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As an early advocate of Web 2.0, nothing please me more than seeing mashups happening across the Internet on a grand scale. So when I saw an official Magento Blog post containing the words Magento and Skype, I was instantly very interested. Well, this isn’t a mashup. The bottom line is that Skype now use Magento. I’m fairly confident that Magento would also use Skype, but I’ll leave that for one of their developers to confirm as we wait holding our breath…

The Skype shop is now using Magento as its primary e-commerce platform for selling it’s telecom-related products. It appears as though they are using an in-depth structure of websites and stores to make each one applicable to the country that the person is browsing from. The design has also been nicely customised in a very simple but effective, clean style. There’s even the nice addition of a bestsellers section at the top of the categories page.

It gets even more advanced as you try to buy a product it sends you to another website, with a highly-customised JQuery checkout – all on one page only. I think stores like this are probably only suited to company’s like Skype because it’s a very one-off event that a customer would need to buy equipment like this. It’s not a place you come back to shop on a regular basis. You get what you need and leave.

All this Skype talk got me thinking about how Skype could be integrated into Magento to create a nice online help feature. I know the Skype embed buttons are available  for anyone to use, but having it integrated more seamlessly would be a nice feature imho. I’m sure Skype could have a big part to play in today’s ecommerce web design, let’s hold out for the future!

Friday afternoon’s were made for reflection… on the week gone by… on future possibilities… and on how successful your e-commerce website is. Are you missing out simple techniques that could drastically improve the usability and sales of your store? I’m not writing a full how-to guide, but I do have a few thoughts…

It has become clear to me over recent weeks just how important the marketing of your ecommerce website is. I’m not talking about marketing externally, but internally. I’m talking about making the best use of your homepage, to tell customers that this is where they need to be. Websites have come on leaps and bounds over the last 10 years and e-commerce (along with the rise and rise of Web 2.0) is at the forefront of advanced web technology. So what I’m saying is make the most of it. Let’s look at a good e-commerce website design:

The homepage doesn’t contain any flash or text, things which very good on a normal website… but this is ecommerce. Promote your products on your homepage. Boast to your customers about your bestsellers, your special offers and if you have the ability recommend products to your customers. This is particularly effective when you can attribute your recommendations directly to your customers based on their recently viewed or searched for items.

The navigation should be clear, but not obtrusive. Take a leaf out of Amazon’s book and make it vertical so that you can add as many categories as you want at a later date. You don’t really need a miniature cart anywhere on the page, a clear link to it will do. Make sure there’s a basket icon next to it so that non-English speaking visitors can understand it. The products that you display on your homepage must always display a price. You’re telling people why you’re showing this item by scoring out the old price and highlighting the new, lower one. Use a bold colour to make these prices stand out.

Have new items? Get them somewhere on the homepage too otherwise no-one will find them. You need to keep this up-to-date so you can tell your customers that you’re stocking the latest, coolest stuff. Don’t underestimate the power of your search bar either. It should be noticeable and easy-to-use, located above the fold of the page, preferably just below the header – this is where people look…

These things have made stores like Amazon truly successful, multi-million dollar businesses. By helping to staple these usability and point of sale features as common e-commerce standards, it makes sense to keep using them. Customer’s like e-commerce sites to be familiar and easy-to-follow. Combine this with good promotion on your homepage, you’ll give yourself the best starting point for a successful e-commerce website.

Keep checking back at the Magento Blog for more ecommerce advice.

You’ve heard me bang on for a long while now about mCommerce, the importance of pervaisive computing and how the future of computing as a whole lies heavily on the development of mobile technologies. There’s nothing worse that a hypocrite in this line of work, so thanks to the folks at WPTouch this blog has now been made officially iPhone friendly.

Having your website specially optimised for the iPhone and other modern mobile devices makes browsing much easier and gives much needed priority to content. As nice as the design of the Magento Blog is, it’s the content that is important. The new iPhone theme looks nothing like the desktop/laptop version of the site, but you’ll be able to find the information you’re after much easier and without doing that zoom action with your index finger and thumb which can get quite annoying…

Expect all sites in the near future to bring out mobile versions of their sites optimised for iPhone. First the Magento Blog, next Ecommerce Web Design…

For all of it’s problems and shortcomings, Magento Dataflow can still be very useful when it comes to the mass upload of data to your website. Being a Magento developer can sometimes feel like being a doctor of an ill patient, constantly having to come up with cures to a range of unknown illnesses. I promise I’m going somewhere with this…

A recent attempt to upload 1,090 products ended abruptly and disappointingly with an inexplicable error. The error came about because there were non UTF-8 characters somewhere in the document which I currently had open in the Spreadsheet program on Open Office. If there’s 20 products it won’t take long to find them, if there’s 1,090 it may take slightly longer…

The error that’s produced read like this:

Notice: unserialize() [function.unserialize]: Error at offset 209 of 247 bytes in /var/www/vhosts/wcshop.co.uk/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Dataflow/Model/Batch/Abstract.php on line 66

My solution was to open the file in Notepad and simply re-save the file in there in UTF-8 format, but you can also do this in Open Office too. It will convert the problematic characters into the correct UTF-8 alternatives.

This was my solution for a site using 1.4.0.1 – the folks at Magento have improved the error reporting for version 1.4.1 + in that you’re actually told which column has been effected by the non-UTF-8 character, which obviously makes diagnosis a lot easier. I think this patient is slowly getting better!

You know that feeling of annoyance you get when the same piece of junk mail is always delivered to your door? You don’t really care what its about because everything you’ve got already works very well as it is. Draw similarities if you will to the admin notifications that always pop up when you log into your backend. Rather like having a mailbox, I’d prefer to go and check the the notifications page for any important message rather than be bombarded by them every time I load up the admin. You can find your notifications in System > Notifications.

To disable teh notifications simply go to: System > Configuration > Advanced > Advanced > Disable Modules Output

From this pretty long list find ‘Mage_AdminNotification’ and set it to disabled. Be gone forever…