…during installation using Nginx on a Plesk Webserver.
Recently we stumbled upon an issue, where a fresh Magento 2.4.x installation was not able to load the store frontend with a default Luma theme.
Instead of the store frontend, the Bad Gateway error appeared.
Find our Magento 2 solution for “Magento 2 shows Bad Gateway during installation using Nginx on Plesk Webserver” here.
Our spring clean up is running at full speed now. We recently relaunched our Magento 2 and Magento 1 Extension shops with complete new designs.
The new Magento 2 store is based on new Hyvä Theme, which is specially optimized for page loading speed.
Additionally we added now a real time chat, based on RocketChat for live customer support, at the bottom right corner of the store. Depending on the availability of our agents, the icon will be shown in green (active) or grey (inactive).
So, if you have a question about our Magento Extensions, Magento Development or other questions, feel free to contact us.
We migrated all our knowledge base entries, reviewed them and published them within our new service desk, which can now be found at https://support.extendware.com.
The new service desk provides a powerful Elasticsearch integration and the ability to directly create support requests within the help center.
As of today, February 20th, 2022 we are happy to announce, that we now offer 24 currencies with our payment providers PayPal and Stripe: AUD, CAD, CHF, CZK, DKK, EUR, GBP, HKD, HUF, ILS, JPY, MXN, NOK, NZD, PHP, PLN, RUB, RON, SEK, SGD, THB, USD, ZAR.
Find a detailed table which currencies are provided by which payment providers here.
Just when you thought you had all the right Extendware extensions for your Magento 1 store, Magento rolled out the 2.0 platform! In order to keep up with the times and the new Magento features, it would make sense to migrate to 2.0, but how much time and money will this take. Not to mention, now you need all new extensions!
Do you need your website migrated from Magento 1.0 to 2.0? Do you love your current Extendware M1 Extensions but don’t want to have to buy new ones just for 2.0? Let us handle all of that for you.
Migration is not an easy task, but our Magento trained team can make it an easy and flawless process. Our migration services start at 4.5K and we will include a free 2.0 upgrade lifetime license on any 1.0 Extendware extension that your currently own, saving you hundreds on new licensing!
Magento 1.x can not easily transition to 2.3. A migration of the existing data from the 1.x installation to a new 2.3 installation needs to be done. Themes and extensions for Magento 1.x can not be used in Magento 2.x. The move to version 2.x is major change and may not be possible at this point if extensions you use are not available for the new version yet.
The good news is that Magento 1.0 will continue to be supported through at least 2019, so there is not a need to rush to the new 2.0 platform, but we are here to do that for you if you are ready! (Running an older version of Magento 1.0? We can upgrade you to the latest version, just ask!)
Please see here for a list of hosting requirements.
Let Extendware Take the Leg Work Out of Migration While You Get Back To Running Your Business!
Here at Extendware, we are excited to introduce our new 2.0 Magento Extensions! We will be adding new extensions monthly and will continue to use the same quality dedication, to make you the best assets for your Magento store!
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!
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!
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!
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!
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.
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!
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!
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!
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.
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 Zend engine has been powering PHP since 1999 when it was introduced with the PHP 4 release. Zend 
(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.
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.
Handling fatal and catchable fatal errors have never been an easy task for PHP coders. The new Engine 
Exceptions 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
ucene SearchIncrease 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 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
he WarmerThe 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.
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 TranslateIncrease 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
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.
It doesn’t get better than having lots of loyal customers right? To be able to have a group of customers who love your product and aren’t afraid to tell others is a huge win! Word of mouth marketing and repeat customer’s costs 0 marketing dollars and is a sure fire way to ensure you are keeping everyone happy.
There are really two tiers to loyal customers. You have your early stage customers and your later stage customers. Let’s break it down.
Early Stage Customer Loyalty Can Come From:
Later Stage Customer Loyalty Could Include:
It is important to be able to distinguish between the two categories as it will determine how relevant your campaigns are depending upon the customer. Being able to identify this allows you to feature the right tone, frequency, and benefits. If you continue to engage customers frequently, you can easily build customer loyalty. This can result in higher rates of purchasing and advocacy from your already-loyal customers and additions to the ranks of customers you already consider loyal.
Testimonials can do wonders. Check out some of the loyal testimonials from this Chicago based Maid Service. This is great example of how to show your customers overall satisfaction.
If you want to achieve this, you will need to leverage your customer engagement platform to paint a complete picture of what you know about your loyal customers including preferences and interests, purchase behavior and frequency, order details, and more. Campaigns like this enables you to gather more information about their hobbies and interests or reasons for purchasing. All of this information makes it easier to accelerate purchase cycles, cross-sell, and upsell.
Knowing the attributes of your loyal customers makes life easier when trying to find additional prospects who could one day become loyal customers. This way, you are not starting from scratch with these prospects, but pursuing those customers with similarities.
Using a customer engagement platform is a great way to perform personalization at scale and can cultivate relationships and learn more about consumer behavior. For my clothing store, I use a platform to learn the habits of my customers, such as what trends they like, what age group they are in, and what interests they have socially such as entertainment, leisure, and sports. The customer engagement platform has also motivated my staff to set up strategies, such as automated birthday campaigns, that help drive merchandise sales and enhance the value of being a fan.
Getting into the minds of individual customers is vital to engaging and keeping them loyal. It pays to keep customers happy! Maybe you have a lot customers who aren’t loyal…yet. Don’t overlook the value of the non loyal customers. They will take a different type of engagement than your typical loyal customer. Look at the data 
that you have about loyal and non loyal customer behavior to determine if there are behaviors or activities that differ between the two groups and identify any commonalities amongst the groups that can help you communicate with them in a more personal way. This way, you can tailor your communications to your non loyal customers to guide them toward the behaviors and activities that build loyalty and help nudge them to the next stage of their customer lifecycle.
