A Cron job is a scheduled task, a task that is performed every so often by the server without any user input. Cron jobs are important for lots of different reasons and when it comes to ecommerce they are a godsend.

Magento required Cron jobs for a few different reasons but the most important ones in my opinion are:

• Newsletter Sending
• Automatic Sitemap Generation

What you should do is set up your newsletters and sitemaps as normal through Magento. Schedule your times and basically follow the instructions on screen. When you set your dates/times etc the Cron Job will perform these tasks after that date/time has been reached. It is therefore beneficial to schedule your Cron Job to run every 10-15 minutes.

Magento uses a single file named cron.php to execute all its scheduled tasks – all that is required to be done is to schedule a cron job to execute that php every so often.

At Ecommerce Website Design we use a server that has Plesk installed – with plesk it is easy to schedule your Cron Jobs.

I will show you now how to set up your Cron Job through plesk.

First of all navigate into your domain and on your domain dashboard click CronTab.

Secondly once you are inside your Crontab select the name of your FTP user. In this case it is “swimming”.

Next you should click on the Add Scheduled Task for FTP user from the tools menu at the top of the screen.

Now the important bit – what you should do is schedule the task for every 10 minutes. To do this we use the following command in the minutes section – */10. Next we want this to execute every hour of every day of every month – so we simply add a * to all the other boxes.

The last thing to do is to actually perform a command for this scheduled event. In our case on our plesk servers (should be reasonably similar for most linux server paths) we use the following command:

/usr/bin/php -f /var/www/vhosts/mydomain.com/httpdocs/cron.php

Simply replace mydomain.com with whatever your domain is called e.g. e-commercewebdesign.co.uk

Here is a screenshot to better demonstrate:

Once your cron job has been saved you will see that Magento will now run your scheduled tasks at the date/time you inputted (or 10minutes after the actual time).

Thanks for visiting our magento blog – I hope you found this post useful – any questions please let me know!

E-Commerce TV is a phrase that we use to describe a “TV station” on your e-commerce store, not a TV station as in big antennae and fixed phone competitions, but really a collection of programmes on a single channel. These programmes can take any form – but the most popular e-commerce based videos, and the ones that we at e-commerce web design can provide, consist mainly of:

• Web Presenters
• Video Product Demonstrations
• Business-related Video features
• Weekly/Monthly Video Blogs
• Interactive Product Videos with Magento/ other e-commerce platform

At ecommerce website design we pride ourselves in our ability to create functional and  successful e-commerce websites for existing businesses or brand-new start-ups. We also understand the important of merging video and ecommerce. It is a fact of life that customers are more inclined to purchase an item if that item is shown and described on the website in the best way possible – Video.

Our E-commerce TV is pushing the boundaries of video interaction. We have the skills and expertise to film high quality videos of your products and businesses, write business-specific scripts that target your audience and then take your videos to the next level. We can synchronize your video with your e-commerce store. We can interact with Magento and other e-commerce packages via your video – creating a product stream of live information about what is currently on your website.

Here is an example:

You have a clothing store – we have filmed your business from inside your shop – moving around your store and showing your range of dresses. On the video you pick up a nice pretty yellow summer dress, as soon as this happens a box fades in on the right hand side of your e-commerce website – showing the product name, the price, the stock availability and a description. You move across the store and pick up a summer jacket – the jacket now appears and joins with the dress, displaying all product data as before. The customer watching your video online says “I’ve got to have that dress!” but instead of going back to Google to search for it – the option is there – right in front of them – calling them to purchase it from your website. The stock says it’s in stock – the price displayed is discounted – there’s never a better time to purchase – and purchase the customer does.

That is simply one example taken from one specific business – imagine the possibilities when you apply this to your own e-commerce website or a website yet unmade. It is also only one example of the kinds of service that we offer to online businesses.

E-commerce TV brings together all of the above into an easy to navigate, video-based product experience that your customers will watch and demand your business.

If you are interested in learning more about what E-commerce TV can do for your business then please get in touch. We can give you a wide range of options for all manner of businesses to come up with the perfect solution for your website.

Back in the day…we had a wide selection of buildings, some big, others slightly smaller. We called these strange places “shops”.  In these “shops” lived a few humble “staff”, whose job it was to patrol the “shop” and keep a wary eye out for miscreants and vagabonds. They were also required to “face-up” the aisles and sometimes mop the floor.

