Is it easy to decide between an annually paid edition of Magento known as Enterprise and a free edition known as Community? It is really a tough decision to choose between the two because when people talk about Magento Community and Magento Enterprise; the first thing that pops in our mind is to take advantage of the free version over the paid version. The key motto of this comparison is not to pick up the least feature edition of Magento and customize it to suit your requirements, but to select the correct edition that satisfied the main goal of your online businesses.

Magento Community vs. Magento Enterprise

If you are planning for a startup online store, you can easily prefer to choose the Magento Community edition, which is a free version, but if you are planning to run your online shop on a rather extended scale, then it becomes important to know the exact set of features and benefits of both these editions to choose the one that fir your business.

Magento has already withdrawn its Go edition for shifting its focus entirely towards the betterment of its Enterprise and Community Editions, which are used by more than 220,000 retailers and are still growing. But the main concern is to choose the most ideal edition among these two that meets your exact requirements and help you to develop your online store in the way you want and can fit the needs of your target audiences as well.

To help you with right selection of Magento Edition, I am going to provide you with the important details of both Magento Community and Enterprise editions so that you can get convinced about your selection.

Magento Community – Free Open Source Edition

Free is always good, right? But do you think that the decision of developing your online store on the basis of investment only will generate better results for you. It’s true to take care of your budget while undertaking an online business, but before opting for something free, it becomes necessary to know the main features offered by this version. The main question that is asked by ecommerce retailers who are trying to decide what to choose is: What do I really get if I choose free open source Magento Community over paid Magento Enterprise version? Magento Community was created as free open source version which means any one can easily download this version without paying anything from their pocket.

Catalog Management

One of the most remarkable features of Magento Community version is “Catalog Management” (CM), which assists in performing inventory management for products on your online store. The highlights of this feature are listed as follows:

• With this feature, retailers or store owners can easily manage their inventory with backordered items, maximum and minimum quantities.
• You can easily export and import catalog using this feature.
• You can easily Edit, approve or delete product tags and product reviews
• You can search for results rewrites and redirects with CM
• You can set the attributes for fast product creation of various item types
• CM is incorporated with Media Manager for automatic watermarking and image resizing
• You can create customer personalized products
• There is RSS feed for Low Inventory alerts for customer personalized products where you can upload the text for monogramming, embroidery, etc
• Retailers can customize customer sorting on their online store with catalog management by defining attributes for customers
• Retailers or store owners can also perform sorting of products according to their price, brand etc.

However, there are some additional advantages that Magento Community offers to the store owners and retailers:

• There is no annual license fee required for using this edition.
• This edition can easily be used by both developers and merchants for adding new features and extensive due to its user-friendly interface and backend.
• You only have to pay for your web hosting, domain name, and a skilled Magento developer to create and maintain your ecommerce store.
• It offers code level accessibility to the store owners, which means if you want to change the system, you can easily do so.
• It comes with impressive Web Services API that allows you to integrate with other systems conveniently.
• Magento Community is blessed with more than 7500+ extensions that makes easier for the store owners to enhance their stores’ functionalities.
• This edition has mobile commerce theme that allows you to drive traffic to your online stores through the mobile platforms as well.
• Multiple store is another added benefit of using Magento Community that allows the store owners to have multiple stores with one common backend system for all.
• Additionally, Community edition of Magento also comes packed with Multiple Store Views that gives users an option to see the website in different languages
• Magento Community has an impressive system that allows the store owners to create discounts on their online stores with free shipping and other lucrative.

The set of options offered by this edition for creating attractive discount and options on the online stores are:

• Buy Item #1, Get Item #2 for 50% off
• Buy Items #1 and #2, Get Item #3 for Free
• Buy Item #1, Get Item #2 for Free
• Free Shipping for Item #1
• Free Shipping for Orders Over $50
• Discount All Items in Category B by 10%

After discussing loads of advantages offered by free open source edition Magento Community, let’s discuss the key features of another popular paid edition Magento Enterprise. It will help in giving you a clear picture of which of these two editions will exactly meet with your set of requirements.

Magento Enterprise- Paid Edition

Magento Enterprise is considered as a scalable, high performance ecommerce solutions for larger and fast goring online businesses. With its enterprise class set of features, it helps you to create customized ecommerce solution.

Additional features that make Magento Enterprise a worthy choice over free Community version are listed as follows:

• Developing your online store on Enterprise edition helps you in handling large catalogs of products.
• Full page caching is another interesting feature of Enterprise version that lacks in Community version. With this features, the store owners can easily create static HTML based snapshots for each page on their website. Full page caching also reduces the loading time of product pages.
• With this paid edition, you can easily roll back to the earlier version of your CMS page, category page or product page. Besides, you can also restore your yesterday’s database backup with this roll back feature.
• If you are looking for better flexibility and scalability for your online store, then Magento Enterprise is a good choice because it makes development of scalable online store much easier by separating the parts and pieces of your online store on to different servers expediently.
• This version is bequeathed with improved tax calculation systems that allow you to create and manage tax rules and rates with ease.
• It also offers a more streamlined and faster checkout flow than the free Magento Community version.
• You will get better logging and site access permission and improved administrator roles with this edition.
• Besides the benefits of Enterprise discussed above, the paid version also offers the online retailers a secured payment bridge, which is amenable with the PCI security standard council.

After going through the features and advantages of both editions, it depends upon you to choose the one that fits your business and its goals. However, if you are a kind of person who likes to scrap things together to make them functioning, then the free Magento Community edition is an ideal option for you, but if you want an all-in-one package that is tuned with more advanced features, then Magento Enterprise will be a better fit. If you want to present some more advantages of these two versions, please share with us below.

The post Pick the Perfect Magento Edition for Your E-Commerce Site appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

When you are done with the front end development work, the next thing to do is to make the website live. However experience tells me that the real job of a web developer only starts here. There are many checks and activities which need to be carried out so that the website can function without any glitch. I have listed some tasks that every developer should complete before announcing website to the world:

1.Base URLs

Base URLs are stored in the database table ‘core_config_data’, but it can also be accessed through admin interface if you have access to it: System -> Configuration -> Web. While moving the website, these URLs need to be updated, if not all URLs will be referring back to the staging site. Further, you should not forget the trailing forward slash.

2.Disable Unnecessary Modules

Before launching the website, you should turn off all modules that you are not using. Some of these modules are Mage_Newsletter, Mage_Wishlist, Mage_Rating, Mage_Poll and Mage_Tag.

3.Favicon

It is a minor point that often gets overlooked, but it is highly essential for each and every Magento website. Favicon brands the window or tab in which the website is open in user’s browser. In addition, it is saved with the bookmark so that visitors can easily identify the web pages from your website. Few browsers automatically pick up favicon if you save it in the root directory as favicon.ico. Make sure it is picked up every time; therefore, include following in your head:

<link rel=”icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”http://media.mediatemple.netdna-cdn.com/favicon.ico” />

4.HTML Head:

You should not leave the original settings in HTML head, and change the title and set the Meta description and keywords, as these are imperative for effective search engine optimization.

System -> Configuration -> General -> Design -> HTML Head

5.Placeholder Images

Placeholder images are shown when any product does not have image of its own. You can create a default set of images for your website and place them in:

catalog/products/placeholder/small_image.jpg, catalog/products/placeholder/image.jpg, and catalog/products/placeholder/thumbnail.jpg

On the other hand, these can be uploaded in admin:
System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Catalog -> Product Image Placeholders

6.Edit the Default 404 Error Page

Editing the default 404 error page is quite important but it is commonly overlooked. The default web page, in addition to being unattractive, references the Magento store that give your visitors an unnecessary glimpse “behind the curtain” of your web site. Make sure that the design of your 404 page is representative of the voice of your brand and provides a clear message as well as guides your customer back to where they need to be.

