The long-awaited Magento 2.0 was recently released for general availability. The all-new platform solves many of the scalability and swatch display limitations inherent in the current platform. Extension developers are busy updating their code to fit the new API for Magento 2.0. Merchants with simple, unextended installations can upgrade now, but most Magento stores are more complex and may require a longer term strategy before upgrading.
“Today we announced the general availability of our next generation open source digital commerce platform, Magento 2.0. The new platform empowers brands, retailers, and businesses across B2C and B2B industries to quickly and cost-effectively deliver engaging omnichannel shopping experiences. Magento 2.0 also offers enhanced performance and scalability, new features to boost conversion rates, and business agility and productivity improvements. The new platform also builds on our open source heritage and offers unmatched flexibility and innovation opportunities to our global ecosystem of partners and developers. Two new products based on this powerful platform are available for download today: Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 and Magento Community Edition 2.0.
Open, Flexible Architecture
It features a modular code base that enables easier customization, faster time-to-market, and greater deployment flexibility to public or private cloud environments. More extensive and efficient APIs allow you to connect and operate at scale with any third party solution, and theming capabilities make building site variations for new product lines or geographies easier than ever. A wide range of turnkey extensions also enable fast and affordable enhancements to your store.
Engaging Shopping Experiences
Creating engaging, seamless and personalized customer experiences across any device is central to the Magento 2.0 platform. New responsive design reference themes give you a fast way to create sites that supports anytime, anywhere sales. And you can share your products in a more immersive way through integrated video. An all-new checkout is easier to customize and further improves conversion rates by minimizing steps and required information. You can also offer convenient, one-click account creation to save customer profiles for future purchases.
Enhanced Business Agility and Productivity
Magento Commerce is also revolutionizing the merchant experience, enabling you to operate more efficiently and handle rapid growth, without scaling up your team. The new Admin panel design offers a streamlined, consumer-like interface that saves time when managing day-to-day tasks and is intuitive for new team members to learn. It is also touch-friendly so you can make updates or track sales while on-the-go.
Improved business tools empower you to continuously optimize your operations to drive growth. You can now effortlessly customize and save views in the Admin panel to enable quick access to information critical to your business. Setting up new products is also faster, with a step-by-step product creation tool and product import capabilities that are 4x faster than before.
Enterprise-grade Scalability and Performance
The Magento platform has been supercharged to offer over 50% faster page load times across many catalog and checkout pages to help you delight your customers and improve conversion rates. It pre-integrates Varnish to cache page content for faster performance and optimizes code and images for fast loading. Your team will be delighted too, with improved Admin performance and support for more concurrent updates. Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 also delivers enterprise-grade scalability and high availability with standalone master databases for key subsystems along with multiple slave databases.
Secure Payments
Additionally, the Magento platform comes with tight out-of-the-box integrations with PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.net payment gateways. Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 also integrates with WorldPay and CyberSource. All versions provide improved security and the ability to pursue the easiest level of PCI compliance, depending on the selected payment method.
Easier Maintenance and Upgrades
And finally, this modern, modular architecture reduces the complexity and cost of maintaining your site and it futureproofs your investment by simplifying upgrades. This means you can easily incorporate innovative functionality as it is released by Magento Commerce on a quarterly basis to drive higher sales and greater efficiency.”
Sounds wonderful, Magento! Can we start migrating all of our clients to Magento 2.0? – Not quite just yet.
As a Magento partner, we’re very excited about Magento 2.0 and we’re ready to help you get there as soon as it makes sense. For most merchants, Magento 2.0 is not ready for prime time, simply because most of the extensions in use are not yet ready to play with 2.0.
By Tom Deutsch, VP Creative Services at InteractOne
Planning a Successful Magento Migraton or Upgrade
Making the decision to upgrade your site to the latest Magento version or migrating from another platform can be a great idea for your eCommerce business. With any complex technological decision, however, it is best to approach the decision well-armed with information and confidence in in your Magento partner.
Pooled from our experience, we can share some of the common elements of some of the most successful Magento migrations/upgrades we’ve been involved in. While we’d like to take complete credit for the success stories, the truth is that your expectations, preparation and actions are as important to the project as our qualifications and expertise.
Here are the four most important considerations to make when implementing your Magento migration or upgrade.
1. Your Plan for a successful Magento migration
We know what you’re thinking, “My plan? You’re the Magento experts, aren’t you supposed to be the ones with the plan?”
We’ll get to that later.