Stock was laid out in the open…a very dangerous tactic. Many’s a time when a “shoplifter” would…now let me get this right…tip the “shop” up and empty the contents into a large ‘duffel bag’ or ‘hoody’ and then scarper away pockets bulging.

In the days of old the rules were simple – either you had a shop and sold your products – or you didn’t. If you did, you would make money but due to shoplifters and duffel bags you might also lose money.

Ecommerce is the future, but is it the future for some or the future for all? According to all those boring statistics, the world wide web is gradually catching up with high-street retail in terms of the number of products being bought. This is still at the time when my broadband speed is only slightly faster than my kettle at opening Google.

It is my belief that the emergence of e-commerce (there are many ways to spell it) as the fast approaching primary source of purchase is because of the psycho/social dis-interaction between human being and money. Now I am no psychologist – all I know is – it hurts a hell of a lot more when I extract a crisp, clean £10 note from my wallet, and, with trembling hands, pass it over the counter to pay for my milk and cheese, than it does when I click a button and spend £10 on a DVD I don’t even have to leave the house to receive.

Stop Press! (or stop-publish in this case)

I have literally just been told, right this second, over my shoulder – amongst the abuse and gestural insults – that the future is in fact “M-Commerce” or “Mobile Commerce“. Descriptions of this new phenomenon are vague at best but the general idea is that ‘ubiquitous’ computing is taking over the world – the fact that you now have a choice as to how and where and why and if and who and when you buy your products means that it literally is all down to you. So what do you do? Do you get on the iPhone and buy your slippers? Do you purchase your cuff-links on your laptop on a beach? Do you buy your dog food while sitting down having a brew in those slippers and cuff-links at home in your computer room? Personally I do all of them…

E-commerce website design is always trying to keep up to date with the latest developments in the world of ecommerce – we did actually know about m-commerce before I just mentioned it…I only added that in there to keep your heart-rate up. Some good news though! We are now hiring for Magento Jobs as well as web design and possibly some SEO. Just see our other posts for details.

To Sum up and get this post over and done with – e commerce (yup, third different spelling on the same post) and m-commerce / “ubiquitous commerce” is almost certainly the future and hopefully we’ll all be ready when it happens.

Next time you walk into a “shop” take a picture…

Over the past few years internet video has dramatically changed the way we spend our time online. Back in the day the masses had to make do with images and text and the occasional flash animation. It seems only the wealthy or the very very lucky were privileged enough to posses a broadband line (or ISDN line) that was powerful and oil-slick enough to allow for streaming video of any reasonable quality.

Nowadays that has all changed – and it seems reasonable to assume that any stranger that you walk by in the street has spent at least a good few hours eyeballing YouTube or other, perhaps more scandalous web video archives. And the reason, other than the obvious, is that web video is now accessible. You can even stream video on your mobile phone these days (if you are privileged enough to own an expensive phone contract that is – vicious circle).

As web video takes up more and more of our online time it seems only right to capitalise on it as a medium through which we (as online businesses) can promote our websites and products/services. For most of you it may seem like a hard way to go about things but trust me – the benefits are enormous.

There are many avenues that an e-commerce website can walk down to show off your products. Let’s try an example and see how we would go about advertising and promoting an “Acer Laptop” on our site. We could use any of the following:

• An Image Gallery (showing front/back/left/right/top/bottom – perhaps even in a nice jquery rollover feature or lightbox)
• Product Description (a short description detailing only the top noticeable specs like the processor, operating system and RAM)
• Product Specification (a detailed specification including weight/battery life etc)
• Customer Reviews (always helpful and informative)

All of these do a good job of promoting the laptop – however what would you say to a 360 spin-around view of the laptop with music and narration detailing the spec? What would you look at first? My guess would be that if you saw a “video review” of a product you would immediately click play. A customer can then learn more about the product in those few seconds of video footage than they would through reading the whole specification.

There’s something about video that just appeals to us as consumers, it makes us stop and pay attention like nothing else. It is a solid fact of e-commerce marketing that the longer a visitor stays on your website the more likely they are to purchase your products.

Here is a good example of using web video for products (you may recognize the website and how well they are doing as a company):

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/9644467/Acer-Aspire-Timeline-5810T-Core-2-Solo-ULV-SU3500-1-4GHz-4GB-320GB-15-6-DVD-SM-Vista-Home-Premium-Laptop-Notebook/Product.html

This has been a short introduction to the importance of web video in e-commerce website design I will follow up on this next week with a more in-depth look into web video as a tool for generating the sale.

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.