7.Contact Information

You should cross check if the store information and email addresses are rightly provided. For this you can go to:
System -> Configuration -> General and System -> Configuration -> Store Email Addresses

8.Titles and Meta Data

The page title is a crucial element for the search engine optimization and is also important so that users know what is on the page. You have to ensure that the page title changes on every page and relates to that content of page.

Meta description and keyword tags are also important for search engine optimization and it is always a good idea to include them. You should change the description on each web page so as to make it relate to the content of that page, because often Google displays it in its search result description.

9.Transactional Emails

The transactional email uses a different logo to the default one. You should make sure that the desired images are saved in theme directory as logo_email.gif.

10.Transaction Email Template

As far as transactional emails are concerned, Magento makes great use of the templates. After getting into the admin panel, you need to load the default templates. In addition, you can modify these templates when required and then save custom Magento template you have arrived at.

11.Payment Methods

Payment methods are the important part of any online business and any loophole given here can spoil the entire setup. There is plethora of options for the secure payment, but you should choose the trusted ones like Authorize.net or PayPal which come in as default in Magento.

12.Speed Check

In this broadband age, website loading speed should definitely be the main priority. You should also check your website for the speed. There are many tools available which are useful for this purpose. These tools will identify the weak points and also suggest improvements to enhance the speed of your website. There is a chance that when your website is slow, your visitor may just skip and jump to your competitors’ website.

13.Database Backup

It is essential to have a proper data backup on regular basis and you should also know how you could restore your data when the situation demands to do so. The data restoration strategy should be in place so as to avoid any emergency.

14.Log Cleaning

Magento has a feature where it keeps all the logs in its database, but over a period of time it may get bloated too. It is easy to clean up these logs regularly with an option that is available in the admin. This option is available here:

System -> Configuration -> Advanced -> System -> Log Cleaning
This option is disabled by default and therefore has to be enabled. Daily cleaning of logs will help greatly.

15.Analytics

Installing some analytics tools is quite important for measuring the statistics to see your site performance and conversion rates. You should track monthly page views, daily unique hits and browser statistics, and all other useful data on regular basis. Google Analytics is a favorite among website owners and it free too. Some others good analytics are Kissmetrics, Clicky, Mint and StatCounter.

16.Some Other Important Checklists:

There are some other tasks that you should finish before launching your website. These tasks are as follows:

• Caching– you should re-enable the cache once you have finished development.
• Google sitemap-it is very important for SEO point of view. Go to Catalog -> Google Sitemap
• Maintenance.flag- It is used to display a holding page while doing maintenance or going live. For this go to System -> Configuration -> General -> Maintenance Mode
• Index management- Make sure that you have re-indexed after making all changes in the catalogue.

I have mentioned all the important tasks that are necessary to be completed before launching the website. If you know of any other activities, which you think are important, you can share them with us in the comment section.

The post Magento Website Pre-Launch Checklist – 15 Important Points Discussed appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

MagentoGo is already discontinued and if you are among those website owners who are still on the Magento Go platform or looking to migrate to some other platforms, there are various good alternatives available, but the choice completely depends on your own set of requirements and preferences.

However, before moving on with the migration of the Magento Go website to other better alternatives, it is necessary to evaluate the drawbacks that have caused its failure among its clients.

Drawbacks That Forced Shut Down of Magento Go Platform

Instead of being an open-source platform with a well-supported framework, Magento Go websites require a dedicated and skilled team of professionals to create and maintain them. Hence, it becomes a necessity for the Magento Go website owners to hire good and experienced Magento development company with well-equipped manpower to build and maintain their website, which ultimately leads to more investment and budget.

Although this was a free framework to be used by small business owners, the Magento Go framework necessitates monthly fees to be paid by the store owners once, they have a good product line or they need more bandwidth for their online store.

Now, when once popular Magento Go comes to its expiry, it becomes important for the website owners to migrate their online store to some better alternatives without affecting the pace and productivity of their businesses. For this, I have selected some alternatives that you can easily select to migrate your Magento Go store and these are:

• Shopify
• Bigcommerce
• Prestashop
• Woocommerce
• Zencart
• Ubercart
• Opencart
• VirtuaMart
• OSCommerce

1.Shopify

Shopify is a one-in-all eCommerce online shopping cart solution for those online store owners who are thinking to migrate their store from Magento Go. It includes everything that online retailers require to sell their products online.

Benefits of choosing Shopify as an alternative:

• It allows categorization of products based on their collections.
• It comes with an advanced Content Management System that helps you to check your website’s visitors, sales, referrals, and traffic sources.
• It comes with a rich text editor that you can use for developing impressive product descriptions.
• It is blessed with a rich app store for adding more functionality to your online store.

2.Bigcommerce

If you are having a startup business and planning to switch your online store from Magento Go to a more affordable and best feature online shopping cart solution, Bigcommerce is there for you. Being a hosted solution, Bigcommerce helps you in saving your investments required to keep a development team for introducing changes to your online store and it is blessed with regularly updated and new features to make your website more customizable and personalized as per your preferences.

Benefits of Bigcommerce as an alternative:

• It comes with nearly 1000 templates to choose from that are all easily customizable to fit the merchandising requirements.
• Comes with fly-out and standard category menus
• Integrated with smart search box along with “did you mean” functionality
• Supports multiple currencies, taxes, and languages

3.Prestashop

When you have decided to migrate your online store from Magento Go platform to Prestashop, you can do so by registering your account at Cart2Cart with your Google or Facebook Account

However, the main question is why to choose Cart2Cart to migrate your Magento Go store to Prestashop? This is because there are no specific technical skills required for performing the complete migration of your website and the security and data transfer accuracy is also guaranteed.

Benefits of choosing Prestashop as an alternative:

• Comes with free shopping cart
• Integrated with a vast range of product management tools
• Advanced SEO and marketing tools
• Various payment and shipping gateways

4.Woocommerce

Woocommerce, a free WordPress plugin is very useful for the businesses, which are planning to switch their online store from Magento Go. This WordPress plugin makes selling the products online very easy and it’s a good option for the first-timers since it does not require tough technical expertise to operate your online store.

Benefits of Woocommerce as an alternative:

• Besides being free, it is very easy to install and operate.
• It offers a very professional and attractive look to the online stores.
• It offers enhanced security to the online store owners since it continues to update on a regular basis thus eliminating then chances of security issues.
• It offers greater flexibility to the website owners to add and sell their products.

5.Zencart

Being a free, versatile and strong online shopping cart software, Zencart is treated as one of the ideal alternatives for the Magento Go store owners to migrate their online shopping stores. Apart from offering personalized customization facility to the website owners, Zencart can do automated tasks and it allows easy navigation of the products and categories.

Benefits of Zencart as an alternative to Magento Go:

• It offers various currencies, taxes, and even languages. It offers different options for shipping and payment to the customers and website owners.
• It allows the search engine optimizations with the use of Meta tags and keywords, which could also be optimized as per each product and categories.
• It allows the shopping cart to act as the main page of your website.

4.Opencart

An open-source shopping platform, Opencart offers a good choice over Magento Go for migrating your online store owing to the wide range of plugins available for this platform and it also comes with easy customization facility that makes the migration much more convenient and effortless.

The migration from Magento Go to Opencart can be done using Cart2Cart service, which provides automated shopping cart migration without any worry for data inconsistency or redundancy

Benefits of Opencart as an alternative:

• Large number of plugins availability makes Opencart a good choice over other platforms.
• Has a good technical support community along with discussion boards for answering the queries of its customers.
• It comes with vast in-built functionalities like Magento and Prestashop that offers the website owners an opportunity to make their website migration adjustable as per their requirements.
• Comes with easy and clear administration panel offering the first-timers a better choice to opt for.

6.Ubercart

Considered as Drupal’s ecommerce shopping cart solution, Ubercart is perfect alternative over Magento Go due to its incredible efficiency and usefulness and is regularly updated with a skilled technical support community. This ecommerce shopping cart solution allows the users to use the Drupal’s core code, which is a complete package of great capabilities and performance. The website owners have the choice to customize the features of Ubercart as per their choice to give their websites more personalized feel and touch.

