News

When it comes to developing websites a lot of people find books (yes proper paper-based, hold-in-your-hands books) the easiest resource to follow. There’s something about the methodical process of turning pages that aids us when it comes to piecing together complex lines of code.

Over the coming weeks myself (Rob) and Adam here at e-commerce web design will be reviewing a number of Magento Books and Guides that we have found to be particularly useful in our own e-commerce efforts. We’ll be sharing our thoughts and opinions about each product right here on our magento blog and will endeavor to come up with a short list of books that will be useful from those starting out for the first time in e-commerce website design and also for those wishing to engage in more advanced developments such as modules and theme creations.

This is also a call for anyone out there who has read a magento book to review it themselves or if you know of a magento book that you are considering buying just let us know and we will try to get hold of a copy and give it a good once over. Simply let us know and we will be glad to give you all an honest opinion about them.

You may find that your Paypal Standard transactions do not change the status of the order to ‘processing’ even though Paypal says that the payment has been received. This is usually down to the enabling of ‘Instant Payment Notification (IPN)’, which should be automatically enabled in your Magento Paypal settings. To check that they are correctly configured in your Paypal settings you need to login to your Paypal account and go here:

My Account > Profile > Instant Payment Notification preferences

Once inside, click on ‘Edit IPN Settings’ and you’ll be shown the form below:

You need to enter your Magento store name followed by the Paypal IPN directory structure. If you do not have  URL rewrites enabled on the site, don’t forget to include /index.php before the Paypal folder, making it: http://www.storename.com/index.php/paypal/standard/ipn/

Then you need to enable it by selecting ‘Receive IPN messages’.

There’s a more comprehensive guide to enabling IPN on your Paypal Standard payments here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/how_to/paypal_standard_payments_setup_with_ipn

I think it’s worth pointing out to all Magento developers that learning the intricacies of the dataflow is unquestionably worthwhile. It allows you to load the spreadsheet full of simple products, including those that make up the configurable products and this is a massive time saver. One thing to remember is to configure the inventory on the spreadsheet. 1 normally means yes and 0 equals no. Make sure that you set the column that suggests that the user configures the inventory at a later date is set to ‘0′ for no, otheriwse your products will all import out of stock.

I’ll be putting some Magento tutorials up in the next few weeks, including more about the dataflow.

A very popular service on the high street is the ability for shoppers to trade in their old video games for store credit to use against buying new ones – something that often offers more than the traditional monetary value should the game be sold straight for cash.

E-commerce giant Amazon is now to be cashing in on the idea in what is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Amazon currently allows user to buy from the site and from other users, sell to other users and now sell to Amazon itself. This should work well for Amazon as it will certainly grow the site’s back catalogue collection of games that are now quite hard to get hold of.

Done correctly I can see this being a very successful and potentially massively profitable service for Amazon as they can begin to market their back catalog in the same way eBay markets its ability to provide buyers with rare items that are no longer sold on the high street.

I’d now like to encourage anyone to make comments on this blog, safe in the knowledge that you’ll get a decent link from your post. Regardless however, anything that I deem to be spam will be deleted. I don’t mind you linking to your site as long as the content of your comment is acceptable and contributing ot the discussion.