Magento Advice

A key feature in Magento in terms of effective marketing, is to make use of up-sells, cross-sells and related products – in the same way that a high street shop would use POS around certain products to make a customer spend more on items they should also consider. Let’s say for example that you own an online shop which sells laptop computers. Here’s how you would get the best out of the three product relations:

Related Products

These appear in the right sidebar of your website alongside your main product content, which is good because it means they are on display constantly without getting in the way of any important content. So what should you put in here? Well, related products…. If you allow me to elaborate this means anything that could be considered similar or directly useful towards the product in question. So in the example of a laptop, related products could include a laptop bag, a wireless mouse or improved RAM.

I normally recommend limiting related products to 6 or 7 items so that you don’t dilute the products that have been suggested too much.

Up-sells

Up-sells appear in the tabbed area at the bottom of the product info page (if you use the default or modern themes) – and they would consist of items that are similar but of higher value. Hence the use of the word ‘up’ in ‘up-sells’, you’re trying to say to the customer: “Hey, this product is good, but for just a little more you can get this better one!” Put as many of these in as you can, but you’ll probably find that you’ll just want the 3 or so items which are of a similar price range, but will bring in more money for you if sold.

So in our example you would see a series of better, higher-spec and ultimately more expensive laptops.

Cross-sells

So, the customer has added items to their basket, they are on the checkout page about to buy their products. Great. But you could also convince them that they need more items to go with their purchase. In a box on the shopping cart page, cross-sells have the same mission as the related products – to get more sales from the customer. Using terminology such as:

• “You may also be interested in…” or
• “Customers who bought this, also bought…” or
• “Got everything you need?” or
• “Erm, excuse me <enter name here>, I see you’re buying <product name here>, I think you may also want some of these…”

Perhaps the last one, is a bit too much but you get the idea. In the same way that a PC World salesman would try to sell you £500, Cinema-grade 150 Watt speakers to go with your laptop, you also need to push your cross-sells – albeit in a less annoying way!

Configuring you product relations properly can be the difference between a customer buying a laptop, and a customer buying a laptop with all the extras, so make the most of them and don’t underestimate their influence on customer buying behaviour.

With all the confusion surrounding the modern theme in the latest versions of magento I just wanted to let people know that if your magento installation doesn’t come with the modern theme or if you are struggling with the magento connect versions of the theme then this may help you.

What you should do in the case of the above is:

- Download the .zip of the latest version of Magento from the official magento website.

- Navigate to app>design>frontend>default> and copy your modern folder.

- Paste your modern folder into app>design>frontend>base>.

- Then go to your skin>frontend>default> and copy your modern folder.

- Paste your skin modern folder into skin>frontend>base>.

You can now upload your ‘base’ folders from app>design>frontend> and also skin>frontend> to your website.

The next step is to go into your admin section and change your package. Set it up similar to the following:

You should then clear your magento cache and reindex your data for good measure and all should be well with your e-commerce website. Thanks for visiting ecommerce website design and our magento blog.

While Magento is an e-commerce platform that prides itself and excels in search-engine-friendly standards, there are several things that can be done in the configuration which can clean up the URLs of your site – something which needs doing a lot to get the most out of clean URLs. Below is a list of checks for you to make in the configuration before signing your site off:

Canonical URLs

As mentioned in a previous post, canonical URLs can make a big difference and it’s very easy to add canonical meta tags to your website. I would suggest making the following changes to your settings in System > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations

1. Change category and product suffix to .php – this will enable external php scripts to work on your pages.
2. Change the page title separator to a comma, this is something which Google prefers when scanning page titles for keywords.
3. Use canonical link meta tag for categories & products – set to Yes.

Web Server Rewrites

By default Magento inserts index.php into it’s URLs, particularly for the category and product pages where the inclusion of index.php is a threat to the quality of the URL that gets cached by Google. A very simple workaround for this problem is to enable Web Server Rewrites which can be done in the Magento admin section when you go to:

System > Configuration > Web > Use Server Rewrites > Yes

These two configuration changes only take literally a few seconds to do and can vastly help your store with its search engine optimisation, something which we take very seriously here at Ecommerce Website Design.

