Optimize Your E-Commerce Store For Cyber Monday and Black Friday 2017!

Its that time of year again!

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a great opportunity for online retailers and e-commerce businesses to drastically increase their sales with discounts and sales. 

Have you prepared your Magento store  the millions of shoppers, amped up to spend money for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? We have some tips that may help you and your store prepare!

Promote Promote Promote!

People can’t find you if you don’t tell them.  Send out dedicated newsletters to your subscribers by creating coupon codes and send them to customers in newsletters. Try conversion rate optimization software to track your customers conversions and promote specials via pop up ads or banners on your site! We love Picreel as they use the ReelOverlay feature where you can capture a new lead, gain a sale, or simply keep a visitor on your website longer with a pop-up that is customized according to your needs.

Add social media buttons to your product pages to encourage visitors to share your offers or post on blogs, community forums etc. Don’t be shy!

Give Your Store a Makeover

If you want your products to jump off the shelves during the campaign, you need to change the look of your website. Turn headers into banners to promote discounts. You can use several tools to do so. Check out our User Experience Extensions to help with things like search engines, product sorting, frequently viewed items and more!

Optimize Your Site

A holiday campaign performs best with seasonal landing pages. You can SEO-optimize  pages by using Black Friday- and Cyber Monday-related keywords. Use captivating images, write great content to allure shoppers. Try Image Optimization for faster load speed on images or Minify Js/Css/HTML to reduce page size, bandwidth and server load. 

You can also add temporarily SEO keywords to existing product pages to enhance your chances of getting new customers who utilize search engines to find discounts on the Internet.

Having an SSL certificate is also essential: shoppers may abandon the shopping cart if they see that the connection is not secure and they may be at risk of losing credit card data.

Make Sure Your Shopping Cart is Prepared

One of the most frustrating things for customers can be the checkout process. How many times have you seen your potential buyers just leave everything in the cart and bail? Its not a fun feeling. Abandoned Cart Modules have been extremely popular, allowing the system to inform your runaway customers that they have some good stuff waiting to be purchased! Check out Abandoned Cart Reminder or Follow Up Email for more info!

Give Your Customers a Reward or Discount

Everyone loves a good deal, and thats the main idea behind Cyber Monday and Black Friday. The great thing is, being an E-Commerce store, your customers can avoid the hassle of getting dressed and perhaps trampled by the deal seekers! Try Shopping Cart Price Rules to enable custom discounts for the Holidays or Free Gift to spread some love to those good customers you want to thank or introduce to your products. 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the best time of the year for ecommerce businesses to take sales to the next level. Some businesses miss the opportunity by failing to prepare their Magento store for the holidays. Stand out from the competition and see how Extendware Extensions can help you get on track. We offer 7 day free trials and 30 day money back guarantee, so you have nothing to lose!

Have fun and Happy Holidays from Extendware!
Use Code: CYBER20 at checkout for 20% off any Extendware Extension! (Excludes services and license updates; valid through 11/18/17)

PHP 7 Why It’s Great and Our Compatible Extensions

We have great news at Extendware. Not only are we adding new Magento 2.0 extensions weekly, but we are also updating our extensions to PHP7. Many of them are available now so we thought we would share a little bit about PHP7 here in our blog!

Much Faster Speed

A great advantage of the new PHPNG engine is the significant performance improvement. The development team of PHPNG refactored the Zend Engine, and remarkably optimized memory usage. With PHP 7, not only your code will be executed faster, but you will also need fewer servers to serve the same number of users.

64-Bit Windows Systems Support

PHP is a prominent member of the LAMP stack which means its native environment is Linux, but it’s also possible to run it on a Windows system. PHP 7 introduces consistent 64-bit support which means both native 64-bit integers and large files will be supported, allowing you to confidently run the language on your 64-bit Windows system in the future.

The New Zend Engine

The Zend engine has been powering PHP since 1999 when it was introduced with the PHP 4 release. Zend PHP#NG-01-01(not to be confused with the Zend Framework) is an open source execution engine written in C that interprets the PHP language. PHP 7 receives an entirely new version of the engine coming under the code name of PHP#NG (Next Generation). The enhanced functionality of the initial engine and adds an extensible object model and a significant performance enhancement to the language.