Benefits of using Ubercart as an alternative:

• Easily compatible with Drupal
• Product catalogues can easily get customized
• Provides flexibility and versatility in its code
• Comes with payment system integration
• Users can easily pay and checkout at single page
• Filling the cart and maintaining the orders is easy

8.VirtueMart

VirtueMart is another better alternative for migrating your online store from Magento Go since, this could also be achieved by using the services of Cart2Cart that offers automated, quick, and appropriate transfer of Magento Go website to VirtueMart. By using Cart2Cart for migration, you are saved from worries of losing your important data, redundancy or any other potential errors that occur while the migration tool place from one store to another.

Benefits of choosing VirtueMart as an alternative:

• Highly advanced and most popular eCommerce software in Joomla
• It is ideal for carrying all important and basic online store applications
• It comes with the facility of managing the products, and user lists with greater ease within Joomla
• This could be easily integrated with the Joomla Content Management System for offering safe online shopping environment.
• It offers host of features and the functionality can be extended using several plugins, templates, and modules.

9.OSCommerce

Rewarded as one of the most popular and comprehensive open source ecommerce solution, OScommerce is considered as a good alternative over Magento Go due to its immense list of features and it also one of the most versatile shopping cart solution that provides immense customization choices for the store owners depending on their needs

Benefits of choosing OSCommerce as an alternative:

• Comes with full features and options for customization
• Supports vast range of shipping services and credit card processors
• Handle vast amount of database with indexing feature
• Immense number of add-on modules available

If you are going to be an ex-client of Magento Go, you absolutely need not to worry, since the alternatives discussed above are good choices to migrate your store and our skilled team of ecommerce developers are there to assist you in this crucial process of your branding and business. However, if you have any other platforms in your mind that you are planning to switch your site, do share with us in the comment section.

10. Wix

Wix is one of the dependable e-commerce platforms you can consider if you are looking for an alternative to migrate to from Magento Go. With robust yet easy-to-use features, Wix allows you to create, manage and promote your e-commerce website with ease.

Also, you will get numerous templates to choose from and customize. Due to the availability of drag-and-drop features, you can easily build your e-commerce website even without any technical know-how.

With Wix, you can showcase your products in stunning galleries, with the flexibility for you to modify product options, add images and alter descriptions. Moreover, Wix is mobile-optimized, enabling your customers to access your online store on any device, anytime and anywhere.

Benefits of Wix as an Alternative

• Allows you to set the tax as well as shipping rules about the customer’s location
• Provides a store manager panel for tracking of inventories and orders
• Highlights products with limited stocks or discounted prices with ribbons
• Allows displaying unlimited products and adding up to 15 images per product

The post 10 Magento Go Alternatives for Your E-commerce Store appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

As per industry facts, there are more than 1, 50,000 Magento stores across the globe and this trendy ecommerce platform is being used by start-ups to well establish brands like Samsung. With its rich features, Magento has become the preferred ecommerce solution for majority of online store owners, however for a successful and feature-rich eCommerce application, the default community version of Magento should be updated with popular add-ons.

After researching many successful ecommerce sites and analyzing the effects of the popular extensions on the performance of an ecommerce store, I have selected few extensions which are must for any Magento shop.

Top 10 Incredible Magento Extensions

1. Smart Checkout

Users never prefer long checkout processes. Nowadays, the online stores are being browsed a lot on mobile phones and users prefer smarter checkout process for easy checkout. The new Smart Checkout extension helps in overcoming the complex steps of order and payment procedure that could lead your customers leave your store without checking out properly.

2. Social Network Integration Bundle

Social media cannot be ignored for a while when we are talking about enhancing the performance of Magento Store for better revenue. The social media channels help in driving considerable traffic to your ecommerce website. Therefore, the Social Network Integration Bundle extension is built for allowing convenient and faster integration of social media icons on your online store. With the help of these icons, the visitors can easily share the content over your website in their circles, which ultimately helps in pouring more visitors to your site.

You can easily select which social media icons to include on your online store with the help of this Social Network Integration Bundle extension. You can also integrate the social buttons depending on the features of the social media sites such as connect, like, tweet, share, comment and follow.

3. Bronto

If targeted marketing campaigns are considered as successful ways of driving traffic to an online store, then the Magento stores can use Bronto extension, which helps the Magento store owners in driving significant traffic to their online store via targeted marketing campaigns. You can easily bring in the past purchase data consisting of the product details and complete order history with the help of this extension that can be used for creating effective lifecycle marketing campaigns for converting the first time buyers into your loyal customers.

4.Canonical URL’s for Magento

This free extension of Magento not only integrates “rel” canonical URL to the head of your web pages but it also let you set the custom canonical links for all your products.

Moreover, this extension also assists the search engines to find the relevant web pages of your ecommerce store against specific search queries performed by your target audience. In general, this extension helps in improving the search engine ranks of your Magento store, which is necessary for driving traffic to your website.

5. XML Map Creator

Another vital Magento extension that helps in improving the overall performance and sales of your Magento store is XML Map creator, which allows convenient establishment and development of various XML sitemaps for your ecommerce site. Besides being simple to use, you can use this extension for submitting the newly created pages of your Magento store in the sitemap submission areas of Google and Bing webmasters.

Submitting the pages will allow these webmasters to analyze your website in depth and also to crawl it better, which will potentially improve the amount of web pages indexed in the search engines thus increasing the chances of better traffic on your site.

6.Fooman Google Analytics

As it name suggest, this extension offers profound abilities of Google Analytics to the Magento store owners

With this, you can easily keep a track of the conversions and Adwords purchases on your site. You can also evaluate how the Adwords are generating conversions on your website. Moreover, it can also track each page of your ecommerce site, which includes the sections reclaimed through AJAX in one-page-checkout.

7. Google Shopping API

Google Shopping API allows the developers or the back end operators to upload and manage the products and important cataloge information conveniently on the Magento store.

Thus, it helps in enhancing the visibility of your catalogue information and products and it also ensures that your online store can perform better on search engines by helping developers to define the products, which will be sent to Google.

8.Trashcan for Magento

It is very common to delete products by mistake while handling your Magento store. With thousands of products to manage, it becomes sometimes hectic to concentrate on each product while uploading details and hence, often the product gets deleted from your store by fault. The Trashcan extension is meant to solve these types of problems only. It does exactly what you expect when you delete some important product from the backend of your website unknowingly.

This extension acts as a life saver when you have not sufficient time for reloading the deleted products because this extension works similar to recycle bin on our desktop and laptops. It puts the deleted product in the recycle bin and you can easily store the product from there whenever it is required. This Magento extension keeps all the deleted products in the admin interface giving you the liberty of restoring the product as per your need.

9.Blog Magento Extension by aheadWorks

The importance of blog in driving leads and sales to your Ecommerce store is worth to mention. Blogs are best way of improving user engagement on your online store, which is ultimately important for converting leads into sales.

This extension can be used as a great way to connect and communicate with your customers and this Magento connect extension makes it convenient for you to integrate a blog on your online store. You can also integrate your old blog with the latest one with the help of this extension.

10.Follow up Emails

For online store owners, sending follow up emails play an important role in improving the overall traffic on their website. It is necessary to keep in touch with your existing customers. The Follow up Emails extension by aheadWorks is a powerful auto-responser Magento add-on that allows you to reach your existing customers or target audience by sending them follow emails related to your products and orders.

This extension also helps in maintaining long term relationship with the existing and past customers and it can easily be added on your Magento store.

These are the ten incredible extensions that I have chosen depending on their usefulness to the merchants as well to the customers. However, if you have any more lifesaving Magento extensions that can help in augmenting the overall performance and sales of a Magento store, do share with us through your comments.

