News

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…

E-commerce website design is proud to announce the arrival of our latest venture, ‘Magento Fox‘. You can now stay even more up-to-date with all of our Magento news and updates because our trusty mascot has his own Twitter account. There we’ll be posting updates to all of our Magento blog posts as well as any other small findings and thoughts that we have throughout the day. Feel free to follow us and the fox will surely follow you.

Simply go to http://twitter.com/magentofox

It has been recently announced that the Magento Developers Paradise event scheduled to begin on the 18th of April has been postponed due to the clouded skies of Ash over large areas of Europe. The event which was supposed to be in full swing today in sunny Mallorca, Spain had gathered a lot of momentum as a result of the growing popularity of Magento and increasing support from several high-end sponsors including Paypal.

Here at ecommerce website design, I was looking forward to what new ideas and developments were going to be announced by keynote speakers from the Magento development team.

But alas, the millions of tonnes of pressure beginning deep within the crust were too much for planet earth to contain any longer – bringing into action the thick plume of volcanic ash that very unfortunately was blown across the Atlantic to cover the UK and mainland Europe. So while the sun shines brightly in paradise just off the east coast of Spain, the potential advances that were afforded to Magento will have to go unmentioned for a little while longer…

If Varien confirm that the event is back on, we’ll mention bring it to you here at the Magento Blog.

Just a couple of thoughts here that I feel I should share with you all. It’s about Ecommerce Website Design and how we should always be smart about its development and design.

Think of it this way – I went shopping last Friday, as I had the day off, and I ended up spending quite a lot more than I wanted to. As I drove home I wondered why it was that I spent so much of my hard-earned money on things that I didn’t need and also how I could use the same tactics that the shops on the high street seem to do so well on my own ecommerce websites.

Market stalls and high street shops have been around a long time, much longer than online shops so it’s only natural that they would have learnt a few tricks of the trade that online retailers have yet to master.

This is where smart ecommerce website design comes in. What we need to do is perfectly adapt our online stores to our users. When I go into a game store I like to look at the video games in action on consoles set up for the customers. When I go into a furniture store I like to sit on the beds and open the cabinets. The main reason why I bought so much stuff the last time I went shopping was that everything I bought I had looked at/picked up/tasted before purchase (Tasted a pick and mix sweet before purchase – lock me away).

It is this sort of interactivity that, as ecommerce website designers, we really need to focus on. If we can bring this same sort of touchy/feely style of user-experience into our online stores we will find that our online conversions go through the roof.

Some examples of the kind of things we can do to improve our online customers visits are things like introducing product-based videos or interactive galleries. Perhaps sound clips of purchasable music files or demonstrations of programs and games. Now that we have good open source e-commerce platforms such as Magento on which to build from, we can really start  concentrating on our visual presentation rather than the core functionality of an ecommerce website.

When you are retailing in the UK and selling your wears abroad – if you are a registered V.A.T company you can charge the V.A.T that is taken from your goods to any country in the EU.

There’s a really easy way to do this – basically use Magento’s inbuilt tax system.

If you click on manage tax zones & rates you can add countries to your list. For each country just select the country name from the drop down and add the percentage of tax you’d want to charge. (in this case 17.5%).

Where you have added your complete list of countries you then navigate to the Manage Tax Rules page.

Here you can enable your tax rates and by using the multiple select tool you can select all your new countries.

Now when you check your tax rates for other countries they come up in the quote calculator!