Why Choose Extendware’s Back-In-Stock Notification Extension?
Extendware’s extension is designed for Magento 2 store owners who want to keep customers happy while increasing sales. It’s built for simplicity, scalability, and seamless integration, ensuring it works flawlessly with your store’s setup. By re-engaging customers with timely notifications, you can turn out-of-stock frustrations into loyalty-building opportunities. Backed by expert support and consistent updates, this extension ensures your store remains competitive in a fast-changing market. Whether you’re a growing business or an established player, it’s a tool you can rely on.

Conclusion

• Let customers quickly subscribe to stock alerts with minimal effort.
• Automatically send branded email notifications as soon as products are restocked.
• Offer detailed reports on product demand to fine-tune your inventory.
• Work seamlessly across multiple stores and languages to serve global audiences.
• Ensure a flawless experience on any device with mobile-friendly forms and emails.
• Provide extensive settings to manage product types, subscription rules, and email templates.
• Prioritize customer trust with GDPR-compliant features for data privacy.

The Bottom Line
Out-of-stock doesn’t have to mean out of options. With Extendware’s Back-In-Stock Notification Extension, you can keep customers in the loop and bring them back to your store when their desired products are available. The extension is easy to set up, powerful to use, and flexible enough to adapt to your business needs. Don’t let unavailable inventory affect your growth—turn missed sales into wins and build stronger relationships with your customers. Start using the Back-In-Stock Notification Extension today and see the difference it can make!

Why Choose Our Sample Order Extension

Our Sample Order Extension offers a seamless experience for both customers and store owners. It enhances customer engagement by allowing easy sample requests, which fosters trust and encourages purchases. Store owners benefit from simple backend management with SKU-based tracking and smooth integration with Magento 2. This extension is perfect for any store offering sample-eligible products, simplifying the entire process, making it efficient and streamlined.

• Easy Sample Requests: Customers can quickly enter their address and place orders without a lengthy checkout process.
• Quick Configuration: Easily add sample products using SKU numbers in the backend for effortless management.
• Streamlined Process: Enjoy quick and simple sample requests in just a few clicks.
• User-Friendly Interface: A straightforward system that enhances the customer experience.
• Hassle-Free Shopping: Eliminate unnecessary steps for a stress-free ordering experience.
• No Login Required: Guests can easily order samples without needing to create an account.
• Separate Email Notifications: Send customized email templates to notify customers about their sample orders.

Extension Capabilities

The Sample Product Order Extension integrates seamlessly into the Magento 2.2.x. Store owners can configure the system to automatically add sample products using SKUs. The extension simplifies the order flow, eliminating unnecessary checkout steps and ensuring a smooth, efficient experience for both customers and store owners. This setup improves customer interaction, promoting trust and encouraging purchases.

Conclusion

Gain a competitive edge with the Sample Product Order Extension for Magento 2. Streamline your sample request process, offer customers a hassle-free experience, and enjoy simplified backend management. This extension is a key tool for growing your business, boosting customer trust, and increasing conversions, all while offering a seamless sample ordering experience.

Magento 2 is very advanced and extremely solid php driven e-commerce platform. However, such a solidity has a side effect. It’s not easy to understand how everything works and organized in Magento 2 from the user standpoint especially of you had no experience with previous version of e-commerce platform, Magento first edition.

We would like to introduce you Magento 2 Essential Video Training where this “side effect” of Magento 2 is addressed. This user oriented training made by Alex Kostritsa, gives merchants, marketing managers, and other admin users the basic information they need to manage Magento 2 store. Such Magento 2 course will make your Magento 2 experience smother and effective than if you decide to dig into everything by your own.

Magento 2 Essential Video Training splitted to 3 major chapters:

Chapter #1: From this chapter you will learn how to select hosting and install Magento 2. What useful software to consider and how to install store sample data.

Chapter #2: The major section where author highlight the basic features needed for day-to-day operations. You will learn how to manage all type of products, categories etc. You will also understand how to work with attributes and attributes sets. And of course, basic marketing and tax related features are covered in this chapter.

Chapter #3: Last, but no least chapter is about adding extensions, templates as well as do other sort of tune-ups for Magento 2.

If you are looking for step-by-step  that will help you to learn basis, this video course made by Alex is a great choice!

When executed the right way, you can also use them to provide valuable information to your customers at certain times of the year.

I started to take advantage of my own Pop-Up Manager a few months ago, so I figured I would share with you some tips and benefits it has given my business.

Customize Your Brand

You don’t have to be boring and implement the usual suspect rectangular pop-up on your site. Think more along the lines of your
brand, is there a shape or other visual that makes sense for your company? Maybe your logo is oval so that shape makes sense for you. Or, you could switch image backgrounds depending on promotions you have. Combining a branded background image with a transparent background color can really create an eye-catching pop-up for your page.