Anonymous Classes

PHP 7 enables you to use anonymous classes, already a well-established practice in other object-oriented languages like C# and Java. An anonymous class is a class without a name. The object it instantiates has the same functionality as an object of a named class.

The syntax is the same as what we are used to in traditional PHP classes, only the name is missing. If anonymous classes are used well, they can speed up coding as well execution time. Anonymous classes are excellent when a class is used only once during execution and in cases when a class doesn’t need to be documented.

Error Handling

Handling fatal and catchable fatal errors have never been an easy task for PHP coders. The new Engine PhP image 2-01Exceptions will allow you to replace these types of errors with exceptions. If the exception is not caught, PHP will continue to return the same fatal errors as it does in the 5.X series.

The new Engine Exception objects don’t extend the Exception Base Class. This ensures backward compatibility and results in two different kinds of exceptions in error handling: traditional and engine exceptions. To enable programmers to catch both, PHP 7 introduces a new shared Parent Class under the name of Base Exception.

New Spaceship and Null Coalescing Operators

The Spaceship operator runs under the official name of Combined Comparison Operator. The notation of the new operator looks like this: <=> (kind of like a simplified spaceship, if you imagine it right). The Spaceship Operator returns 0 if both operands are equal, 1 if the left is greater, and -1 if the right is greater. It’s also called a three-way comparison operator, and it already exists in other popular programming languages like Perl and Ruby.

The Null Coalescing operator is denoted with two question marks ( ?? ). You can use it when you want to check if something exists and return a default value, in case it doesn’t. The coalesce operator returns the result of its first operand if it exists and is not null, and the second operand in any other cases

Enables Accurate Type Declarations

Have you ever wanted to prevent unintended return values by declaring the return type of a function? PHP 7 enables developers to enhance the quality of their code with the help of return type declarations.

Imports from the Same Namespace

The new Group Use Declarations feature will be crucial for those who want to import many classes from the same namespace. The new syntax cuts verbosity, makes your code tidier and easier on the eyes, and saves you a lot of typing time. It will also be easier to read through and debug codes, as group use declarations help you identify the imports that belong to the same module.

Frees Up Space

The goal of PHP 7 was to free up the space to enable improvement, so it was necessary to get rid of many deprecated functionalities and old and unsupported Server APIs and extensions.  All the removed items have been deprecated for a while in PHP 5 so most likely you haven’t used them for a long time. However please note if you have a legacy app running on older PHP versions the new PHP 7 can potentially break the code.

Check out some of our updated PHP7 compatible extensions!

LLucene-Searchucene Search

Increase 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.

 

Full Page CacheFull-Page-Cache-(Web)

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

 

 

CacCache-Crawlerhe Warmer

The Magento Full Page Cache Crawler / Warmer will ensure your Full Page Cache solution is always “warmed” and ready to serve your store pages at the fastest speed possible. The extension is efficiently coded to reduce bandwidth, CPU, and crawling time.

 

 Image OptimizationImage-Optimization-(Web)

Images are very important for online stores, but unnecessarily large images can slow down the user experience and reduce search engine rankings. Image Optimization will optimize your images and reduce their size without sacrificing image quality, so that your site images are faster loading.

 

Auto-Translate-(for-web)Auto Translate

Increase your stores potential customer base by allowing users to translate the page to their preferred language. Ensure advertising campaigns and feeds targeting certain languages will automatically translate to that languageMinify 1.0

 

Product-Labels-(For-web)

Product Labels

Automatically highlight your special offers, featured products, sales, and more. Multiple images / labels per products supported, flexible rules, and many, many options to empower you to market your products the best way possible.

How To Fix Common Magento SEO Mistakes

SEO is the key to running a good online store. If you’re doing Magento search engine optimization yourself without issues, then you are in great shape! It can certainly be a challenge for those who have less SEO experience. Kind of like myself! When I first started my online clothing shop, I was struggling to get my store to a higher than 50 position.  I was goof with blogs and keywords so I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t in a better spot! I then realized my low traffic and low rankings were due to issues in my Magento SEO settings. After identifying this, I took some action to fix these issues and I want to share them with you!

