Magento commerce with Windows 8 UI Style

MageMetro takes pride in obtaining professional features

Having been designed to operate on both the most innovative mobile devices and any laptops and computers, the integration of Windows 8 UI theme with Magento in one MageMetro app can surprise your customers with all of its prominent features and make them just forget which devices they are browsing the shop because the difference between using a mouse or keyboard to click and drag/ drop products and using finger touch or pen to tap is so minimum using finger touch or pen to tap is so minimum

Feature #1: Easy management with MageMetro Panel in back-end

Manage slideshow on homepageIt’s easy for you to manage slideshow items on homepage in MageMetro’s backend panel

Manage static block (banner ads) on homepage You can easily add/edit/delete static block to advertisement banners on homepage in MageMetro’s panel

Easy to configure Featured products on homepage A ordinary ecommerce site often presennts featured products, or sale-off products.... on homepage. With MageMetro, admin can easily assign products to featured products section on homepage. When in MageMetro’s panel, you will only need to click and select products for featured products section on homepage

Easy to configure Featured categories on homepage It’s managed similarly to featured products settings, you can add/edit/delete featured category items for featured categories on homepage with a peace of mind in MageMetro’s panel
Feature #2: Windows 8 Metro UI styles for Magento commerce

Attractive landscape view & Touch interaction We use horizontal panning for horizontal layout. When viewed on PCs, MageMetro is designed primarily for mouse interaction, so content on every page is laid out horizontally and users can use their mouse to quickly and easily scroll to the content they want. On Ipad, Tablet, it’s designed to be touch-first and uses landscape orientation. It’s also more comfortable and natural for users to pan horizontally with touch on a landscape device than it is to scroll vertically

Scalable orientation and resolution on different screen sizes It’s designed to display properly on any resolutions and different screen sizes. Having been developed to be a responsive them, it is expected to apapt to any screen sizes whether it is viewed on PCs or Phablets, Tablets and Ipads…

Commanding & Actions design Keep app commands and actions in the app bar which is revealed at a swipe. It uses ad-hoc commands that appear as user actions in line with content

Navigation design for Windows Store apps We used Hierarchical system, Navigation anatomy, Navigating with filters, pivots, sorts, and views at category pages and Flat system

Feature #3: Our Mageshop extensions support

Magento homepage slideshow extension A Magento Slideshow displayed on homepage is usually paid highest attention by the shop owner when starting an online business. We integrate our own Mageshop slideshow with MageMetro Package.

Magento Facebook login extension Visitors want to save time for account registration and they want to use their Facebook account to login. It’s now even more convenient with our Mageshop Facebook login extension’s integration into MageMetro. So at MageMetro, visitors have available option to to login via their Facebook account.

Magento Onestepcheckout extension The checkout process will never be any difficult with our installation of Mageshop OneStepCheckout extension into the MageMetro Package.

Magento product image zoom extension Your product images are taken at highest quality and you are proud of sharing them. Not least to say product images play an important role in attracting your customers to the shop. Therefore, do not dim your products with small and low resolution images. We have Mageshop Product image Zoom extennsion add-on compatibly installed in MageMetro package which faciliates your business.

Feature #4: Magento site’s loading time acceleration

Standard HTML5/CSS3 This language is growing and will only result in more, new, better and faster features that will leave old websites looking outdated

Ajax loading support Your website will load faster if it doesn’t load all products, categories… at the same time. MageMetro is designed and used Ajax Loading script to load products, categories… limited, only when you want to view more products, categories then it will continue loading more products, categories

Feature #5: Cross- browsers compatibility

Flexible layout on different devices MageMetro is designed with a flexible layout to meet any browsers on different devices such us PC, Ipad, Tablet, mobile…

All browsers are fully supported MageMetro displays correctly on all web browsers, it’s also is designed with W3C standards
Feature #6: Additional value

Safe and timely upgrade MageMetro is developed with 100% open source, so it is convenient for customization with good documentation. It’s also easy to request us for upgrade, customization at your needs....

Easy installation & Customization Attached with careful and detailed documentation and video instructions, it will help you to manage installing and customizing on your own

Social media integration Yeah, MageMetro is designed to interactive with Facebook, Twitter, Google plus+, Linkedin… whatever promotes your business

Feature #7: Outstanding design customization

Smooth lightbox and toggle MageMetro performs a lot of lightbox and toggle effects which are all smooth and eye-friendly looking

Flyout dropdown menu MageMetro focuses on content appearannce, but you can reveal the dropdown menu and right navigation at a hit

Amazing filter on category pagesMageMetro’s navigation is designed with filters, pivots, sorts, and views based on Windows 8 UI style

Easy to update items on shopping cart page You can update the Shopping cart when you are strolling the shop, and MageMetro even makes you totally relax with its new styles of Windows 8 UI Style

Demo Information:
http://demo.magemetro.com

Reference: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/developer/mageshop

Why You Have to Choose Magento Ecommerce for Your Online Store

Magento is best evergreen open source of online eCommerce store development tool. Now day’s magento has boom in eCommerce industry because of its flexible features which are real time need for the online users to sell their merchandise online and aspects and clapping management feature.

