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.


Imagine 2016 Magento Conference

Imagine 2016
Imagine 2016

Imagine 2016

Extendware is excited to say that we got to attend the Imagine 2016 Magento Conference. Now in its 6th year, Imagine 2016 brought together 2,500+ merchants, partners, developers and commerce experts from 45+ countries to network, exchange ideas and build relationships.

Speakers such as Earvin “Magic” Johnson of Magic Johnson Enterprises, Mark Lavelle of Magento Commerce, and Jamie Clarke of LoveOutThere.com took the stage along with many other informative entrepreneurs, business owners, and Magento’s top professionals. Magic Johnson, spent lots of time in the crowd answering questions. It wasn’t hard to find him.

Magento 2016
Magento 2016

Magento News

Magento 2 Momentum: 228,000 downloads of Community and Enterprise Edition, over 800 sites live, and 100+ Magento 2 Trained Partners

Magento Enterprise Edition 2.1: The next release will include enhanced staging and preview, ElasticsSarch, and payments functionality

Magento Marketplace Launch: A better place for developers to show off their best work

Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition Launch: New PaaS environment built to power innovative commerce experiences

Conference Goers
Conference Goers

 

The conference began with awards recognizing the 20 most active users within the Magento developer community, recognizing the exceptional creativity, innovation and success of merchants across the global Magento ecosystem.They also unveiled the Inaugural Magento Trailblazer Award to Vandy Santos, Global Omnichannel Solutions Leader for Nestle and A.J. Nahmad, President of Watsco, Inc.

Schedule Imagine 2016
Schedule Imagine 2016

It is no wonder that the Community itself, is what makes Magento so special and unique. Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento, used the words “We Are Magento” to acknowledge the community of developers, system integrators, merchants, and partners that make up the powerful ecosystem.

We are happy to congratulate the Magento team on the release of Magento 2.1 and the announcement of the Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition. Both are examples of exciting new tools for the hundreds of thousands of Magento merchants from all over the world.