Magento has concentrated quite hard on the order management side of ecommerce, basically handing over all features of managing your order books to the user. This post will basically be a run-down of the main features of the order management system and how you can use these to process orders that you receive over the phone or even in store.

The main features that we will cover in this section are:

• Handy FREE Extensions
• Processing an Order over the Phone
• Getting around PayPal Pro/Maestro problem
• Editing Prices on-the-fly
• Organization

The above should cover most of what clients will need to be able to manage themselves once a Magento site is signed off and passed across.

Handy FREE Extensions

A couple of features that Magento (as default) sadly lacks is the ability to export your order list as a .csv file. Something that it manages to do fine with products but has somehow been overlooked for order management.

With this handy free extension you can now get this functionality:

Order Export

Also you may find this extension handy – it allows you to delete canceled orders – so they don’t remain on your order list.

Deleting Orders Extension

Processing an Order over the Phone

What you will find when you have an ecommerce store is that when customers visit your site – a good number of them will want to process their order over the phone. This could be because either they a) Don’t trust online payments as far as they can virtually throw them, or b) prefer to know that there is a company at the other end of this pretty little window.

Either way you will get customers over the phone.

When using Magento you can easily log in to your back-end and process an order. All you need to do is take down the following information (this is assuming you are using PayPal pro or similar):

• Mr/Mrs, Name, Email, Address (first line, city, county, postcode, country), telephone.
• Product Name (or SKU), quantity and any other additional info such as billing address (if different) and company name etc.
• Credit Card information – Card Type, Long Card Number, Expiry Date, CSV Number (if applicable – start date, issue number)

When you have all this information you are ready to insert your order manually into mangeto.

Log in to your back-end. Navigate to sales>orders. Then click on Create New Order (top-right).

Here you will see a list of customers that have visited your site and placed orders – you can even reorder for one of these customers but for now we will click on “create new customer”. After clicking this you will be presented with a large blank form that you can fill in with the details you took over the phone.

- If you had clicked on an existing customer this information would be auto-filled.

After filling out that information you should click on the “add products” button at the top of the page. This will let you search for your product and add it to the order. There are a few details that can be edited here that I will cover later on but for now simply add the product and the quantity that you require onto the order.

After this you will see a payment section and a delivery section at the bottom of the page – simply fill out the payment using the details taken from the phone call (hsbc/paypal pro).

After entering all this information you can click “Create Order”. The order is then placed – and all emails are sent out as per usual – the order is also added to your order list.

Getting Around the PayPal Pro / Maestro Problem

All is good with the above section until you are faced with PayPal pro and are holding the details of a maestro card. The way to get around this is to enable your PayPal standard account (which will use the same log in as your PayPal pro account), you will then have to go through the checkout process of your site – entering the customers details as you go. When visiting the PayPal site to pay -choose the option on the left which states “pay with a card”.

Editing Prices on-the-fly

If you have agreed a special price over the phone as a gesture of goodwill or the like, you can edit the prices of the products that you place on the order as you order them – this will not affect the actual price of the item on the store.

A good example of the need for this was presented to me earlier today. Our client had told a customer over the phone that the price of 2x items at £19.99 included the delivery – however the magento store did not allow this. The delivery charge would have been applied at £5.50.

We got around this by obviously taking the cost of the delivery off of the item using that “user custom price” tick box. £2.75 off of each item meant that delivery was now included. An additional note stating this change was made in the “comments” section of the order form. The order was then processed and the customer was happy.

Organization

In terms of organizing your orders there are several housekeeping things that you can do. With those extensions made above it’s easy to delete canceled orders (such as early development test orders) and also its easy to export your orders to .csv for printing or backing up or sending to colleagues.

Another good thing to practice in the back end is ensuring that you follow the main steps of completing an order, on the invoices page you can create memo’s and also let the customer know when an item has been shipped. There are simple buttons for these but keeping the customer informed on the movement of their purchased items does make them feel a lot better about purchasing from your site.

I hope these little tips have smoothed over some of those frown wrinkles caused by the back-end of magento. If nothing else, it has eaten up 5 minutes of your day reading it.

Thanks for visiting our magento blog at ecommerce website design.