Benefits of magento development

1. Magento is a open source tool to develop ecommerce online store, so it is useful to start small business.

2. Magento Community version elaborating ecommerce industry in details and it has all the necessary features to represent a good online ecommerce store. such features like >> Shopping cart, Catalog Management, Payment Module, Shipping modules, a SSL encrypted and secured admin console to manage the whole store sales and customers.

3. Magento flexibility: It allows us to customize the inbuilt functionality in ease way or for the new extension development. We can integrate magento with third party application such like Magento Wordpress blog, Magento Drupal Integration, Magento eBay etc. We can also import the order from OsCommerce, X-Cart to magento if anybody wants to switch from OsCommerce or X-Cart or any other ecommerce tool to magento.

4. Magento Community is keep on upgrading growing developers community who continue to report errors and problem, and suggesting solutions and sharing their developed magento extensions and modules, magento is the vast technologies. Many Magento Development Companies writing open source extension and modules to meet online users requirement to add extra features. Varien the producer of the magento ecommerce tool has provided roadmap which helps online users and site owners to upgrade their site in ease way.

5. Magento is built on MVC structure which means it is truly trustable when we talk about security, this make stable reliable faith on its users.

6. Magento Checkout functionality is best then any other ecommerce tool due to its structure and User friendly GUI, it has enormous Checkout structure which allow a customer to pass on with the great security steps to fill their billing and credit or bank information without any fear of leak.

7. Magento order management from admin panel makes any site owner to fill ease to understand the flow of the order process, from order to invoice and shipping from admin panel, admin can have shipping tracks also, and most of it admin can have compabilities to create a order from admin console itself and cancel the order or refund the order payment.

8. Email Marketing: Magento has inbuilt functionality to make customer aware of our site owners strategies to help customer for offers and sale fundamentals using Newsletters which are getting created by the admin of the store. Admin can divide customers in groups using Customer Management tool available in magento admin and can send the individual emails or newsletters to them.

9. Magento sales rules are attracting ecommerce users most because we can create our own sales rule from magento admin panel, we can put discount on particular products and assigned to the group of customer so the customer can get the benefits of it. there are couple way of to create sales rule in magento first is A. Magento Shopping cart rule where all the discounts will get count on shopping cart page and second is B. Catalog sales rule which can directly applied on product page.

10. Magento has different types of the product which can help us to categorized product in simple manner. Like Magento Configurable product, Simple Product, Bundle Product, Downloadable product and Virtual product, Product type functional in magento is taking magento popularity high on sky.

Some of the magento features are listed below which are heart beats of an ecommerce website:

>> Magento Catalog Management.

>> Magento Customer Management.

>> Category Management.

>> Inventory Management.

>> Shipping Management.

>> Order Management.

>> Sales Management.

>> Sales Report Management.

>> Email marketing using Newsletter Management.

>> Inbuilt content management system.

>> Proper theme structure.

>> 50+ Magento Payment gateway supportable.

>> Attractive API system.

>> Magento newsletter management.

>> Search engine friendly theme structure.

>> Attractive two way checkout process.

>> Magento shipping and invoice handling.

>> Language switching options.

>> Multi store functionality.

>> Individual theme switcher.

>> Search engine friendly URL structure.

>> Mata tags, title, meta description.

>> Shopping cart discount rule.

>> Attractive magento Checkout steps.

>> Individual Store Management and more…

Above are the magento’s great and attractive features which are beneficial for any ecommerce website, I will prefer Magento for you ecommerce online store because of great and enormous features.

Read more: mage-shop.com, arrowhitech.com

Cheap and best magento extensions & themes : http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/developer/mageshop

9 quick ways to keep your magento site healthy

1, When possible, avoid running back up utilities during peak hours of your site’s operation. For most ecommerce sites, it is best practice to reserve a time after peak hours (typically anytime between 12am-5am). Additionally, avoid running security scans, such as McAfee Secure, during peak operating hours. This will ensure your customers are not leaving your site due to excessive latency.