The post Top 10 Incredible Magento Extensions For Your Online Store appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Ecommerce being the only trillion dollar industry growing at a double-digit percentage each year, there are more than 2,00,000 online stores actively running on Magento alone – one of the biggest ecommerce platforms across the globe with 26% marketshare.  But online retailers are facing tough competition to survive in this highly competitive market despite choosing a platform that offers best-in-class functionality & features. Very often, while consulting online merchants for Magento ecommerce solutions, both Magento Community & Magento enterprise, clients ask me – “Why we’re not selling? How can we convert visitors into buyers? Are we missing something?”.

So, in this blog, I decided to share some important conversion tips you shouldn’t miss in your checklist while launching & optimizing a Magento online store. Not just the tips, wherever possible I have also included the – How to do this section to let you know how you can execute a particular task

1.Launch a mobile-first online shop : Go responsive & offer a painless user experience

Mobile devices now account for nearly 50.3% of all ecommerce traffic and mobile commerce is now the default way that people shop online. Still, I come across so many Magento stores that look horrible on my smartphone. Adopting a multi device approach by using a responsive design is not only recommended by Google itself but also ensures easier upgradability & allows you to use only one digital strategy for everything – may it be marketing campaigns, optimization of keywords or URLs. As an example of a responsive design, you can checkout one of our client sites – Petsworld  that we did in Magento Ecommerce. Also, focus on giving best user experience to your mobile customers by customizing the layout of your store & the size of your “Buy”, “Add to Cart” etc buttons according to a minimal size that visitors can easily click with their fingers & thumbs.

How to go responsive – To convert your existing Magento shop into a mobile ready shop, you can use extensions like Couchcommerce and Tenfoot or if starting from scratch, you can use a good responsive theme like Argento or Magento Mobile HTML 5 Themes but don’t forget to customize it. 

2.Use a professionally designed Custentoom Magento Theme Design instead of Free Magento Themes

Each online store is unique, sells different type of products and targets different customer’s demography. Hence, from marketing perspective, a custom Magento design converts better than a free Magento theme. Here are my 4 solid points that should give you enough reason not to go for a free theme design

Brand Image: A potential buyer might have seen that design before sported by any other brand because free & even premium themes are used by numerous online stores. This will give your visitors an immediate red flag not to buy from you as they’ll doubt your authenticity and may hesitate sharing their credit card information with you. This is why, I always advise my clients to hire dedicated ecommerce magento developers and get a custom theme design that can represent their corporate identity and build a unique brand image with their target audience so that buyers remember them and keep coming back.

Technical support – Free Themes don’t provide any technical support. If something goes wrong, you can’t count on anybody for help. Choosing a reliable Magento ecommerce company to create a custom theme for your store will help you to fix any potential problems in future.

Upgrades – Magento is an ever evolving ecommerce platform that constantly upgrades a no. of times and incorporates new features. Free themes might start showing errors or you may not be able to take advantage of cool new features that roll out in future. This is why when my Magento ecommerce development team designs a custom theme; we always focus on integrating themes that are easily upgradable.

Functionality – You might want some unique features or additional functions in your store which is not possible to achieve with a free theme. Whatever theme you may pick up- Free or premium, you would require professional Magento development services from an experienced Magento ecommerce development company to support you in making the best online store and provide solutions to your problems.

3. Customize the Shopping Cart Page for more conversions

When a customer arrives at the shopping cart page, you already win half the battle. All you need is to prompt your visitors to click on the “proceed to checkout” button as soon as possible and make the transaction. By default, Magento theme uses a design that is not at all optimized for conversions. As I already told you in the above point to get a custom theme, also ensure you optimize the shopping cart page for more conversions. Change the size and color of the “Proceed to checkout” button on the shopping cart page, change the layout to one that pleases customers to shop and incorporate more effective call to actions like “Go to checkout” .By doing all these things, you can almost fetch double the amount of sales in your online store.

4.Use One Page Checkout Booster instead of the Default Magento Checkout

Research shows that upto 15% shoppers abandon their shopping cart for each page they’re required to fill in while checkout. The default Magento Checkout Page ruins all the online shopping experience of customers with its lengthy checkout process. If most of your customers are abandoning shopping carts without finishing orders, then there are high chances that you’re losing sales because of a complicated and long checkout process. To avoid this, you need to simplify the checkout and reduce it to minimal steps for faster order processing. Also, pay attention to all the segments of your checkout page from layout to content and navigation to usability.

How to do this – Make sure to get the Magento extension One Step Checkout Booster installed when you’re creating your online store or rather I would suggest you to go for a completely customized online store from a professional Magento ecommerce development company who will do everything for you. Here I have shared a screenshot of One page checkout booster below that quickly does everything in one go.

Bonus Tips

• Use a persistent shopping cart
• Make sure that the user doesn’t need to enter the same information twice in checkout process
•  Preserve customer information if a validation error occurs so that users don’t have to enter the whole information again and get frustrated
• Try to reduce the required (*) fields as much as possible.
• Label all the fields & if possible, write example information in the needed fields
• Don’t forget to offer a guest checkout

5.Selling internationally?? Localize your Magento shop to specific countries

If you’re selling your products globally, then it is very important to make your customers understand that you offer international shipping also. To do this, you can simply use an IP identification method and then redirect your customers to a Magento storeview in their language, say for E.g. A customer with a US IP goes to www.your-magento-store.com/us

6.Optimize the Magento Product Page and even the Product Search

It is extremely important to optimize the product pages and the product search for better conversions. After optimizing, don’t forget to check the accuracy as well by trying it out yourself.

How to optimize your product search – When users search for same products in singular or plural – like dog foods or dogs food or dogs foods, the search result should be same. If your correct product is not showing up in search result, you should add product tags in your online store by using

Magento backend –>Catalog -> Tags-> Add a new Tag and then fill the search tags and place it to the required product.

How to optimize your Product Pages for higher responses – Use only high quality product images so that customers can easily get a clear idea about your product. Make sure your default image i.e the base image should be of highest quality. Also try to show more than one image in different angles below it, design a nice background and if possible, use product videos for best selling products. Don’t forget to write a good product description that people can easily understand and make the content SEO friendly.

7.Don’t let customers wait. Avoid Performance bottlenecks & optimize for speed

Waiting is the worst thing that a customer wants to do in online shopping. Don’t kill the shopping experience of your customers. Optimizing for high performance not only ensures a better SEO but it helps in gaining an edge above your competitors. Every page should be as fast as possible, especially the checkout if you want your customers to buy from you. If you don’t know how to do this, read below or to know about this in detail, go through one of my previous blogs on Tips to enhance the speed and security of a Magento website.

• Use minimum amount of JavaScript code lines & clean up your CSS by removing the unnecessary rules. This will speed up the page &      reduce load time. If possible, you can combine your JS & CSS codes in one file
• Optimize all the images. To do this, you can combine images into CSS Sprites – Clustering a bunch of images in a sprite can reduce the page load time by a great extent. To do this you can use the tool Spriteme

8.Work on your USP’s (Unique Selling Points)

Strategies some unique selling points that cut through the mental barriers a buyer goes through while shopping & make way for higher conversions. For example – offering Easy Returns, Free Shipping, and Price Guarantee, Risk Free Shopping or the count of Facebook can be great USPs.

Bonus Tip

Show your Facebook Likes or Twitter followers count and Product reviews so that visitors can take the buying decision instantly

The Final Note

Whatsoever may be your ecommerce business model; the bottom line is closing sales and fetching more revenue for greater ROI. Hence, creating a beautiful online store & launching it on the web isn’t just enough. Optimizing your Magento ecommerce shop to achieve optimal sales also becomes an extremely important aspect to consider if you’re truly focused on growth. I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog and will start implementing these tips as soon as possible for better sales. Please throw in comments below if you also have a good tip to share with us.

