How To Start Up Online Business

Whether you are running ecommerce website or adding online website based on brick-and-mortar business, Web sales are necessary. Research from Invesp show that e-commerce sales are growing around 20 percent per year and nearly 200 million online shoppers are projected to spend $260 billion in 2014.
There are numerous reasons to explain for that including comparing prices easy and searching a larger variety of items to purchase without fighting through crowded stores.

Fastest OneStep Checkout ONLY $39

Checkingout process is regarded as one of the most complicated part of placing an order online, and many customers leave their orders because they do not have enough patient to complete unnecessary 6 steps in their checkingout

Boost Customer Traffic Easily With Daily Deals

Days after days traffic seems slower and slower. Does it happen to your business?  But it doesn’t mean you can’t do something about it. If you’re looking for ways of attracting more customers during those off-peak times, daily deals are the best way to go.

How to Pay Less and Save a Lot of Money Magento Extensions

According to a recent survey of the Alexa Top 1 Million sites that are doing eCommerce by an UK developer Tom Robertshaw shows that once again, Magento topped the field. In fact, the survey found that 20% of all eCommerce sites in the Alexa 1 Million were using Magento – a higher share than any other eCommerce platform. Robertshaw continues to invest time in improving the survey’s methodology, providing an even clearer picture of which platforms are leading and which are lagging.

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

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

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

When Should You Override Magento Core Files In app/code/local/Mage?

The short answer is: NEVER!

The longer answer is somewhat less absolute and requires some explanation.

Often you will see Magento tutorials or forum posts that implement a feature or functionality change that is different from what the core does which requires changing something in the core of Magento. Someone may then advise that, instead of hacking core files it is better to copy them into theapp/code/local/Mage location and perform the modifications there, so that, upon upgrade, the modifications are not lost. This process is called overriding Magento core functionality and is based on the fact that Magento sets its PHP include paths to first look in app/code/local/ thenapp/code/community/ and finally in app/code/core/. This has the effect that any files of the same name placed under the local or community name space will take precedence in loading, hence, we can override almost any core file in this way. To learn about how exactly Magento sets up its system, read the excellent series on the Magento Configuration by Alan Storm.

This is one, sometimes recommended, way of overriding core functionality without hacking the core but why is it, as you may conclude from my initial statement, so bad?

First, let’s see what scenarios would be compelling us to override core files:

1. We want to change a piece of functionality in a core method so we copy the php file containing the code and modify one or more methods.

2. We want to add a new method to a core block class, so it’s available for use in the phtml template so we copy the relevant core Block php file and add our method to it.

3. We may have several modifications consisting of core functionality changes and additions over several files.

So, what are we actually doing here, when we override core files?

For one thing, we must override the complete core file because we can’t trim out the stuff that we don’t want changed since we would lose all that functionality and most likely break Magento. Once the overridden file is in place, this will be the file and code Magento will be using from now onwards. Given that most core classes contain several and many times a large number of methods it means that we are effectively overriding all those methods in our file.

Now, remember when we were advised to use this override approach so we can make sure that our customizations are going to be preserved after a Magento version upgrade? Well that, indeed, will be true, but, what if the new Magento version has changes in the very files we have previously overridden? What if they have newly implemented methods or bug fixes in existing methods? Since our override will always take precedence, these new features and fixes will never be operational as our override runs all the old code. If you’re lucky, you may get an error report because a new change falls over due to missing methods but what if you don’t get error reports and instead, somehow, some inexplicable and erratic behavior starts expressing itself on your site?

You can see the problem now, right? After each upgrade, you will have to go and check all yourapp/code/local/Mage/ overrides and compare them to the new core files and port any core changes to your local override in order to maintain your site’s integrity. If you have lots of such overrides, this will be tedious. Also, if you are a developer who gets passed on an existing site with these kinds of overrides, you will not be happy. Often you won’t even know what the purpose of the override was and you’d need to laboriously go from diff to diff and decipher the meaning of any changes. It gets worse if the previous developer already performed some Magento upgrades.

By now, I guess, you have a good idea about the dangers of applying this kind of override, so, let’s get back to our original question, when, if at all, should you use this approach?

There are a few cases when this approach may be justified, in my opinion, these are the cases:

If you want to quickly try a core modification to see if it will solve your task as a proof of concept, but don’t want to create an extension just yet. When you are satisfied, you remove your override and implement a proper Magento extension with rewrites.

If you are implementing a temporary override of some core functionality that you will remove after your task is complete. A prime example of this is overriding the Magento dataflow classes for importing, when you want to change the way the importer handles certain things in an initial customer or product import.

The key concept here is: temporarychanges/experiments. You are not planning on leaving your overrides.

Note: There are some other scenarios where local Mage overrides are the only way to customize parts of Magento’s core functionality. I’d like to encourage a discussion in the comments to see what others think about this.

Conclusion

The take-away from this article is, never use the app/code/local/Mage/ approach to permanently override core functionality! If you must, then only use if for temporary changes that you will remove afterwards.

As for the question that now presents itself: how, then, should you implement core overrides? The answer is by creating a custom Magento module and using the available class rewrite mechanisms, or better yet, using event observers if possible.

Well come to visit my website:  http://www.mage-shop.com