2, Avoid using too many different external sources because every DNS lookup takes extra time and could cause latency with your site. Having images, iframes, twitter feeds, etc..  pulled outside your server will slow down your site and page load time. When possible keep what you can on you own server as this will speed up your site tremendously.

3, Make your output W3C compliant. W3C errors can slow down the browsers. Only have extensions to other technology providers that you actually use. Any extensions that you are not using can put a strain on your servers.

4, When possible, limit the number of products on a product overview page. This will help your pages to load faster as there are less images and information that the browser will have to pull in.

5, Use Magento’s Compilation feature. It’s reported to give you a 25%-50%  boost in performance. This can be accessed via: System > Tools > Compilation.

6, Enable full page caching. This will help product load faster on your ecommerce site.

7, Enable Solr search, usually this is faster than the default setup. This is more noticeable when you have lots of products, more than 10 thousand for example.

http://www.slideshare.net/dmitriysoroka/methods-and-best-practices-for-high-performance-ecommerce

Slide 32 has a chart of this Slides Created by Varien.

8, If you are having planning a big sale or advertising on sites such as slickdeals, dealdump, techdeals, etc, contact your support team so you have time to prepare for the large influx of traffic to your site. This will allow options for increase bandwidth, additional failover options and so on.

9, Last but not least monitor your site. You need some sort of monitoring in place in order to see problems before they start. It is recommend to have dedicated hosting with monitoring support. When a possible problem is discovered early it is often times preventable.

Read more: mage-shop.com, arrowhitech.com

Open Social Collaboration: The Missing Piece of Your SEO and Content Marketing Strategy

Through working for a startup, I know these strategies can take a significant amount of time and effort to plan and execute. So, I set out to find a better way to manage our SEO and CE planning process and provide better content (i.e. becoming authoritative by sharing what we're getting done) while optimizing the potential search and social reach for our content..

I’m going to share a few of my secrets on how integrating open social collaboration helps you produce better work and, improve your organic search results.

Open collaboration

It’s important that we first make a distinction between the two ways to use open social collaboration; that’s the “open” component. Let’s look at open social collaboration in two parts: the front end and the back end.

+ Back end: includes everything that happens before you hit “publish.”

+ Front end: includes everything that happens after you hit “publish.”

Open only comes into play when it’s time and/or necessary. There’s an entire “private” social collaboration component that’s meant for you or you and your team. You can use open social collaboration to plan your SEO and CE efforts, and then extend your reach privately. Before doing so, it's important to find a collaboration platform that can handle both private and public sharing to truly optimize your SEO and CE strategies.

But back to our content engagement workflow. The back end process includes things like:

+ Editorial planning for your website, blog, and social networks

+ Keyword list creation

+ Content creation for your website, blog, and social networks

+ Editing and review of content

+ Delegation of tasks to socially promote each piece of content

Let’s break these steps down even further. As you plan the promotion for the content you create, think strategically about the social networks you use and how they complement your SEO efforts.

The retweet opportunity and the Rule of 60

You may know that getting retweets is the best way to amplify your Twitter reach. But, did you know that many miss out on the complete retweet opportunity? Here’s our tried and true magic mix:

When you search for something on Google, the result titles only display about 70-80 characters (or less). That means the first 60 to 70 characters in your tweet, title tag, and other indexed social postings are the most important. If you include your keywords after that point, it doesn’t do much to help your SEO. I like to call this the Rule of 60.

The Rule of 60 is also important for your title tag. As Ruth Burr wrote in a recent case study, “When your title tag is too long, instead of simply truncating it and adding an ellipsis to the end the way they used to, Google is trying to algorithmically determine a better title for the post.”

A few great tactics for planning out Twitter content (and a variation of this for other social networks) includes:

+ Creating great content you think will resonate with your customers

+ Creating SEO-friendly headlines with 70 characters or less title tags

+ Keywords included in first 60 words of your tweets

+ Include the link to the post after the keywords (they have the highest likelihood of being retweeted)

+ Post tweets during times your community are most likely to engage.

Although this may seem like a lengthy process, over time it becomes second nature - a habit is formed. I keep the checklist around for sustainability (i.e. if someone new had to jump in and do it) reasons. The final tweet recommendation goes to the entire team to share, if they feel so inclined.  Publishing versions of posts to Twitter and Facebook (or with Buffer) is a great next step, which adds more SEO value since it’s spiderable and makes social sharing even easier (this is part of the “front end” strategy). When your team is in the loop and your content is shared across multiple platforms, everyone wins!

Our product here: mage-shop.com, arrowhitech.com

Top 9 Keyword Placement

“Keyword Placement Is an SEO Essential” will trump “SEO Essentials: Keyword and key phrase Placement” for a look for on “keyword placement”, with the exception of that all other factors are organised continuous.