There may be non loyal customers that may not engage with you at all anymore. In fact, they may no longer be customers. Most consumers are willing to switch brands if it means getting more benefits. However, just because they have churned away from your brand doesn’t mean they are gone for good! You just have to win them back and focus on re-engaging them with relevant communications based on what you have learned about their behaviors. This includes insights you’ve taken from social channels and paying attention to negative word of mouth, such as an online review.
A Win back can be anything from a personalized email or letter telling them you miss their business, or a
survey as to what would make them want to come back to your brand. People love deals, so maybe offering a discount or special code just for them to draw them back in. There are a variety of ways to win someone back and even convert them in to a loyal customer, you just have to give them some personal attention and learn about what they really want, not what you think they want.
Many times, marketers invest their hard work and precious dollars in campaigns and promotions aimed at getting customers to make that first purchase. But once those customers are in the door, they’re left largely to their own devices. By consistently engaging those customers over time with relevant, appealing offers, you can cultivate long-term loyalty that translates into higher revenues and advocates who drive even more business for you through powerful word of mouth.
Why not try Extendware’s Loyalty Program extension for your Magento store? This extension allows you to incentivize customers based on order history, average order amount, and account age.
The marketing world today is exciting and dominated by affiliate trend. Those who don’t know what an affiliate marketing program is should learn it fast. For that, it is the latest way for marketers and bloggers to make money by flexing their marketing muscles. Affiliate networking is all about getting the piece of the action and getting paid handsomely for it. Widely known for the win-win situations they create and the great results they can provide, affiliate programs seem to be the new golden child of marketing.
Launched by 
Amazon in 1996, affiliation has managed to earn true popularity only in recent years. Affiliate programs are a form of the performance-based marketing through which a company, also known as a merchant, agrees to pay its affiliates (or webmasters) for the visitors or clients that they bring in through their efforts. Based on the object of the contract, the affiliate will advertise certain products and pay a flat fee or a previously negotiated percent per every sale or visit which was brokered through the referral.
An affiliate program is structured on the idea of a mutually beneficial relationship through which both the advertiser and the publisher can draw consistent benefits. However, the affiliate market is a fiercely competitive performance-based, result-orientated market which will require good marketing skills to bring about consistent income and professional success. Overachieving affiliates tend to be well connected, thus marketing passionate people, a fact which usually brings bloggers and online marketing specialists to the front of the pack.
Leaving that aside, providing you have some marketing skills of your own, here are a few of the benefits brought about by affiliate programs and why they are totally worth giving it a try:
Choosing the right affiliate program is not easy, considering that one can easily find a variety of affiliate networks in every field of the market. However, some of the fields are saturated, hyper-competitive areas which make them unattractive for most marketers out there.
If you are a seasoned affiliate marketer or want to become one and you are looking to join a rewarding affiliate network, try the Extendware Affiliate Program. The affiliate program is free to join and is based on the Magento Extensions and various development/configuration/customization services associated with them. Once you log in, Extendware’s backend has readymade links and banners you would need to promote and states so that you can track your progress all of which already include your personal code so that when people click on them you automatically get the set commission. In addition to the exceptional quality of the products and the great price Extendware is selling them for, you will get bi-weekly newsletters, exceptional support and extra prizes at the top tier level, this affiliate program is quite generous with its top-performing marketers.
The commission section is organised in 4 Tiers which range as follows:
The affiliate program also includes clear steps and detailed suggestions that educate you on how to best advertise the products. Doing affiliate work is quite fast and rewarding even for a novice who has just entered. When done right, it has every potential to pile up a significant income. So what are you waiting for? The time to affiliate and collide with success is right here!
Only an idiot keeps trying to reinvent the wheel – so why would you venture out on your own to make your own mistakes trying to find the right tools for your Magento store?
Many others – including us – have already made all those mistakes for you. All you have to do is just listen to the hard-won “wisdom” we all have learned the hard way.
At Extendware, we are out here – every single day – learning what works and what doesn’t work with Magento and the Magento eco-system. We’re testing various CRM Systems, Customer Service Tools, Magento extensions and plugins, Magento hosting solutions, you name it, we’ve likely tried it.
We know it feels better to always try out something on your own, hoping you’ll stumble on some great new tool that others haven’t found yet. Maybe you’ll find the next ConvertKit before anyone else does, but more likely you’ll end up wasting time and money on something that doesn’t fit your company or goals…(we’re looking at you, ZenDesk)
Trust us, we’ve been there…and now, after years of testing different tools, we’ve settled on a few products and services that we believe are best for our customers and we use them on a daily basis for everything we do.
One of the first things that we wish we had when we started working on Magento was a list of “Best of Breed” tools and utilities to help us optimize our Magento installation and make our store “just work better.” Now that we’ve been through years of figuring these things out, we wanted to share what we’ve learned in multiple blog posts and collect all of that information into one resource for our community.
We’ve put together our own Extendware Resources Page where we list out exactly what tools we use, why we use them, and some
other tips and tricks to help with your Magento store configuration and implementations. We have tested and relied upon every recommendation on our Resources page for at least 6 months or more. Many of the resources listed there are crucial to running our business (or were crucial to developing Extendware to where it is today).
We hope this resource helps you cut down on searching for the right tools and brings you success faster than you would have otherwise. As always, send us any suggestions or ideas to [email protected], we love to hear from you.
That’s it for today, Extendware Community! Thanks for tuning in. Have an profitable and resourceful week!