Default Settings

The main thing you need to do is go through all configuration points and change every single default setting. The default Magento installation is pretty useless when it comes to SEO. It has certain settings, but they are insufficient for proper search engine optimization and fighting competition.

You can’t leave the default settings as they are and you will still need to go through them and tune everything up before installing any third-party SEO extensions.

Changing URLs/Deleting Pages

If you change URLs or delete pages and don’t set up a proper redirect, it will cause more 404 mistakes on your website. Google says it’s okay to have some URLs returning 404 pages, but still they want you to fix them. Just go to System, then Configuration, then Catalog, and Create Permanent Redirect for old URLs. Its good to eliminate these as nothing scares a customer off more than a 404 message!

Image OptimizationImage-Optimization

Magento doesn’t change the name of the product image or add an alt tag so you will have to do this yourself if you want your images bring you passive traffic from search engines, and SEO friendly name tags. Try Extendware’s Image Optimization  extension to optimize your images and reduce their size without sacrificing image quality!

Default Descriptions

If you go to System, then Configuration, Design, HTML Head and finally Default description and enter it, Magento will put this description to all pages without a custom description. Remember that each of your pages is considered to be unique, including meta tags.

Translated Page URL’S

If your product is site.com/product.html for the English language, you should have different URLs for the same product in other languages as well. I learned that you have to change it for each language your store is geared towards. Make sure to do it on all pages too not just home page, which means all product pages!

Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets are a great way to have more exposure and attention without necessarily being in top 3. Results in Google with rich snippets have higher CTR and more clicks. Implementing rich data is pretty easy and should be only be made once.

rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”

rel=”alternate” connects pages with the same content, but in different languages so don’t ignore it! You might even want to use another tool – “x-default hreflang” for international landing pages. Make sure to link translated pages with each other. It is usually done through country flags or links with language names’.

Layered Navigation/SEO Optimization

Layered-NavigationLeaving Magento layered navigation as the default or third-party, without tuning SEO settings is an important mistake which may lead to hundreds of pages with messy URLs and duplicate content. Check out Extendware’s Layered Navigation extension to increase sales by making your catalog more filterable, aesthetically appealing, and faster for your customers to find the products they want!

XML sitemap

To make sure all of your store pages are indexed and re indexed properly and fast, you will need to upgrade your XML sitemap. Make sure to check the content before submitting it to Google Webmaster Tools. Default Magento XML sitemap only includes products and category pages and doesn’t contain images.

Duplicate IssuesProduct-Sorting

Ok so Magento is a culprit of duplicate content, which Google hates! Product Sorting can increase the effectiveness of your online product catalog and can increase your conversion rates. Sort products on your sales page by Best Sellers, Top Performers, Most Viewed, Number of Reviews, and more. Easily cascade your sorting options – such as always showing in stock items first. For more info check out Extendware’s Product Sorting extension.

Load Speed

Full-Page-CacheLoad speed on any website is an official Google ranking factor. An e-commerce store’s speed influences bounce rate and customer’s likeliness to return. Magento itself is very slow in terns of site speed and SEO. So it is recommended to use a cache service such as Extendware’s Full Page Cache extension. This will reduce your Magento store’s First Byte Time, increase your web server request rate, reduce database load, and make your store much more responsive!

All in all, Magento is a great platform for my business, but like anything, it takes time and investment in the right tools to make it run fast and efficient. For more tools that focus on SEO and performance, visit Extendware’s Performance Extensions. They are sure to help you like they did me!

Have questions on the spot? Extendware now has a live chat!

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

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?” »

Starting a Store on Magento: Time-Saving Tips

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

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.


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

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.

 

Reduce The Size Of Your Images And Help Your Sites Load Faster With Image Optimization

“What’s the hold up?” You might ask yourself while waiting for your page to load. After trying every solution to fix this issue, you might be surprised to realize its something as simple as a photo! Images, although very important in communicating your products, can sometimes be too large and slow up your customer browser cache. With Image Optimization you can alleviate this issue and improve search engine ranking.