1. Each web page (article, publish etc) of material should be between 500-1000 terms long

Creating a web page that only has 100 terms on it, is fairly much a spend of your energy and energy. Unless you are offering great material you are not going to get all of the advantages of referring to the subject and could possibly keep your visitors asking concerns that your web page does not response.

2. Use your primary keyword and key phrase at least once in each 80-100 terms and each additional keyword and key phrase at least once in each 400-500 words

Each web page of your web page should be planned out with one primary keyword and key phrase (the primary concentrate of the page) and 3-4 additional search phrases. When you create (or edit) the material of your web page you need to consist of these terms to create the material appropriate. Your primary keyword and key phrase should be recurring a few times throughout and your additional every so often, maybe once or twice in the site based on its duration.

3. Use your primary keyword and key phrase in the headline of the site, content or post

Each of your webpages should have a headline that is designed using the <h1> going tag. When you create this headline it should consist of your primary keyword and key phrase as this is given more concentrate than your web page material.

4. Use the primary keyword and key phrase in the first and last phrase of your web page, content or post

This is one that you should be trying to do anyway, consist of your primary keyword and key phrase at the starting and the end to present people to the subject and tell them why they just study your page: awesome simple phrase structure we should have all discovered in university.

5. Include at least 2 sub-titles with the primary keyword and key phrase of the site, content or publish.

A large content should always be designed out with sub headings to demonstrate the different segments of the site, these subheadings should consist of your primary keyword and key phrase. If your keyword and key phrase is Bundaberg Housing your sub headings could be Bundaberg Housing Features and Things to do near your Bundaberg Housing.

6. Add primary keyword and key phrase in the first aspect of your meta information (and keep in mind it needs to be exclusive for every web page on your site).

Getting back to the Meta Description we described previously, you need to make sure your primary keyword and key phrase is involved towards the starting. This is a primary SEO concept that provides concentrate to google and also reveals visitors that your web page material is appropriate to what they are looking for.

7. Include at least one picture in each publish optimized for the primary keyword and key phrase such as the picture name and alt tag.

No one wants to look at a lengthy web page with no pictures, when you create your web page material create sure you consist of appropriate pictures that are known as properly with the keyword and key phrase and have an alt tag also such as that keyword and key phrase, keep in mind, google cannot see pictures, they depend on the picture name and alt tag to find out what the picture is ‘about’.

8. Include one primary keyword and key phrase in strong and one italicised.

Throughout your written text, where most appropriate you should structure your primary keyword and key phrase so it is bolded and italicised once each. In our case we have involved seo guidelines and seo guidelines throughout our material.

9. Use your keyword and key phrase as aspect of your web page permalink.

When you create your web page you should be able to figure out the URL that will display for that web page, you should always work to consist of the keyword and key phrase as aspect of it and when in two areas individual the phrase with a hyphen.

Read more: mage-shop.com, arrowhitech.com

7 Tips for On-page SEO Success

When searching for an SEO strategic consultant, your best option is to go with someone who not only has years of SEO training and experience but someone that has in-depth experience in website coding, programming, designing and developing. As a SEO strategist who began her professional career as not only a software application programmer but also a website designer and developer, I always take into consideration the front end and back end of a company’s success online. In order to help your online success, I’m going to give you 7 tactics to successful on-page SEO problems that happen quite frequently but can be fixed quickly.

1. Create Unique TITLE Tags

One of the most powerful ranking factors is the TITLE tag on your website. The TITLE tag is the text that appears at the top of your browser bar that will usually state your business name and specialty. These tags should always be unique, keyword rich and descriptive. Each page should have it’s own unique TITLE tag to illustrate to the search engine spiders that each page contains unique and relevant content. If you have a huge site that is running on a specific platform (WordPress, Joomla, .NET, etc) there are ways to code appropriately to automate this field to pull a specific area of content from the page.

2. Create Unique META DESCRIPTION Tags

Although the DESCRIPTION tag does not directly impact your search engine rankings (SER), it does indirectly impact your website in:

+ It most often determines the snippet of content that is displayed in your listing on the search engine results page (SERP).

+ Creates a value added that attracts your visitors to click on your link in the search engines to visit your website.

As with the TITLE tag, the DESCRIPTION tag should be unique to differentiate it from other areas of your website and attract more relevant traffic.

3. Keep Your TITLE Tags Short

SEO is an art and a science but still has certain rules it must follow. One of these rules is the limit of character displayed in the TITLE tag on your website and the fact that the more words in this tag, the more diluted your optimization efforts. Keep your TITLE tags relevant but do not make your other pages compete with each other. Keep the TITLE tags short and relevant to the content on the page.

