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)

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.

Magento Ajax Cart Up-selling Support to Increase Sales

Our Magento Ajax Cart Extension has had a lot of features and fixes recently. Here is a run down:

Up-selling ability Now the Magento Ajax Cart extension has the ability to list up-sell, cross-sell, related, also viewed, or also bought pages on the success page. This enables you to increase sales by putting products in front of your customers that they are likely to want to purchase.

Mobile / small screen support Before the Ajax Cart would show dialogs in a fixed position on the screen. This works great on a desktop, but on a mobile device or small screen it is possible that the dialog would not be close-able and no ability to scroll the page to close the dialog as the dialog would auto-position. Now the dialog does not auto-position. This way its possible for smaller screens to scroll and close it.

Add to cart on cart page Adding to cart from the cart page is now supported. This is mainly useful if a cross-sell block is shown on the cart page.

Have a look at the Ajax Cart product page and try the demo to see it in action!


Quick Extension Overview

Magento AJAX Cart will change the way your customers interact with your store by making adding and deleting cart, compare and wishlist items AJAX-ified. It works for all product types, has many customization options, and will increase your store’s usability and appearance.


Magento Lucene Search Released

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 AJAX Cart & Magento Quick View Dialog Centering

Extendware’s Magento Ajax Cart and Magento Quick View have been updated with new features and a bug fix.

Dialog Centering

Both extensions now have the capability to vertically center the popup dialog. The old behavior of the dialog being at the top of the screen may be achieved by setting the “max top” configuration option to 0. May also set this to other values to better position the dialogs from the top according to your needs.

Transition Effects

This configuration option was available in previous versions of Quick View, but it was not being applied properly. Now both extensions fully support enabling / disabling transition effects.