Speed Up Downloads With Hostnames
Speed Up Downloads With Hostnames

Here are some other great perks you will gain with this Extension 

Optimize Images Without Losing Image Quality
Image quality is very important in order to sell products online. As a result, all image optimization will ensure no image quality is lost.

No Need to Install Server Software 
The smushit online API is used (not yahoo which is shutdown, but resmushit which is available) so you do not need to install any server software. You can of course continue to optimize on your server if you want or need to.

Optimize Catalog Product Images
Optimize product images and add forever expiries to them to better use the browser cache.

Search Engine Optimize Catalog Product Images 
Make the name of the product image the same as the product name to improve search engine rank.

Optimize-Catalog-Product-Images
Optimize Catalog Product Images

Optimize Skin Images
Optimize skin images and add forever expiries to them to better use the browser cache.

Optimize Media Images
Optimize media images and add forever expiries to them to better use the browser cache.

Optimize Images in Any Directory 
Easily add any directory of images you want to optimize and all the images in the directory will be optimized.

Optimize Images In Any Directory
Optimize Images In Any Directory

Compatible With Almost All CDNs
Image optimization is compatible even if you use a content delivery network.

Improve the Browser Cache Management of Images Files
Your catalog and CSS images will be rewritten and cached in a similar way as the Javascript and CSS. This means that once a user downloads an image, they never have to request that image on your server again. This can save dozens of server requests per page load and save hundreds of kilobytes per page load. On a default Magento Commerce install, this saves 20 web requests per page load just for the CSS images alone.

Reduce Bandwidth
Image optimization will reduce bandwidth requirements for your store which can save money.

Speed Up Downloads With Hostnames
Speed Up Downloads With Hostnames

 

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

Create Discounts and Promotions with Shopping Cart Price Rules

 

 

 

I think many can agree that default Magento promotions are pretty boring and outdated, and what’s worse is…you can’t create new ones! They are very standard and don’t offer much in the way of creativity, which really cancels out the look and feel of a unique website. Extendware has the solution with Shopping Cart Price Rules, allowing you to offer 24 completely new discount actions. This way you can keep your customers engaged during the most important part of the transaction…the sale!

 

Here are some of the great promotions you can add with this software. We shall use a clothing store as an example.

  • “Buy one product and get another product with X discount”
  • “Buy two shirts and receive the 3rd for 50% off”
  • “Buy 5 products for the normal price and get 20% off each additional product
  • “Get $15 off for every $150 spent”
  • “Buy 2 pairs of pants and get the 3rd for $10”
  • “Buy a shirt and pants for $75 total”
  • “All hats for $5.99”

Discounting merchandise this way can be extremely effective. Consumers love a deal and with the options and templates provided here, you can change your promotions as often as you want and see what works and what doesn’t.  You can specify exact products or be more general and specify the categories. (i.e. Black Nike Sneakers vs. Tennis Shoes)

24-new-awesome-discount-actions!
24-new-awesome-discount-actions!

More Great Features of Shopping Cart Price Rules

More Easily Manage Your Promotions
Shopping Cart Price Rules can be deleted or inactivated in bulk, have it’s priority changed, or have it’s date start / expiration changed. This can all be done by the enhanced shopping cart price rules grid that is included.

Create “Buy One Product and Get Another Product with X Discount”.
Easily create discounts such as “Buy 2 pants and get a tie for 20% off” or “Buy 3 pants and get a tie for $15.00” etc. You can create a variety of discounts that are conditioned on purchasing another product. You can discount by either percent or fixed discount or make it a fixed price.

Create Promotions Like “Buy 2 Shirts and Receive the 3rd for 50% Off”
Creating promotions in a series (every 2nd, every 3rd, etc) which allows promotions such as “buy 3 products and the 3rd receive 20% discount”. You can select whole categories or select individual products to determine which are eligible. You can also discount by a percentage, a fixed amount, or set the discounted product to a certain price.