Along with this, the TITLE tag has a limited character threshold on the search engine results page (SERP). Don’t make your TITLE tag contain “…” after it. When it does, the search engines and potential visitors are missing out on quality keyword content.

4. The Importance of Canonicalizing Internal Duplicates

There is a lot of duplicate content available on the Internet and Google has been implementing new algorithms to ward off websites that scrap and steal quality content. In order to help increase your website’s search engine ranking you need to be aware of three common kinds of internal duplicates:

+ Those caused by alternate URL paths to the same page

+ Those caused by tracking parameters and session variables

+ Those caused by search filters and sorts

In these cases, it is important to canonicalize these pages by either using a canonical tag or 301-permanent redirect. This will inform the search engine spiders which page is the original content and help prevent duplicate content indexing.

5. Create Direct Product Links

If you’re website is e-commerce based or has thousands of pages, then having a simple website architecture platform is not a viable option. Normally, you never want to make your website visitor click more than 3 levels deep to find the page or product they are looking for on your website. In this case, it is best to add direct product links, from your best sellers, on your homepage. For bestsellers or featured products, keep the direct links to a minimum but by implementing this strategy, both your visitors and search engines can more easily get to deeper levels of your website.

6. Get Rid of Low Quality Links

The more links you have on your website, the more diluted the weight of each link becomes. Websites with limited links (internal and external) demonstrate to the search engines that each link is of high value and therefore should be treated as such. Keep the linking limited to a few high quality pages and websites in order to increase the weight of each of those links.

7. Modify Internal Anchor Text

Don’t over-think the keywords you use to link to other pages in your website. Keywords should always reflect your keyword strategy and remain simple but relevant to both your visitors and search engines. Use common words that your customers or visitors would use to find your products or services. For example, if you are a B2C company, don’t use language or jargon that only the internal employees would know for your consumer website. Simple and relevant anchor text should remain a priority.

Although there are many parts to a complete SEO strategic plan, website owners and companies should not ignore the important of on-site tactics. Link building and off-site tactics may bring some traffic and search engine spiders to a website but it is what happens on the website that determines the overall success of a SEO strategy. Without a solid on-site SEO strategic plan, search engine spiders may not only have difficulty indexing and ranking your website correctly but customers may become frustrated – which highly decreases the chance of conversion.

I welcome you to implement these solid SEO strategic tactics on your own website and when you are ready to take your website/online brand management success to the next level, don’t hesitate to contact us.

mage-shop.com, arrowhitech.com

E-commerce tips by Steve Jobs

As many other Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, G+ users I felt sad and a bit shocked by today’s news. Steve Jobs resigns as CEO of Apple. It is truly an end of an era for Apple and to all of us Mac, IPhone, IPad and IPod lovers.  Everyone can learn from this almost magical CEO, here is how you can improve your e-commerce using his methods:

Design

“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.”

Creativity

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

Business

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”

“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”

Life

“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.”

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Here is one of the greatest speeches Steve Jobs had, Stanford graduation:

E-commerce tips by Steve Jobs

mage-shop.com, arrowhitech.com

Top 10 Things Customers Expect from Your Online Store

Oneupweb has recently put out some interesting research which includes the top 10 consumer expectations that influence purchase decisions.

Let’s take a closer look at these items:

Pricing/shipping information clearly stated – 95.5%

No surprises here, as several studies have found that “sticker shock” (the unexpected inflation of final price due to shipping and taxes) is the number one reason for cart abandonment.

Crutchfield does a good job presenting not just the price but shipping, warranty and servicing prices on this product page:

Looks credible and trustworthy – 76.5%

If you’re not a household name, you can improve your site’s “trustworthiness” by having a clean and professional design (yes, first impressions count). Security badges, store ratings and a mailing address on your contact page can also help.

You must also avoid things that scare off your customers like expired SSL certificate warning messages (even the largest sites can fall victim to this).

Product displayed on homepage – 70.8%

Most online stores show products on the home page, but not every site. For example, Abercrombie and Fitch:

The study does not specify whether customers prefer to see individual products merchandised on the home page (such as bestsellers, new arrivals, featured items, etc) or simply be shown product (in a banner, rotating Flash presentation, or other creative). But when you consider that the goal of the home page is to keep the customer interested and win a click deeper into the site, it makes sense that the customers would like some idea on what to explore on your site without fudging with menus or search boxes.

Just showing product is not enough. The way you design and merchandise your home page has an impact. If you’ve been reading Get Elastic for a while, you will recall some A/B tests we did for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store. One test looked at home page design. We actually found better results showing categorized mini-menus above featured products. Bounce rate, conversion rate and average order value all improved with the test version.

