way to recover these lost sales.

Send an Unlimited Number of Follow-up Emails
Every store is unique. Some stores will only want 1 email while others will want to send 5 or even 10. You may select from 1 to an unlimited number of reminders and each setting is set on a per-store basis.

Reminders
Reminders

Send Reminder to Registered Members and Guests
Guests reminders can outnumber registered member reminders by 100 times. E-mails of your guests will be captured via Ajax as they fill out the checkout form and they will be sent reminders if they abandon the order.

Easily Track Emails with Google Analytics 
When customers click on the recovery link the URL will include your google tracking parameters.

Supports One-Step-Checkout Extensions 
Out-of-the-box support for numerous one-step-checkout extensions and adding new ones is extremely simple.

Coupons with Expiration can Automatically be Added to Emails
Adding coupons to your emails will motivate your users to complete their sale! Various coupon types are supported and you can customize the priority and discount of the created coupon. You can even set a minimum cart value before the coupon is enabled.

Adding Coupon
Adding Coupon

Each Coupon Sent Will Have a Unique Coupon Code So it Cannot be Used More Than Once 
Coupons that are sent to users are completely unique, so they cannot be shared or published on a Web site. Each coupon will only work one time.

Show the List of Products in the Abandoned Cart Email
The abandoned cart reminder email will show the list of products that were added to the cart. The customer can restore the cart by clicking a link.

Coupons Support Advanced Action Rules / Conditions 
Do you want to only add a coupon when the cart value is over $500? Maybe you want to exclude all books from being discounted? You can easily do this and more with Abandoned Cart Emails. We give you complete control of the parameters of the coupon being added to the email.

Enable Customers to Automatically Recover Their Cart (optional)
Customers may click a link in the reminder e-mail which will automatically log them in and add their original cart contents to their session. This makes it even easier for them to place their order.

Easily Track Who Recovered Their Cart and When
All sent reminders are stored in a history log. When customers recover their cart via the e-mail link and use their coupon (if applicable), it will be recorded in the history log.

Configure When The Reminder Will Be Sent
Configure When The Reminder Will Be Sent

Unsubscribe / E-mail Blacklist Abilities
Ensure you are compliant with local laws by giving customers the ability to unsubscribe from receiving cart reminders.

Change the Reminder Template in Any Way You Want
Every reminder can have its own e-mail template. This template can be modified in System -> Transactional Emails just like any other Magento template. In addition, you have the option to further change any reminder before it is sent to the customer.

Delay Sending if Cart Contents are Out of Stock 
Sending a reminder when the cart contents are all out of stock can be embarrassing for a store. We allow you to delay these reminders and send them when product returns to stock.

Reminders / Alerts Automatically Stop on Purchase or Cart Recovery
It is important that a reminder sequence is stopped once a customer responds. A reminder sequence will stop once a user recovers their cart from the email or places a purchase (this is configurable).

Display Time of Checkout 
For even easier tracking the history grid will now show the time the recipient of the user placed an order.

Capture Telephone Numbers
Sometimes sending an e-mail is not enough. Now telephone numbers are captured (via Ajax) during checkout, so that you may call select customers if you wish.

Only Send Reminders to Specific Customer Groups 
You can disable the sending of reminders to specific customer groups. This ensure your wholesale customers will not receive messages meant for your retail customers.

Send Copy of Reminder to Alternate E-mail Address
In addition to the reminder log you can choose to send copies of reminders to other email addresses so you can keep track of what reminders are being sent.

You Have Complete Control of Reminders and When They are Sent
Turn off auto sending and you may manually send reminders or delete them or even edit the reminder contents prior to sending.

Customizable Delay Period Between Reminders
A reminder sequence is the sequence of reminders that are sent once an abandoned cart occurs. The time periods between each reminder in a sequence can be customized according to your needs.

Offer Your Customers the Best Promotions and Products with Bulk Product Updating

Extendware Team

Its a Sunny Day and you are stuck inside. Why? You are too busy  updating your prices, assigning categories and managing your catalog to enjoy the beautiful weather. Its tasks like these that allow us to lose valuable time that we could be spending doing fun things! Extendware’s Bulk Product Updating can update a series of prices, upsells, and manage products all with  a quick press of a few buttons. There are over 45 actions you can use, so you can have more time to enjoy the exciting things in life!

Here Are Some Other Great Features of The Bulk Product Updating Extension

Bulk-Product-Updating
Bulk Product Updating

Edit Prices / Special Prices / MSRP Prices / Cost Price
Set prices / special prices to a specific value or apply increases / decreases in the form of +10.5, -10.5, +20%, -20%. Flexible rounding rules (none, floor, ceiling, rounding) and the ability to add a value after the price modification (0.99, 0.50, etc) allow you to guarantee pricing such as $45.99 or $54.50. For example, you can increase all prices by 5%, round down (floor), and add 0.99 so prices are of the form $XX.99. This greatly reduces management time.

Edit Prices Relative to Other Prices or Cost
You can set the price relative to the cost and you can set the special price relative to cost or price. For example, set the price to be +20% of the cost and then set the special price to be -10% of the price. The possibilitie are endless!