Perform-a-variety-of-bulk-actions
Perform-a-variety-of-bulk-actions

Don’t Apply Promotions to Products with a Special Price
Products with a special price are usually already deeply discounted, so discounting them further would mean the product would be sold for a loss. Easily ensure that products with a special price do not receive any further discounts.

Create Discounts for the Cheapest / Most Expensive Product in the Cart
It is very popular to create general discounts based on most / least expensive product in the cart. For example, buy any 3 shoes and the cheapest (or most expensive) shoe will receive a 10% discount. You can use any combination you want to create powerful and motivating discounts based on cheapest / most expensive products.

Create Promotions like “Buy 5 Products at Normal Price and Get 20% / $20 Off Each Additional Product”
Encourage large orders by giving a discount after a certain quantity has been purchased using our After-N discount actions. For example, “all shirts purchased after 5 cost $20.00 / receive 10% off / etc” or even “buy 3 belts and every belt after will cost $10.00”. As you can imagine, this is a powerful way to increase sales.

Create Fixed Price Promotions Like “Buy Two Pants and the 3rd Costs $10.00 (or is Free)”
Fixed price discounts are especially powerful. Using our Each-Nth discounts (each 2nd product, 3rd product, etc) it is very easy to create common promotions such as buy 1 shirt and get the 2nd for $10.00. Or even something like buy 5 ties and receive the 6th for free.

Create-Fixed-Price-Promotions-Like-'Buy-Two-Pants-and-the-3rd-Costs-$10.00
Create-Fixed-Price-Promotions-Like-‘Buy-Two-Pants-and-the-3rd-Costs-$10.00

Give Discounts Based on Money Spent Such as Get $10.00 Off for Every $100.00 Spent
Encourage large orders by giving a discount after a certain quantity has been purchased. For example, “buy any 5 shirts at full price and each additional shirt will receive a 20% discount” or even “buy 3 pants and every pants after that will cost $30.00”. As you can imagine, this is a powerful way to increase sales.

Create a Fixed Price Promotion for a Set of Products Like “Buy a Keyboard and a Mouse for $100.00”
A great way to generate sales is to offer a fixed price for a certain set of products. You can easily do this with our Set Discount Accounts. You can specify the exact products or you can specify the categories.

Create Fixed Discounts for a Group Such as “Buy Any 5 Shirts for $100.00”
Discounts can also be applied to a group of products. You can specify the products that are valid for the group by category or individually.

Offer Fixed Discount Amount for Each 2nd / 3rd / etc Product Such as “Buy 3 Shirts and Get $20.00 of the 3rd Shirt”
In addition to using our Each-Nth discount account this will work with our After-Nth discount action so you can create a promotion like “Buy 3 shirts and every shirt purchased after 3 will receive $10.00 off”.

Create a Promotion For a Set of Products Such as “Buy the Pants and Shoes Together and Get 20% off Each”
Another way to discount when using our Set discount action is to give a percent off when the full set of products is in the cart. A product set can be two products from two different categories or the specific products can be defined.

select-individual-products-or-whole-categories
select-individual-products-or-whole-categories

Apply Discounts Only to Products with Specific Custom Options
Discount can be set to only apply to products with a specific custom option or if the custom option value is set to a specific value. For example, if you sell electronics and a warranty is a custom option, then you can have a discount only if the warranty is selected.

Support for Multiple Stores
If you have 1 store or 100 stores within your Magento installation it will work for each store.

Support for Multiple Currency and Tax Rules
Multiple currencies and tax rules are supported for promotions created with Shopping Cart Price Rules.

Support-for-Multiple-Currency-and-Tax-Rules
Support-for-Multiple-Currency-and-Tax-Rules

The Shopping Cart Price Rules extension from Extendware also has an enhanced promotions grid to help you organize and manage the promotions you are running or plan to run. Also it will support multiple currencies and tax rules which makes it easy for any region.

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 advantage of our risk-free 30 day refund guarantee to fully see the power and elegance of the Magento Shopping Cart Price Rules extension.