The post Tips to Increase Your Magento Online Store’s Conversions & Sales appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

The two eCommerce platforms – Magento Go & ProStores, owned by the largest retail division eBay Inc, are going to shut down the online shops of more than 10,000 online merchants on Feb 1, 2015. Both the platforms catered to small & mid-sized businesses across the globe providing software-as-a-service, precisely a hosted eCommerce solution. eBay has selected Bigcommerce – the fastest growing Sydney based eCommerce enterprise as the transition SAAS provider to migrate all the affected online merchants.

Mark Lavelle, eBay Enterprise head of product & strategy, said in a conversation – “Magento is dedicated to helping fast-growing retailers succeed. We chose Bigcommerce to help with the transition because of their shared commitment to client success & their proven track record of migrating large groups of merchants onto their platform.”

How big is the acquisition deal for Bigcommerce ??

Bigcommerce already counts more than 50,000 online retailers in 25 industries across 100 countries & the total sales of all merchandise sold on eCommerce stores is about to touch $4 billion approximately.

In a news posted on Wall Street Journal nearly 15 days ago, it was revealed that Bigcommerce signed an agreement with Global Payments Inc, one of the largest worldwide providers of payment solutions, to grow its business by leaps & bounds. In view of this, the partnership deal put forward by eBay to acquire nearly 10,000+customers of Magento Go & ProStores is like icing on the cake for Bigcommerce – a golden opportunity to expand its customer base fast.

In an interview, Eddie Machalani, CEO of Big commerce said – “We are prepared & excited to work with ProStores & Magento Go merchants to help them continue their success using the Big commerce platform. We understand that the to-do list for small business owners is never ending, and our teams are standing by to deliver the very best migration & on boarding experience so merchants can focus on growing their businesses.”

What eBay is doing to ensure smooth migration of its clients from Magento Go & Prostores to Bigcommerce or other new platforms ??

To ensure customers can plan the transition before Feb 2015 (~7 months), eBay is making efforts to help its clients decide what to do next & migrate their stores without any hassle. Here are the offerings the company plans to provide as of now.

1. Customers of both the platforms who plan to stay with the hosted ecommerce solutions can choose to migrate to Bigcommerce subscription-based SAAS plans that are similar to what they used to avail earlier from Magento Go or Prostores.
   The transition will be free for all the customers who plan to go with Bigcommerce. Plus, they can take advantage of the checklists, planning resources & special offers updated on Magento Go Migration center & Prostores Migration center respectively, before taking transition to any new ecommerce solution.
2. For those merchants who are looking forward to self-hosted eCommerce solutions & consider themselves the right fit for Magento EE or CE editions, they can upgrade to these more flexible platforms & can take advantage of the migration support and migration tools on Magento ecommerce extension library. Alternatively, you can also hire Magento ecommerce development company offering customization & migration services at an affordable cost.

What Bigcommerce has in box for Magento Go & Prostores customers ??

1. Securely hosted eCommerce tools with 100+ features included right from the start
Bigcommerce gives you a fully packaged eCommerce solution for inventory management, order management & purchasing management with nearly 10 hosted eCommerce tools that includes a mobile-optimized website, a domain name for your online store, a CMS with WYSIWYG editor, a built-in blog, fully-featured shopping cart, product catalog; secure payment gateway& multiple email accounts.

2.Built-in SEO & Exclusive Marketing Tools

With discount options & coupon codes, social media integration facility, newsletters for email marketing, automatically generated customer lists & tens of exclusive features like abandoned cart saver etc; Bigcommerce gives you more marketing tools than anyone else can.

3.Best in-house support

Bigcommerce has a dedicated support team that can help you with everything –from setting up your store to importing products & fixing other bugs, inventory issues or payment transactions. With 500+ support articles, detailer tutorials, webinars from experts & an online community of hundreds of store owners; they’ve got you covered.

How to plan successful migration for your online shop ??

As a consequence of the sudden shutdown, we’ve got more than 100 migration requests from Magento Go & Prostores clients asking to suggest a better solution, recommend a successful plan& transit their store as soon as possible. Our Magento ecommerce development team of more than 20+certified professionals have already migrated more than 50 stores successfully without affecting the inventory & sales. When one of our clients asked to share the strategy we’re using for data migration & design migration, I along with my team of ecommerce development experts decided to sum it up as follows and also share some tips to help other online businesses.

Step 1 –Analyze your current e-shop & decide whether you would like to go for self-hosted solutions (licensed & open source) or fully-hosted ecommerce solutions (SAAS)

What we recommend–If you’re planning to add more & more customers and invest big in your current venture to turn it into a million dollar business in near future, you can go for the free Magento Community Edition (open-source) or the paid Magento Enterprise edition. For this solution, you will require expert services & you may need to hire dedicated Magento developers to make your online business a huge success. But if you are a small-sized online retail business, it will be a smart move to stick to the hosted solutions & go for Bigcommerce. If Bigcommerce doesn’t seem a good fit, you can plan for another popular ecommerce solution – Shopify.

Step 2– Choose an external vendor for successful migration

What we recommend – Be careful while deciding the vendor to avail migration services for your online shop.Hand over the work only to an ecommerce development company who has prior experience of migrating shopping carts successfully& is ready to provide best post-delivery support. If you’re unsure of any such company providing expert services along with 24 X 7 support, you can contact us & our technical team will assist you.

Step 3–Ask your vendor to test everything before going live with the new store & don’t forget to run a mini-check yourself too.

What we recommend – Once everything’s up, make sure your vendor carries out a complete check before launching it. After this, you can yourself run a couple of mini-checks to see whether your store is running successfully. This can be done by inviting some friends, family or loyal customers to shop from the store & send you the feedback.

The Final Note

Ecommerce platform Migration is not a cakewalk. Besides your hundreds of dollars, your hard-earned customer reputation is at risk. Make sure you go through wisely & as painlessly as possible.

The post Bigcommerce Takes Over as Magento Go & Prostores Shut Down appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

If you’re one amongst those businesses whose online stores thrive on eBay’s Magento Go hosted ecommerce solution & ProStores, then this news might come to you like a bolt from the blue – EBay’s senior vice president Mark Lavelle has officially confirmed the shutdown of Magento Go on Feb 1, 2015, at the Magento Go website in an open letter to all merchants. Two days earlier i.e. on July 1, 2014; Magento marketing head Craig Peasley announced on its official blog that they will be transitioning their Magento Go & ProStores merchants off and will finally stop providing customers support for these two products on February 1, 2015.

Magento’s range of solutions powers businesses of all sizes while giving the power, flexibility & features to serve hundreds of eCommerce clients across the globe. Both its hosted eCommerce packages – Pro store & Magento Go helped many small & medium-sized businesses sell their products & services online.

Moreover, these platforms allowed users to create a customizable virtual storefront using their own IP by providing a complete eCommerce solution that included domain registration, hosting & a shopping cart along with secure payment processing as well.

Why EBay took the tough decision?

According to multiple resources, it was confirmed that Magento Go never succeeded in pulling customers against other eCommerce giants – Big commerce & Shopify who were its biggest competitors in the eCommerce marketplace and succeeded in targeting more sophisticated online sellers across the globe than Magento did.

Moreover, the official announcements made by eBay spokesperson, Marketing Head & senior VP revealed that Ebay plans to continue focusing on its two other flagship products – Magento Community & Magento Enterprise Edition that can better support & equip small & medium size merchants in the fast-evolving e-commerce landscape as well as developing the next generation of their platform – Magento 2.

In another news put forward by Recode.net, it came out that Magento previously cut dozens of employees(nearly 50) including its product & marketing departments as well while realigning its focus on its other two eCommerce software products – Magento Enterprise & Community edition that has made big success in past few years. EBay’s spokeswoman Kelly Henry confirmed the job cuts without discussing any particular no. of individuals who are being laid off.

