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.

What Problems Does the Magento Extended Admin Product Grid Solve?

Editable-Product-Grid-(for-web)The Magento admin product grid is probably one of the most viewed screens in the Magento admin area. Unfortunately, it is not very flexible in meeting the needs of store owners, to add new columns, sort columns, and directly edit within the grid. For that, reason, we have created our Magento Extended Product Grid extension.

What Problems does the Magento Editable Product Grid Solve?

With the admin editable product grid you can easily perform the following actions:

  1. Add / remove columns – enhance the admin product grid by adding new columns so you can better view your products. You can then sort / filter by these columns
  2. Order columns – change the orderings of the columns so that you can put the most important information first
  3. Edit products within the grid – directly edit product attributes within the grid which will enable you to make product changes faster

Here you can see how your product grid will change and how you can edit products directly in the grid:

Extenteded product grid

This extension works very well when combined with our powerful mass product actions extension which we will cover in a different post.


Quick Extension Overview

Extendware’s Magento Admin Product Grid extension allows you to easily filter and edit your products within the product grid. You can add / remove columns, change the ordering of columns, filter by new attributes or categories, and much more. Editable Product Grid turns your Product Grid into a powerful editing tool.


Magento Google Analytics – Page Load Speed

Google-Analytics-DashboardGoogle Analytics has hundreds of reports and this one is often overlooked even though it is one of the most important reports. The report tells you how quick your Magento store is for people. This is very important considering that Magento store speed directly impacts conversion rates and search engine rankings.

What information can be seen from the Page Load Speed report?

The following types of information can be seen from the report:

  • Average Magento page speed – This is the average page load from all requests on the store. It is important for understanding the general speed experience your store customers have.
  • Page specific page speed – Delve deeper and understand exactly what pages are fast and which are slow. The most important page for speed will of course be your home page.

How is this information actionable to my Magento E-Commerce business?

Information is only useful if it is actionable. That means, is it in your power to improve your Magento store speed so you can have better results? The answer is yes!

It is very easy to improve your store speed with our advanced Magento performance extensions. These extensions can improve both your generation time speeds and the download time speeds. Both of these factors are components of store speed.

For maximum results you will want to get these extensions which speed up the various components of page load speed:

Faster page generation time

  1. Full Page Cache – Cache your HTML pages so they can generate very, very fast.
  2. Cache Warmer – Crawler your store to ensure the pages are cached.

Faster page download time

  1. Minify Javascript / Css – Make your javascript / css/ HTML smaller and faster to download.
  2. Image Optimization – Optimize store images so they can be downloaded faster and reduce bandwidth.

Focus on your business and leave the speed to us. Contact us for any questions!


Quick Overview

Magento Google Analytics Dashboard is a dashboard that shows various statistics from your Google analytics account. This helps ensure you are always staying on top of your analytics and are able to quickly spot any downward or upward trends.


Magento Bulk Product Updating – Tier / Group Price Support!

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

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

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

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

Magento Bulk Product Updating and Mass Product Actions – Pricing Flexibility

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

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

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