Seasonal Pop-ups

A typical pop-up captures a contact’s opt-in and email address, plain and simple. The creative part comes in to play when site’s pop-up can support a special promotion and have those same contacts who previously signed up, see it. When configuring Pop-Up Manager, you can choose to set cookies based on specific versions of your pop-up. So, if you start using a new pop-up design on your site, previous respondents to the earlier one will be able to see the new one.

Mobile-Friendly Pop-Ups

When you are designing your pop-up ad, don’t forget about mobile visitors. You can display a totally different version for those users. Make sure to create a design that’s appropriate for the mobile screen size and activate it for the mobile version!

Test Some Options

Different designs and pop-up settings can have dramatically different results. Pop-Ups allow you to run A/B testing on multiple pop-ups. Just associate your opt-ins for each to a different list and watch your lists grow. When you see a clear winner, make that version the active pop-up for your site.

Recommended Pop-up Service

Extendware uses Picreel for all of their Pop-up ads. They like to implement for special offers and discounts and find it super effective. Picreel optimizes offers on your website by tracking visitors’ mouse and scroll movements in real time and then serving up the best offer when they navigate away from valuable content. You can use our design templates or create your own offers that will be displayed to visitors based on the business rules you set and the website content they are viewing. Exit offers will display when it appears the visitor is leaving your website.

The pop-up sign-up has proven to be a very valuable tool for today’s retailers, and with the many options and customizations available through Picreel, it can work for pretty much any brand with very little effort. You can add a coupon, create versions specifically for people shopping on mobile devices and change the message seasonally. It’s as easy as uploading an image to your site.

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 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

Leaving 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 Issues

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

Load 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!

Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) is the amount of money spent on raw materials to create product, or the amount of money used to purchase a product from a wholesaler. COGS is important because it helps stores calculate Gross Margin by product.

Revenue – Cost of Goods Sold = Gross Margin

Gross Margin (also called Gross Profit) is an important driver of store strategy and should be well understood for each product. Because Gross Margin represents cash available after paying a supplier, it’s good to use as a primary consideration when managing marketing expenses. Products that have high Gross Margins, such as electronics, are better suited for pricier marketing campaigns, while low Gross Margin items may be a better fit for scalable marketing such as email campaigns.

In some cases, increasing marketing spend on low-margin items may actually make sense. By combining sales volume with Gross Margin data, you may learn that a low-Gross Margin item is generating a healthy amount of cash thanks to a large number of orders. For instance, selling one bracelet may generate six dollars of Gross Margin, but selling 500 bracelets may generate $3,000 of Gross Margin. While it may seem intuitive that you would spend more cash to market high sales-volume products, knowing the exact Gross Margin for an item will help you understand how much of a product’s Gross Margin can comfortably be allocated to marketing. It will also help you track the return on your advertising spend by product. Keep in mind, marketing is just one of many operating expenses. You’ll want to consider other expenses as well when you budget for advertising spend.

Tips for Using Gross Margin to Dictate Strategy

• Place items that have a healthy Gross Margin and that convert well in the prime real-estate positions of your store.
• Bundle low-margin items with high-margin items to justify the time and effort spent on merchandising and shipping costs. Or where appropriate, only sell your low-margin products in packs of three or five.
• Raise advertising spend for items that generate high amounts of Gross Profit, but be sure to analyze the effects of increased spend on sales volume to understand the return on this spend.
• Negotiate with your vendors to reduce Cost of Goods Sold. Consider switching out expensive materials for options that don’t compromise quality.

Ready to get started? Here are the steps for enabling Cost attributes to appear on each product:

Step 1: Log in to your account and go to Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attributes.

Step 2: Under Attribute Label search for ‘Cost’ and click on the row.

Step 3: Scroll down to Apply To and change the setting to be ‘All Product Types.’

Step 4: Save your work and go to Catalog > Manage Products.

Step 5: Click on a product and go into the Prices tab. Enter the Cost for each product and save your work.

All done! I hope that helps with your Cost Attributes and Gross Margin calculations. Anything that can give you a better idea of exactly how you’re making money is a step in the right direction. Until next time!

Sheryl Davis is a digital marketer at Glew, an E-Commerce analytics software provider, where she focuses on helping online stores understand and act on their data. Each week she publishes practical strategies for ways to rock E-Commerce.

Abandoned Cart Extension Overview

Extendware’s 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. This extension pays for itself within just a few orders. 

]]> https://blog.extendware.com/magento-exception-invalid-block-type/ Fri, 10 Apr 2015 17:43:28 +0000 https://blog.extendware.com/?p=457 Read more]]> What does the “Invalid block type” exception mean?

This exception usually means that your layout files are referencing a block that does not exist. This could be because an extension was disabled / deleted or because there is a typo in one of the layout files.

How do I solve this type of issue?

Look at the block name and search your layouts for any reference to this block. You can then either remove the layout reference or create the block it is referencing.

I recommend to always use high quality Magento extensions to avoid errors like this. If you need help resolving this error you can utilize our Magento development services.

Quick Development Services Overview