Category: Magento Extensions

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.

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.

Magento Image Optimization Extension

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Image Optimization is very important when trying to improve your Google page speed. This is especially true because Magento will auto-resize your catalog product images and when it does this they are not in their most optimal form. Previously, having an magento image optimized store was impossible.

That has all changed! Now Magento Image Optimization will optimize your jpeg, gif, and png files so that they are as efficient and fast to download as possible. Some stores are seeing up to a 30% reduction in total page weight and nearly every store will see some reduction. Images are optimized efficiently in the background so that your site speed is not affected. If you are running an older version of Site Optimizer, then we highly recommend upgrading. Refer to the demo at the Magento Image Optimization product page.

Magento Loyalty Extension Released

Extendware Team

Enhance sales and reward your most loyal customers with discounts. Loyalty programs allow you to incentivize customers to purchase from you instead of competitors. With our Magento Loyalty Program you will be able to incentive customers based on order history, average order amount, and account age. We provide you with 3 new sales rule for creating unique sales rules that reward a subset of your customers and we also provide a standard loyalty program based on order history. When customers feel like they have an investment in your business, they will be more likely to be repeat customers!

How is our loyalty program different?
It is extremely flexible. It provides 3 new sales rule and it also operates outside of sales rules. This means it will not conflict with any existing sales rules. It allows discounts on the marginal dollar, so customers do not have to place multiple orders to maximize discounts. View the Magento Loyalty Extension page for more information.

Magento Bulk Product Updating – Tier / Group Price Support!

Extendware Team

Managing Tier / Group prices is very time consuming task in Magento. For each product you must make several clicks of the mouse and potentially input dozens of numbers. If you need to change 100s of products, this could take you hours or even days. Magento Bulk Product Updating solves this by allowing you to copy tier / group prices from another product. The following tier / group price features are supported:

  • Copy – Copy the tier/ group price from one product to other products.
  • Delete – Delete the tier / group price from products.

Each of these features can be applied to an unlimited number of products. If you have 100 products that all have the same tier / group prices, then you can update all 100 at the same time!

Note: Tier / group price actions are fully compatible with Magento Tier / Group Price Percentages.

Magento Product Labels Extension Released

Extendware Team

Highlighting your special offers, featured products, sale items and more can improve your catalog’s conversion rate. What good is a promotion if you are not communicating the promotion effectively to your customers? Magento Product Labels allows you to highlight products by placing images / labels over the product image.

The number of marketing possibilities are endless. Mark items as being on clearance, put a graphic an “50% OFF” label on a product, or show which products are new in your catalog or which have free shipping. Magento Labels Extension includes advanced filtering rules and features. It is only limited by your imagination!

Informing customers of hot items, sales, etc is not the only use-case of Magento Labels. You can also use it to inform customers of special product characteristics. For example, highlight a product as being “100% natural”, “Organic”, “Made Locally”, “1 Year Guarantee” or anything else you can imagine. The goal is to communicate important information in an emphasized, visually pleasant way! You can even place multiple ribbons on a single product image.

Tier / Group Price Percentages Extension Released!

Extendware Team

With Extendware’s Tier / Group Price Percentages you may now specify percentages for tier / group prices. This enables you to ensure that the tier / group price will always be a percentage of the product price. For example, let’s say you have a wholesale and a retail store and your normal store price is the retail price. Specific users login in order to view the wholesale price. You may now set the whole sale price to be 90% of the normal price, so all prices will appear to be 10% off to wholesale users.

Tier prices work in the same way. If you want to give a 5% discount when someone orders 5 or more a product, then set the tier price to be 95%. When you update the price, the tier price will automatically update to be 95% of the product price

As you can imagine, this will save you a lot of time when managing product tier / group prices!

Magento Bulk Product Updating and Mass Product Actions – Pricing Flexibility

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Bulk Product Updating and Mass Product Actions 1.0.5 has been released. This is the 5th release of our best in class mass actions Extension. In this release several important bug fixes / features have been added.

  • Change Price Based On Cost – Change the price of a product based on the product cost. This allows you to make the product price +20% of the product cost for example.
  • Change Special Price Based On Cost – Change the special price of a product based on the product cost. This allows you to make the product price +20% of the product cost for example.
  • Change Special Price Based On Price – A bug has been fix that prevented the special price from being changed based on price.

Combining the various price functions allows for some very powerful mass price changes. For example, you may set the produce price to be 50% of the cost. Next, you may set the special price to be -20% of the special price. This can be done across all your products, which saves your valuable time.