Visually appealing – 66.7%

Similar to looking trustworthy, consumers also consider the look and feel of your site. There are several low-cost tools to help you gauge whether your site is aesthetically pleasing (using real people’s feedback!)

Total cost calculator (shipping, tax, etc) – 59.1%

Showing taxes and shipping before checkout will likely reduce checkout abandonment. But don’t expect it to dramatically boost conversion rate. Rather, more people will abandon before checkout if the additional charges are too high. Customers appreciate you providing these tools, so you do win some warm-fuzzy points.

Search function – 48.2%

The larger your product catalog, the more important site search is to your ecommerce success. While it’s rare to find an ecommerce site without a search box, it happens, even among some of the most famous brands.

It’s not just the presence of a site search box that matters, it’s also the functionality of search. Web users are becoming more comfortable with Google’s “suggest” feature, the search engine will suggest terms as the user types. More and more e-tailers are adopting autocomplete tools to improve usability and relevance of search results and reduce “zero results found” occurrences. It’s possible users may expect suggestions, and even product results, as they type, rather than after they hit “submit.”

Search result usability is also important. Customers expect filtered navigation to further refine results by attributes that are meaningful to them (category, price, star ratings, color, size, etc).

Killer search result pages provide filters, the ability to sort results, prices, stock availability, large thumbnail images, product description snippets and add-to-cart/add-to-wishlist buttons.

Privacy statement – 45.5%

Though the legalese can be overwhelming, some people do look for privacy policies (though they may not read them). It’s important not just to have one but to make it easy to find wherever the customer experiences “privacy anxiety” on your site.

Onsite customer reviews/testimonials – 40.9%

There are plenty of studies that tout the popularity of ratings and reviews with customers. Reviews reduce the risk of making a bad purchase, and show an online seller is trustworthy when negative reviews appear.

Review content can also help your search engine rankings as a wider variety of keyword phrases appear on your pages than your product description alone (provided your reviews do not appear in a frame that is not read by search engines).

Testimonials are not as common (and not always as believable since only the glowing testimonials are published), but they can give the customer a bit more confidence in transacting with you if you’re not a big brand. Marketing Experiments has tips for using testimonials effectively.

Online customer service (live chat) – 32.5%

Not only can live support help customers figure out your site, locate products or ask questions, one study found that 76% of customers wanted to chat about checkout problems, which could prevent cart abandonment.

Live chat can be reactive, where a clear call-to-chat appears on your site, and the customer initiates the conversation, or it can be proactive, where the system triggers a chat invitation based on user behavior.

Links to social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc) – 22.7%

I was surprised to see that over 1 in 5 consumers expect to see social sharing tools on a commercial site. I can’t imagine the absence of social links would deter someone from making a purchase. Perhaps this stat is the result of how the question was worded. Today’s customers might expect to see these links because so many sites have jumped on the social network bandwagon, but that doesn’t mean they use them or are more likely to purchase because of them.

Though social sharing buttons increase the likelihood the product will be evangelized by your visitors, your site can also take a performance hit (as some have found with the Facebook Like button). This may not be worth it, as we know that site speed is one of the most critical factors in bounce rate, customer satisfaction, loyalty and conversion. (Fast page loads was an item I believe is missing from this questionnaire, it should be #1 or #2!)

Do you agree with this study? Think #10 is way out of left field? What important elements of the sales process was missed (perhaps omitted from the questionnaire?) Speak your mind in the comments!

Read more: arrowhitech.com, mage-shop.com

5 Awesome Simple Steps To Find Your SEO RankScore

The aim of this post is to give you a gauge of the most important SEO metric for your website – your search engine rankings. Often, we find ourselves searching for our keywords on Google to see where we rank. That gives us a binary result – a ‘yes/no answer’ i.e. you’re either ranking well or not. But while performing this periodic ritual, we miss recording something more valuable. And what’s that?

Imagine you’re playing a game – and all your rankings in that game are put up on a scoreboard, next to your competition. The score-keeper runs some calculations on the rankings, and comes up with a total score for each contender. Those scores are then put up on a totem pole (a pole where ranks are put in order from top to bottom), so you know exactly who’s winning & who’s losing. You then track this score over-time to witness your improvement (or decline); and make changes to your SEO strategy when necessary. Such a score would arm you with precise knowledge of your competitive rankings & tell you where you stand on Google in one go, wouldn’t you agree?

That’s the concept behind RankScore, and that’s why I feel it is important to share it with you. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to determine your own RankScore (with the help of a simple Excel sheet), and know the RankScore of your competitors too. You ready? Let’s jump right into it then.