She also told that they are consolidating their local businesses to focus more deeply on developing core Magento products that are serving more than 2,00,000 merchants worldwide. However, in an interview with Magento marketing head Craig Peasley, it was revealed that the company does not expect further layoffs related to the shutdown of both of its businesses – Magento Go & ProStores.

How EBay’s hard move is going to impact the merchants running Magento Go e-shops & ProStores?

The closure seems to affect more than 10,000 small & mid-sized businesses that relied on Magento Go & ProStores to fuel their online stores and generate millions of dollars from their huge online customer base.

As an impact of this sudden news, online sellers across the globe are really disappointed to learn that the platform is going to close in early 2015. In multiple conversations with CEO’s of different ecommerce brands, it came to light that merchants are finding it difficult to find a new platform & migrate all information to a completely fresh eCommerce solution without affecting sales & inventory. The situation worsens further for those Managing Directors who are hardcore Marketers & are not at all equipped with technical terminologies and challenges of eCommerce website development.

However, eBay announced to all Magento Go & ProStores merchants to take advantage of the checklists, planning resources & special offers in their Migration center to enable everyone to smoothly migrate to other eCommerce providers.

It also suggests using Bigcommerce for those who want to continue with hosted shopping carts while upgrading to Magento Enterprise Edition & Magento community edition if it fits their requirements. In an endeavor to further help its clients, eBay has posted a variety of resources online to help merchants decide on other options.

Darlene Shirran, the CEO of Lamppostglobes.com – an online store powered by ProStore, told Ecommercebytes that it would be very tough to remove a store that was by far the most successful & fetched majority of the online sales for her.

However, she was grateful to eBay for giving notice before 7 months of finally closing the stores in early Feb 2015. All she is concerned about as of now is finding the right eCommerce provider & migrating her store for a new transformation.

Just like Shirran, the fate of other 10,000 small businesses is undecided & can make them lose millions of dollars in taking the big risk of handing over their stores to new vendors. Despite Ebay’s senior management continually claiming to ensure that the transition will be as smooth & seamless as possible; selecting right vendor who can successfully migrate their store to other platforms would be a challenging task.

If you’re also one amongst those unfortunate store owners who are hit by this sudden shutdown, we can successfully migrate your Magento store to Bigcommerce or any other hosted or licensed platform of your choice.

Regardless of which version your store is currently running on, we can easily shift your product inventory along with fully-featured shopping cart to another platform. In case, you are yet to choose as to which eCommerce solution suits you, our migration experts & ecommerce application developers will love to talk & suggest a better option that fits all your selling requirements.

The post EBay Shuts Down Magento Go & ProStores – Puts 10,000+ SMB’s at stake appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Magento is now leading ecommerce platform and you can figure bunch of websites done in Magento while browsing web. Since it is a ‘heavy’ feature rich ecommerce CMS system, shoppers want that the speed offered by its default configuration should be high. Further, popular ecommerce platforms like Magento stand first in the list of potential victims as they deal with monetary transactions, therefore, these sites need advanced online security management.

Though, you can find many Magento developers who can easily configure and implement nice look to your website, it’s quite important that speed and security of Magneto websites are enhanced to ensure good conversions and secure shopping. After an in-depth research work, I have listed here a few simple but effective tips that will enhance speed and security of your Magento site.

Tips to enhance speed of Magento site:

With the launch of Google Panda 4.0, loading time of any website has become an important criterion in Google ranking. Those websites that take too much loading time can lose their ranking in Google search result page. Moreover, having a slow Magento website can be frustrating and can affect your ecommerce business. Read following statistics:

• 18% of shoppers abandon their cart if pages are too slow. Source
• 51% of online shoppers in the US say that the slowness of any website is the top reason they’d abandon a purchase. Source
• Even 2 second delay in load time during a transaction results in abandonment rates of up to 87%, which is significantly higher than the average abandonment rate of 70%. Source

In order to enhance speed of your Magento website, I have collected a few effective tips. Apart from following the below mentioned tips, you should also avoid Magento SEO mistakes to increase page-load speed of your Magento website:

1. Merge CSS and JS files

Merging CSS and JS files is an easy but effective way to enhance speed of Magento website. There are various CSS and JavaScript files in a website and if you combine these files, then the website has to load only one CSS and JS file that will make each page load faster.

How to merge CSS and JS files?
In Magento admin, (top menu) System -> Configuration, (left nav) Advanced -> Developer, (main page) JavaScript Settings, CSS Settings. Just set “Merge Javascript” Files and “Merge CSS” Files to “Yes”.

You can also install Fooman speedster extension, which merges and compresses JavaScript and CSS files. This extension also reduces the total size of files to be loaded as well as the number of HTTP requests.

2. Enable compilation

Compilation is a new feature in Magento version 1.4.x.x and above. It compiles files and scopes into more easily accessible blocks of HTML. If you turn compilation on, it can provide between 25% to 50% better performance depending on the page requested. It is important to know that if you need code modifications, updates, and extension installations, then compilation needs to be disabled first.

How to enable compilation?
In Magento admin, (top menu) System -> Tools -> Compilation, click Enable.

3. Delete unused extensions

Deleting unused extensions is one of the best ways to speed up your Magento website. It is required to completely remove unused extensions rather than just disabling them because when you disable an extension, it still exists in the database and increases the size of your database (DB). So, if you do not require any extension, delete it completely.

How to Uninstall Magento Extension?

• Log into your Magento administration panel
• Click on Magento Connect Manager
• Click the dropdown menu besides the extension name and choose “Uninstall”. Then click “Commit Changes”.

4. Clean database log

It is easy to understand that your Magento website cannot load in less time with a huge database. Many ecommerce websites keep too much data on their website that they have never used. You should clean this unused data if you want your website to run fast.

How to clean database log?
Cleaning unused data will not take you more than 15 minutes. You can clean logs via Magento admin panel by following the below method:

• Log on to your Magento Admin Panel
• Go to System -> Configuration
• On the left under Advanced click on System (Advanced -> System)
• Under system you will see “Log Cleaning” option
• Fill the desired “Log Cleaning” option values and click Save.

5. Enable Magento Flat Catalog

Magento uses the EAV database module to store all the data related to customers and products. This implies that each category or product has information spread throughout dozens of tables. Enabling the Flat Catalog improves performance of your website as it allows Magento website to build the same objects with one single DB query from one single DB table. All online stores should enable Flat Catalog for Categories and stores with over 1000 products should enable Flat Catalog for Products.

How to enable Flat Catalog?

• In the Magento Admin, go to System -> Configuration -> Catalog
• Under “Frontend”, change “Use Flat Catalog Category” to YES
• Under “Frontend”, change “Use Flat Catalog Product” to YES (optional)

Tips to enhance security of Magento site:

With cyber crime on a rise, nobody wants to provide any loopholes that may allow hackers to creep in their online store. Further, if any virus enters your e-store, it can damage database of customers as well as the whole website. Many people choose Magento for building ecommerce website and if you are also planning to build your website on Magento, it is necessary to follow below mentioned security tips:

1. Use latest Magento version

Magento consistently gets updated with new features. Updating your Magento website with its new version is important to enhance security. Latest versions of Magento fix security issues of the preceding ones; therefore, it is quite vital to stay informed about the latest Magento version and once a stable release is out, get it implemented.

2. Choose a secure password

If you are not choosing secure password, your Magento website can give access to hackers easily. When you are choosing your website’s administrator passwords, choose it wisely. Some guidelines for creating a really secure password are:

• Use at least 10 characters for creating password
• Mix lower and upper case, punctuation and numbers
• Making your password phonetic can make it easier to remember and type quickly

Make sure to not use the same password everywhere, and SSH password and DB root password should not be the same. You can also use a non root user for SSH or your specific Magento database. Try to refresh passwords every 3-6 months and force all of your administrators to do so as well. Further, saving your passwords in your browser may be a convenient way, but certainly not wise because those who have the access to your computer can easily read the credentials and use them.