Master Your Store Product Grid with Editable Admin Product Grid Extension for Magento

Extendware’s Editable Product Grid Turns Your Magento Product Grid into a Very Powerful Editing Tool

Become a Master of your own Product Grid by enhancing Magento’s default product grid tools with the Extendware Admin Product Grid extension.

With this extension, you can easily filter and edit your products within your backend Magento product grid. You can add or remove columns, change the ordering of columns, filter by new attributes and categories to enable you to view, process, and correct items more quickly and easily.

Change Order of Magento Columns
Change Order of Magento Columns

The extension also allows you to more easily edit granular product data such as the price or name of a product. Even better, the changes take effect immediately. Filter by various product attributes to make mass changes using Bulk Product Updating.

Easily-filter-products-based-on-category

Features of Editable Admin Product Grid

  • Edit Product Data in Your Backend Product Grid
    Quickly and easily edit data such as name, price, stock quantity, attribute set, etc, directly in the product grid.
  • Filter Products Based on Product Attributes
    Simply add an attribute to the grid and then filter products by it very easily which allows you to more efficiently find products.
  • Filter Products Based on Product Category and Show Product Categories in your Grid
    Now you can filter products based only on the products in a specific category.
  • Change the Ordering of Columns in the Grid with Drag and Drop
    Have you ever wished that product status was displayed before the name or vice-versa? No problem! You can change the ordering of columns in the grid to support your work-flow.
Magento Product Grid - Change the Order of Products
Magento Product Grid – Change the Order of Products
  • Support for Single or Batch Edit Modes
    * Single Edit Mode – each product will be saved after each edit
    * Batch Edit Mode – edit multiple products at once and then save the changes at the same time
  • Set the Width of Each Column
    Some columns are more important than others, so they should be wider so they have focus. Easily set the width of any column of the grid.
  • Show the Product Image in the Grid
    Optionally show the image of the product in the grid so it is easier to identify. You can even easily change the image size.
  • Show Cross-Sells, Up-Sells, and Related Products in the Grid
    Optionally display related, cross-sell, and up-sell products in the grid to make it easier to identify what has been assigned to what product.
Magento Admin Product Grid - Show-cross-sells, up-sells, and related products
Magento Admin Product Grid – Show-cross-sells, up-sells, and related products
  • Find “Lost” Products that Do Not Have a Category Set
    Often times you will want to know what product has no category so you can assign it a category
Magento Admin Product Grid - Find Products With No Category
Magento Admin Product Grid – Find Products With No Category
  • Remember Your Last Sort Order
    If you sort the grid and login / logout normally Magento forgets your sort preference. Now your sort preference will be remembered!
  • Show Last Update Time in the Grid
    Optionally display the last update time of a product in the grid which is very useful for seeing which products have had recent changes.
  • Change the Default Number of Products in the Grid
    By default the admin product grid displays 20 products. In some stores it makes sense to raise or lower this default value so we give you the power to do this.
  • Fields Can Be Marked as Read-Only
    Ensure that some fields will always be read-only in the grid even if an admin wants to edit them. This ensures some admins will not accidentally make changes they should not.
  • Grid Configuration is Per-Admin User
  • Each admin in your store can select their own grid configuration that works best based on their individual work-flow.
Magento Admin Product Grid - Set Configuration Per User
Magento Admin Product Grid – Set Configuration Per User
  • Fields Can Be Hidden From the Grid
    Don’t want a field such as the category to be in the grid even if an admin wants it? Globally make it hidden so it will not be shown in any grids.
  • Remember Filtering Between Sessions
    If you filter the grid and login / logout normally Magento forgets your filter preference. Now your filter preference will be remembered!
  • 100% Compatible with Extendware’s Bulk Product Updating Extension
    Our Editable Product Grid works 100% with Bulk Product Updating. The power of Mass Product Actions combined with the filtering capability of Editable Product Grid is a very powerful combination.

Magento Product Grid finally brings your product management into the 21st century.

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 advantage of our risk-free 30 day refund guarantee to fully see the power and elegance of the Magento Editable Product Grid extension.