Step 1: List your Keywords

In the first step, simply list down all your keywords together (preferably in an excel sheet). In the next column, write down your website name/URL, and highlight the whole column.

Tip: the more keywords you enter, the more awesome analysis you’ll get

Step 2: Know your Competition

This is important! You need to know who you’re competing against. If you already know your top 3 competitors (atleast), skip this step. If you don’t, perform a search on Google for your main keyword, and note down the top 3 competitors. Now, enter them next to your website like this:

Step 3: Find thy Standing

Where do you rank on Google? More importantly, where does your competition rank? Let’s get searching! To do this, you can either use free tools available online that allow you to check your rank on Google, or do it manually yourself. What we’re trying to do here is fill in that sheet with actual data that can be used for our analysis in the next step. The final version may look something like this:

Step 4: Analyze

Done checking your rankings for all keywords? Great! It’s time for your hard-work to pay off! The first thing you should do is find out your average rankings. This will tell you the exact number of #1’s, Top 10s, Top 30s & Top 100s you have. The formula I use to calculate this is:

=COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=10″)

The above formula will tell you the number of Top 10s that are present within a keyword cell range. To put this in your sheet, simply change the B3:B6 to your keyword cell range, and “<=10″ to whatever criteria you want to apply (for eg: “=1″ for to find the number of Position 1s).

Next, let’s run a formula to get the actual rankScore. For the sake of simplicity, here’s a formula you can use right away:

=(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “=1″)*5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=3″)*4)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=10″)*3.5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=30″)*2.5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=50″)*1.5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=70″)*1)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=100″)*0.5)

Put this formula below all your rankings and replace the “B3:B6” with the range of your keyword cells. This formula basically counts all your rankings, gives a specific score to each position range (for eg: 5 points if you are #1 for a keyword), and then sums it up for all keywords. There it is, your RankScore! This is how it all looks at my end:

Step 5: Take Action!

Yep, about time! Now that you know where you stand, it’s time to think about your future steps & the action you’re going to take on them. If you have a lower score vis-à-vis your competition, change your SEO strategy. For more insight, compare your averages too (your number of #1s, Top 10s etc.). If you fare great on both these aspects, great job – be proud of yourself!

Read more: arrowhitech.com, mage-shop.com

Magento: Module testing and integration methodology

At the moment, Magento has dozens of module vendors with hundreds of different modules. Each of the vendors have their own methodology and coding standards that often clashes with another module from some other vendor. In order to have a stable environment, there are some steps that you could take before transferring your freshly obtained third party module to the production server.

The first rule of dealing with the modules is that there is no “out of the box and working” installation. Magento is built in a way that gives developers a lot of freedom to shape it as they see fit. The module you have purchased might not have any bugs and most likely will work on the default installation right after you install it, but how will it interact with other previously installed modules? Or some custom code you have added? You’ll most likely agree that this is something that you might want to check.

How NOT to do it

Imagine you have a blank project in front of you. You have defined functionalities you will need to cover and decided to get a certain amount of modules from the market in order to cover them. The worst thing you could do is install them all at once and run the tests afterwards. This is a reliable way to make such a mess with your Magento installation that you will end up with a system that is very difficult, if at all possible, to debug. Yes, it might look as a shortcut that could save you some time you should be spending on proper testing, but you will end up having to wipe everything out and start from scratch much more often than not.

What should be done

If your modules are stored in archives, do not unpack multiple modules directly to your Magento installation at once. The obvious reason is that you will be automatically starting multiple module installation the next time you open admin panel. The not so obvious one: If two modules are using the namespace fallback mechanism to override the same core class, you will be forced either to overwrite a file or cancel extraction. The first option will wreck the first module that used namespace override. The second method will leave you with partially extracted archive and a task to manually pick and delete files that were extracted in order to start over. Ideally, module producers should avoid using the “app/code/local/Mage/…” type of overrides, but sadly it is not the case. Always extract the archives in separate folders somewhere on your computer (other than Magento’s folder) and run a quick check to see if there are direct file conflicts. (Exta tip: use version control system of your choice.)

Install each module separately. Always run through the whole process of module installation, including clearing cache and resetting session by logging out and back in your Magento admin panel after each individual installation. Even if a module is built on best programming practices, chances are that you will not be able to use it until you do this. Having your session and cache clean for the next module installation can prevent unnecessary issues during the installation process.

Get familiar with module’s documentation There are hundreds of modules out there. You are not expected to know the details about each one of them and what they are supposed to do, how are they supposed to do it and what should not be expected as a feature. Knowing the exact intended functionality of a module will help you to better understand how it can be used, how it can be modified to fit your needs and will help you in the potential debugging process. This step will also help you define what exactly should be tested before completing the integration.