Magento also provides users a great password recovering facility through their pre-configured Email address. If this email gets hacked your whole Magento website becomes vulnerable, therefore, you need to make sure that the email address you use for Magento site is not publicly known.

3. Enhance security of admin panel using custom path

Generally, you access your Magento admin panel by going on my-site.com/admin, which is very easy for hackers. They can get on the admin login page and guess your passwords. You should avoid this and create a custom path i.e. make a secret code instead of just /admin. In this way, you can prevent hackers form getting on to your admin login page even if they somehow get hold of your admin password.
You can easily change your admin path by:

• Locating /app/etc/local.xml
• Finding

4. Use a Secure FTP

Hackers often breach security of Magento e-store by intercepting or guessing FTP passwords. This has become critical now, as almost 75% of the merchants do not change their FTP account password after working with a service provider. If you want your website to remain secure, it is essential that you use SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) in which a private key file is used for de-encryption or authenticating a user. Further, you should use a powerful and difficult password for FTP.

5. Use encrypted connection (SSL/HTTPS)

When you send important data across an unencrypted connection, there are high risks of that data being intercepted or hacked. Therefore, it is quite important that you acquire secure connection for safety of your online store.

You can easily get secure HTTPS/SSL URL in Magento by checking the tab “Use Secure URLs in system configuration menu. In this way, you can make your e-store compliant with the PCI data security standard and secure your all online transactions.

6. Do not use a free or non-effective anti-virus software

There are various Trojans and viruses which are made for a sole purpose – to steal login details and credentials. In order to prevent your Magento e-store from such viruses, invest in some quality and effective Antivirus software.

There are many free Antivirus(s) such as AVG and Avast etc., which are great for home and personal use but to maximize their shield and potential, it may cost you a certain amount. Therefore, you should avoid free and non-effective anti-virus software, if you are really serious about security of your online store.

Conclusion

Speed and security of online store is the priority for every online entrepreneur. By following above mentioned tips, you can speed up your Magento server and make its environment secure, keeping hackers away from your setup. If you want to enhance security and speed of your Magento website professionally and effectively, I recommend you to hire experienced Magento developers.

The post Tips to Enhance Speed and Security of Magento Website appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

When trying to create your own eCommerce store, you will have hundreds of choices as far as the software and platforms you can use are concerned. Each program seems to offer you plenty of benefits and choosing the right one can be a nightmare, especially when you consider that the success of your online business might be on the line.

Design, simplicity and elegance are extremely important factors to draw in customers and persuade them to shop from you, instead from your competitors. Reliability and popularity of the software will determine whether your business will be safe and whether you’ll be able to find online assistance when needed. Your eCommerce platform needs to have both great design and reliability to work for you.

Magento offers a delicate balance between being dependable as well as extremely flexible. The customizable and flexible nature of Magento is what makes it a platform and not just a simple piece of rigid software. It comes as no surprise that the leading firms like Nike and Samsung have chosen a reliable as well as elegant program like Magento for their online commerce.

Here’s why…

Very High Reliability

The first thing you have to look at when searching for a reliable software, is who actually created it and who owns it. The more famous the name of the producer, the more dependable your program becomes. This makes reliability as one of the most prominent features of Magento, because it is powered by eBay Inc itself.

Magento is owned by one of the leading online commerce businesses, which certainly is an attribute none can sneer at. Especially if you consider the number of years of actual hands on experience which has gone into the programming of Magento. In a way you know that some of the formulas that made eBay so successful at online commerce will be inside your very own software when you use Magento.

Extremely flexible

Software is usually an already finished product, which has certain uses the developer intended it to have. This is not the case with Magento, because it actually works more like a platform on which you can build your own business site the way you want it and need it to be.

Instead of just being handed a toolbox, you are being offered ability; the ability to create a site that exactly meets your business needs. You can tweak and adjust your online business site in so many ways that even Magento’s developers could not have predicted.

Add to that a huge community, which creates its own plugins and extensions that you can adapt onto your program, and you have an extremely flexible eCommerce software solution. Using Magento is a sound business plan, since you use the ingenuity of a whole community to create the perfect site for your business needs.

Thoroughly Specialized

Magento is made to create online commerce sites, nothing more or less. This specialization is an extremely important benefit when using Magento, because everything about it is designed and tweaked to facilitate efficient eCommerce transactions.

Many programs can “also” create business sites, but this ability is usually only a bonus feature of a program that was created for a different purpose. This makes handling your shipping list, your clientele and your sales with such unspecialized software a nightmare.

On a professional level, you need a professional program that will serve you in as many ways as possible, and which is focused on the singular task of creating an eCommerce site. WordPress, for instance, is great when trying to create blogs and quick sites from scratch, but handling a business with it can be extremely hard. This is where Magento comes in with its high specialization in eCommerce.

Steady Popularity

The popularity of a program speaks volumes of its value. The more people use a program for a specific purpose, the better this program usually is. When some of those clients are actually high end brands, then you know that you have found a treasure.

Magento has many users who are unrelenting fans of its flexibility and great design. If you have chosen the community version of Magento, you will be in touch with thousands of people who can guide you through the process of building and handling your own eCommerce site with it.

Most of the advice and plugins you get from the community will also work on your Enterprise version of Magento, which offers more versatility and support, but also comes at a higher price.

Being popular also means that your program is widely supported and thus you will not have any compatibility issues, which is often the case with less popular eCommerce platform solutions.

So, why switch to Magento after all?

From the above mentioned points, it becomes clear why so many firms around the world prefer Magento when it comes to creating their online stores. The program might take a while for you to get adjusted to it and it does have a steep learning curve, but once you have mastered it you will only be limited by your own imagination and creativity. Since the codebase of Magento is written in PHP, it can be hard even for experienced designers to use efficiently.

Yet, that pretty much constitutes the software’s only substantial weakness, which can be overcome with some dedication and support from the community. If you’re having trouble using the software, you can always have a specialized professional help you with using Magento to optimize your eCommerce store’s functionality.

Being far more flexible to use than other platforms like Opencart, Magento is perfect to make your eCommerce site look and feel professional. It is no surprise that 10 in every 15 eCommerce businesses prefer to use Magento as their platform of choice.

Finally, if the above doesn’t persuade you, then consider this: Magento has made the sites of Nike, Samsung and many other world-class brands successful online. Would you not like the same for your eCommerce site ? Magento can make it happen!

The post Why Choose Magento for eCommerce Website Development appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Magento is the one and only platform which is dominating the ecommerce market with 26% share winning clear leadership amongst all other hosted as well as licensed shopping cart solutions. It already powers more than 1,50,000 online businesses across the globe and this is the reason why more and more new entrepreneurs are investing in this giant platform and are looking to hire experienced Magento developers. But sadly, not all who have their stores up and running succeeded in lifting sales, making a strong impression on search engines and are under pressure to deliver targeted customers traffic and conversions. So in this article, I decided to spot the 8 common SEO mistakes committed by most of the ecommerce businesses and suggested possible solutions in an endeavour to increase your sales and conversion Rates. In case you missed my previous article on Magento SEO – Top 5 SEO tips to skyrocket your ecommerce sales, go read it now.

Magento SEO Blunder #1 -Not Optimizing Title Tags Correctly

Forgetting to change default settings with Title Tag is the biggest mistake that kills your chances to show up in the search engine result pages (SERP). I have come across many SEO folks who optimize the title tags but tend to do so in a completely wrong way. Here the most common mistake I have often found is the website’s Homepage title as “Home” which is absolutely unacceptable and rather I would say that it doesn’t make any sense. Instead, the title should be something which directly represents your business and reflects its services or products. Say, for example – If your store sells shirts online in India, a relevant title could be “Shirts | Buy Shirts for Men and Women Online in India at Best Price”. If you have hired good SEO experts for your SEO campaigns, you will probably not see this blunder being done on your ecommerce website. So here, I would strongly suggest you to not take any risk with your traffic and get the best optimization for your ecommerce site to rank top in the search engine results.