Edit Prices Relative to Other Prices or Cost
Edit Prices Relative to Other Prices or Cost

Support for Custom Price Attributes 
If you have custom attributes with the decimal type you can enable it to be used for the bulk editing by simply selecting it in the graphical configuration.
Copy / Delete Tier / Group Prices 
Tier /group prices are very time consuming to create for every single product. Many times products have the same tier / group prices. Now you just need to define the tier prices you want for one product and then you can copy that tier / group price to any other products. This can save you hours and it is even fully compatible with Magento Tier Price Percentages.
Assign / Unassign / Copy Categories 
Simply select the products you wish to apply the action to and either select the category or input the list of category IDs you wish you assign / unassign / copy. Nothing could be easier.

Manage Related / Cross-Sell / Upsell Product Links
Create related, cross-sell, and upsell product links with ease. You may select between 3 different algorithms to create the links:
One-way – selected products are (un)linked to inputted product
Two-way – selected products are (un)linked to inputted product and vice-versa
Multi-way – all products are (un)linked to each other
Copy Custom Options
Creating the same custom options for every product is a very time consuming task. With Bulk Product Actions you can copy the custom options from one product to another. You can even choose whether you will replace any existing custom options or simply add to whatever custom options already exist.
Duplicate Products 
Easily duplicate multiple products so you can go in and edit their details later as you want.

Over 45 actions!
Over 45 actions!

Delete Products Directly From the Database
If you need to delete a lot of products and you know what you are doing, you can delete them directly from the database. This will not run the before / after delete code, which will save a LOT of time.
Change the Attribute Aet of Products
Change the attribute set of a product with ease. This means you no longer have to delete / re-create a product to change the attribute set
Have More Free Time to Spend on Income Generating Activities
This extension, especially when combined with Tier / Group Price Percentages, will save you countless hours of performing mundane and repetitive tasks. This extra time can be spent on income generating activities such as marketing.

Reduce bandwidth, CPU, and crawling time with Cache Crawler/Warmer

Extendware Team

The web contains trillions and trillions of pages, which can make it hard for your customers to find your store at times. We rely heavily on Google to find things for us and Google is able to do this with something called a Web Crawler.

Stores with a high number of unique pages compared to their traffic will tend to have a low hit rate and as a result caching solutions are not effective. The Magento Cache Crawler solves this by crawling and pre-caching the pages on your site, which will increase the cache hit rate

Here are some more great features of the Cache Warmer/Crawler Extension

Efficiently Crawl Your Magento Store to Warm Your Caches
The crawler will only access each page one time during a crawl session to ensure there is no duplicate effort. In addition, pages your users cannot access (disabled products, children of configurable products) will not be crawled.

Crawl All Your Important Pages
Crawl CMS pages, catalog pages, and product pages. When used with the Full Page Cache, all your layered navigation filter options, deep catalog pages, searches, and 3rd party extensions will be crawled without any further configuration.

Ensure That Server Load on the Server Does Not Become High
A crawler increases server load in exchange for faster page speed. If there are lots of things happening on the server, then it can create high server load. The crawler can detect this and automatically pause itself and automatically restart when the server load reduces. This ensures that the crawler does not compete with user traffic for server resources!

Cache Warmer/Crawler
Cache Warmer/Crawler

Crawl as Quickly as Possible Using Multiple Crawler Threads
Multiple threads will be used which can reduce the total crawl time by 10 times or more.

Crawl as Logged in Users
Do you show different content to logged in users? If so, it might make sense to crawl as a logged in user so their cache can be warmed. You can now easily select which customer group you want to crawl.

Crawl Out-of-Schedule Jobs By Manually Adding It
Did you flush the cache and need to run a job real quick even though it is not scheduled yet? No problem, you can easily add a manual job that will run immediately.

Don’t Crawl Disabled / Hidden / Out-of-Stock Products
Ensure you don’t waste resources crawling products that would be infrequently viewed or not viewable at all!

Filter Out Generated URLs by URL Type
Easily filter out certain pages such as category pages or cms pages or product pages from being added to the queue. This is useful if you only want to crawl category pages or certain page types.

Always View the Status of Crawls and Manage Crawls Using an Easy Interface
Easily view past crawls, currently running crawls, and queued crawls. Pause or disable crawls. Change the number of threads used. View the number of crawled URLs, the source of the URLs, and view performance metrics such as the number of crawled URLs per minute.

View current and past crawler jobs
View current and past crawler jobs

Filter Out any URL by Regular Expression
Easily ensure that URLs that match a regular expression will not be crawled. This is useful if you do not want certain pages to be crawled.

Fully Support Crawling of HTTPS Secure URLs
Is your site running in secure mode on the frontend? The crawler will crawl your secure pages too.

Reduces Bandwidth and CPU Usage During Crawls
When combined with our Full Page Cache there will be reduced bandwidth and processing done when loading uncached pages loaded by the crawler process.

Flush Caches Prior to Crawling
Flushing Magento caches prior to crawling is important to ensure that the crawler crawled pages are the most up-to-date.