Configure the module in the admin panel… repeatedly. This will help you define the exact configuration for the module as well as test different settings. Some modules are built in a way that you will need to find an exact configuration that will allow it to function without clashing with other modules. This step is especially important for modules that are using AJAX calls on the same page in frontend – like some AJAX based layered navigation and AJAX based add to cart with lightbox. It is also important for modules that are playing with URLs. Testing to confirm that each of the module’s key settings are working is also useful, since it will allow you to better pinpoint a bug or a conflict later, during the development.

Perform a quick code and database inspection. Some of the module producers out there are not following the best practices and standards in developing modules for Magento. We have seen situations where even core files are modified by the module, which is something that should be avoided at all costs. These cases are rare and are usually linked to just a few producers, but it will not hurt to check anyway. Take a look at the overwrites in the files and overrides in the config.xml and detect potential conflicts with other installed modules. Do a quick inspection on database modifications done by the module as well.

Write down any potential bugs, missing features, issues and conflicts and add module’s name to the note. You should also remember that even if everything went well during your testing process, code and database inspection and configuration, you might still get some bugs later in development. It’s good to know previous issues you had during the installation and testing of the module as it can help you define the source of the current ones.

Read more about Magento: mage-shop.com, arrowhitech.com

5 SEO Mistakes To Be Careful Of

When I first started building websites of my own many moons ago, I read almost everything I could lay my hands on about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I could foresee the importance of search engines then and wanted to be ahead of competition. Soon, I knew by heart the methods needed to improve my websites’ search engine rankings by leaps and bounds, or so I thought.

Unfortunately, not all my websites were able to achieve great SEO as well as I had desired. Some websites were ranked pretty high and were sitting on the first page of search engine results for years; while others did not even make it to page two. Looking back, I saw that I had committed countless mistakes in my quest to SEO my websites. And through the years, I had learned from my mistakes and had managed to put these websites back on track, though it did take some time. Today, I have put together a list of 5 common SEO mistakes to be careful of, that I would be sharing with you, so you don’t have to learn it the hard way like I did.

Mistake #1: Wrong Keywords

Choosing the appropriate keywords is the most important part of the SEO process and yet the most common SEO mistake ever. Most webmasters, regardless of beginners or experts, commit the crime of applying keywords that THEY think best suit the website, instead of what keywords the search engine users pick to look for information offered by these websites. Most of them failed to realize that their keywords are not necessarily the ones that their targeted readers choose to search with. So do ensure that you do keywords research first and one way of doing so is through Google’s free Google Keyword Tool.

A tip here is to concentrate on keywords that have lesser competition and higher monthly searches. This way, you get less competitive sites but comparatively higher traffic, thus elevating your chances of ranking high in the results page.

Mistake #2: Keywords Saturation

I’m sure you have come across some sites which seemed to be saturated with the same keywords. Some webmasters believe that by stuffing the website with the keywords over and over again, the search engines would be able to detect them better. While this may hold some truth few years ago, it is not the case these days. In fact, most popular search engines today would penalize websites that have excessive keywords and poor content.

Regardless of whether it was done intentionally or unintentionally, cramming keywords in the websites or articles should be avoided. Do ensure that you produce quality articles and not quantity keywords only!

Mistake #3: Duplicating Content

Seen an article in another website and think that it’s so well written that you are tempted to just “borrow” it for your website? Don’t even think about it. Not only would search engines drop your site from being indexed but you would also be committing the ultimate crime in writing i.e. plagiarism. It is not worth the trouble.

You may be able to get away with it once or twice but what happens after that? You have to think long term and you definitely have to put in the effort.

It is not easy to come up with quality articles and sometimes you may encountered writer’s block but do persevere through it and your readers will come to appreciate it. So will the search engines.

Mistake #4: Not Doing Any Site-keeping

Like housekeeping, you have to consistently monitor and manage your website’s SEO progress. This is because search engines are changing their algorithms every so often and in order to maintain your high ranking, you would need to constantly put in SEO efforts besides updating your websites.

Mistake #5: Using Black Hat Techniques

Most people are tempted by the less-effort and quick-result offered by black hat SEO techniques like invisible text, doorway pages and overstuffed unrelated keywords. These are short-term and therefore, should be avoided. Bear in mind that search engines are improving their techniques too and will heavily penalize websites found to be using black hat techniques. Do not every use any black hat SEO techniques!

Read more about Magento: www.arrowhitech.com

From: hellboundbloggers.com