Apart from the one listed above, I have jotted down other 4 mistakes that are often committed with title tags:

1. Not changing the alt title text on Images and especially on the Logo
2. Not changing the default Homepage Title that is usually ‘Magento commerce’
3. Similar title tags on multiple pages giving rise to title duplicacy
4. Making long nonsense titles without including keywords

Suggested Solution:

Go to your admin area,

System – Configuration – Design – HTML Head

and enter a new title in the “Default Title” field. Make sure that the title you create is keyworded, descriptive, absolutely unique and relevant to your own store, what you sell or deal in. Fill out the default description field as well with unique content and best keywords that are 100% relevant to your business. Remember to choose only the logically meaningful phrases for your keywords instead of nonsense copy pasted stuff. Don’t forget to limit your title to 60 characters and your descriptions to maximum 160 characters.

Below I have attached an image for you to understand better.

I have seen many SEO companies optimizing alternate title texts for all product images but unfortunately most of them forget to change this for the logo, thus hurting the SEO part. For changing the alt text for your logo, do as directed below

Go to System – Configuration – Design, click on Header tab and change the logo source to your respective filename or path and here you can change the alternate text of your logo as well. Again I suggest using the search engine friendly filenames and good keyworded text for the alt text of your logo.

Magento SEO Blunder #2 –Forgetting to change the Default Keywords

I have seen many search engine optimizers committing this mistake deliberately and they proudly argue by saying that Mat Cutts – the Spam Leader at Google has informed in 2009 that Google doesn’t use the keywords metatag at all. Yes, I do agree that search engines ignore the keyword meta tag because of the rise in spamming issues and that they tend to focus more on the visible text. But not changing the default keywords is also painful from SEO lens. Here what I mean to say is don’t focus on keywords, instead focus on high quality logical phrases that make up Best Keywords. The keywords that you craft for your website should be unique and meaningful to avoid a bad experience.

Suggested Solution:

Leave the Default keywords field blank if you have not yet decided the keywords for every product page, category page and CMS page otherwise Google will index these default keywords and you will be in trouble. While choosing keywords, you can even take help from many free Keyword tools that are present on the web.

Go to System – Configuration – Design – HTML head – Default Keywords and change the default keyword setting by either leaving it blank for some time or inserting your own keywords if you have carefully analysed them.

For example, you have a company that manufactures Ruby stones so instead of using the whole company name as keyword, you can use something like – “Ruby Stones from Gala – Fashion Manufacturing”

Magento SEO Blunder #3 – DUPLICATED URLs

Having Duplicated URLs is another big blunder for ecommerce search engine optimization. What it exactly means is having a redundant URL in the webpages.

Suggested Solution:
To solve the duplicacy issues in your URLs, go to

System – Configuration – Catalog – Search Engine Optimization

and assign “No” to the field “Use Categories Path for Product URLs”.

Magento SEO Blunder #4 – Not Handling Canonicalization

Despite Google sharing a pretty good overview on how to deal with canonicalization issues in its content guidelines posted at Webmasters Tools Support Page, a large no. of search engine optimizers and even the professional SEO agencies commit the mistake of not handling canonicalization at all.

Suggested Solution:
Go to System – Configuration – Catalog – Search Engine Optimization

and at the bottom set the following 2 fields to “Yes”. This not only handles your canonicalization issues but it will also prevent the auto generation of duplicated content whenever you want to show the same product in multiple categories

1. Canonical Link meta Tag For Categories Field and
2. Canonical Link Meta Tag for Products Field to yes

Magento SEO Blunder #5 – Not fixing URL Rewrites

URL rewrites are also known as search engine friendly URLs that are very crucial part for SEO. They make your URLs easier to read by both search engine crawlers and visitors.

Suggested Solution:
Go to your admin panel and change the following default settings as suggested below:

1. Change the default setting of the option “Add Store Code to URLs” present under “URL Options” to “No”
2. Turn on your Web Server Rewrites by navigating to
   System – Configuration – Catalog – Search Engine Optimization – Use web server rewritesIf you miss out on this, all your pages will have /index.php/ extension added that looks ugly.<br/ >Wait, if this option is not getting enabled, it means the Apache mod_rewrite is not checked in your Hosting environment, quickly go to your Hosting account and check on this.
3. Automatically redirect all your traffic to the same base URL by setting the “Auto-redirect to Base URL” option as yes.

Magento SEO Blunder #6 – Layered Navigation Issues

Layered Navigation is also a big problem for Magento SEO but at the same time missing this part while designing Magento ecommerce site is also a blunder for sales because every visitor who is browsing products on your site would love to find the desired product within seconds and can get irritated if he/she doesn’t see any layered navigation widget to filter the products by price, category , size or color. For those who don’t know what exactly I am talking about, see the image shared below that well describes what layered navigation is.

This type of navigation attracts many issues of identical content. Plus, it messes up all your URLs, page titles and descriptions with duplicate content which again ends up killing all your SEO efforts.

Suggested Solution:

Don’t allow your layered navigation pages being indexed by Google. This can be done via cookies or sending fast Ajax Requests. Using Ajax navigation will enable your visitors to filter your featured products without appending anything to URLs and ending up at the original page only. But again, to achieve this is a hard nut to crack and you will have to hire experienced Magento Developers to do this for you. Alternatively, you can even purchase and integrate a Premium Extension – Layered Navigation Pro from Magento Ecommerce extensions library.

Magento SEO Blunder #7 –Blocking Indexation of Website while going live

This is the biggest mistake due to which your website looses all worth as it instructs search engines to go away and not pay any attention to your online shop. This mistake is often not committed deliberately and many ecommerce development companies just forget to turn it on while switching from development stage to live stage.

Suggested Solution:

Before launching your website live on your server, don’t forget to turn meta robots on through “index,follow”

To do this ,Go to your admin panel and scroll to

System – Configuration – General – Design – HTML Head – Default robots “INDEX, FOLLOW”

Or if you want to directly do it in code, i.e. in your robots.txt file, change the attributes as follows

meta name=”robots” content=”INDEX,FOLLOW”

Remember, you have to do this only after you are completely done with the development of your store and would like to switch to live server. Don’t do this in your development stage and instead you need to set it as “NONINDEX, NOFOLLOW” while you are on your testing server.

Magento SEO Blunder #8 – Forgettingto create Google Sitemap and refreshing it at regular intervals

For those who are not aware of this, let me tell that in Magento Language, sitemaps refer to ‘Google Sitemaps” and this doesn’t mean that they are supported only by Google and not the other search engines. Yes, they are supported by Yahoo!! and Microsoft’ Bing as well. I have seen a lot of SEO folks forget including sitemaps and if they do, they don’t refresh it at regular intervals. Many of them even build it including sample products and categories and later they forget to check it and remove before going live.

Suggested Solution:
Step 1 – Add a sitemap by creating one from the sitemap directory in your web root along with writable permissions.

Step 2 – If you are using “Magento Go” – the hosted version of magento, simply Go to Catalog-  Google Sitemap tab as shown below.

Or if you are using the normal version, go to System – configuration – Catalog – Google Sitemap and create one for your site.

Step-3 – Set up your Magento store such that it automatically refreshes your sitemap at regular intervals. To configure this functionality, go to your admin area,

System – Configuration – Catalog- Google Sitemap

You can also download some premium custom sitemap extensions like Magento Extended Sitemap Extension and Aschroder.com Sitemap Submit

So, these were the most common mistakes that I could compile from my experience of optimizing tons of high ranking Magento Ecommerce sites. I hope you all will keep them in your Magento SEO checklist and will evolve your SEO strategy by learning from these mistakes. If you would like to challenge us by giving us a chance to optimize your Magento ecommerce site as well, contact TIS India to get an affordable quote and let’s get started.

The post Top 8 Mistakes To Be Avoided In Magento SEO And Their Solutions appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.