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