As the merchant, you have to have a clear idea about the steps involved before you commit to a course of action. It’s also important to know and list out the important features you currently have that you wish to preserve. You must also be open to changing some of your processes and legacy features, especially with respect to a Magento migration or upgrade from a legacy or custom platform.
We promise change will be worth it and easier on your wallet.
Flexibility is a top-line requirement when migrating or re-platforming. Don’t put a brick wall between some internal operational habits that might seem very important or immutable and “the way Magento does things.” Magento works very well along its designed paths – which have a lot of extensions and huge flexibility. But if your requirements are inflexible, you are asking for a lot of added customization and moolah.
2. The Price
Don’t get hung up on fixed price deals. We get it; a fixed
price is attractive. It seems like a great deal that you can budget for. Unfortunately, we know from plenty of experience that you can also be burned by it.
Essentially, a fixed price is a bet placed by both parties. The seller is betting he can deliver services for less than the agreed price and the buyer is betting that he will be happy with the service. Rarely do both parties win this bet when it comes to major website migration and upgrades. InteractOne has completed dozens of projects begun by other developers who promised a price and had no idea of the scope of the work they had undertaken. Sometimes they just stop answering phone calls.
What’s the answer? Obviously, you do not want a vague, open-ended vague project without a budget. The solution to completing a successful Magento migration within a reasonable budget is careful planning, based on a detailed but flexible set of specifications (see Point #1!) agreed to by you and your developer.
3. The Team
What are your in-house capabilities? Design? PHP programming? Server administrator? These are all wonderful capabilities to have in-house, but the question is: how many Magento sites has that resource helped to migrate, build or launch? The hard truth is that a cobbled together team – in-house capabilities plus a Magento freelancer – will end up with a cobbled project.
Make sure your migration/upgrade team includes at LEAST:
Magento certified back end developer
Magento certified front-end developer
Project manager or support team
Make sure your migration/upgrade team has experience with:
Magento server configuration experience
Thorough knowledge of the Magento API
A rigorous process for development staging
Even if they are not experienced in Magento, your in-house development resources can still represent a significant cost savings for your Magento migration, if tasks are planned, delegated and staged carefully. An in-house designer can save your company a lot of money during your Magento migration by providing well-organized branding guidance, powerful images and even mockups if they are familiar with the structure of your chosen Magento theme.
Similarly, in-house PHP or other technical resources can take on responsibilities that their training and know-how permits. This is especially true if your Magento development partner uses agile project management, wherein specific tasks can be assigned to your in-house team with everyone working safely in a version-controlled development environment.
4. THE Plan for a successful Magento migration
The planning step is very difficult and is often overlooked. At InteractOne, it’s the only way we’ll begin a project. We’ve learned from experience that the time we invest in planning is the most transformative and effective way to start a successful Magento migration or upgrade.
We outline, estimate and agree to specific functionality, requirements, customizations, extensions, responsibility and process.
Insist on the total transparency that a comprehensive plan can provide; you don’t want $urprises.
Bottom line for a successful Magento migration, if you know what you’re getting into, are smart with your money, have an experienced Magento team and a game plan everyone agrees on, you’re likely not to fail with your website migration or upgrade.
Guess what? InteractOne is an experienced Magento partner! Contact us to start your successful Magento migration or upgrade process today.
Webinar from InteractOne, Migrating to Magento 2: Procedures, Practice and Pitfalls. InteractOne’s President and CEO, Brian Dwyer discusses what’s new in Magento 2 and plans for making the migration work. Ryan Street, one of four global trainers for Magento U discusses the migration process with tips for creating a migration plan, testing the migration and finally performing the migration via live demo. In addition, Ryan covers some best-practice examples, case studies and obstacles to avoid.
Watch below the presentation with InteractOne’s CEO and President, Brian Dwyer and Magento U Trainer Ryan Street.
There were questions we missed and did not get to during the presentation. We would like to address those here.
1. Can you expand on how Magento 2 is 52% faster when adding to cart?
InteractOne: “Magento has made many code and database improvements in order to enhance performance for Magento 2. Please refer to the webinar recording below for additional information on performance.”
2. A good chunk of the data that would need to be migrated over include product content, customer information and order information. Can we simply export product and customer information from our instance of Magento 1 and import it into Magento 2?
InteractOne: “Using the data migration tool will almost certainly be easier than exporting / importing from Magento 1 to Magento 2. Exporting / Importing is a very laborious and tedious task plus there is no good way to handle incremental updates…hence Magento providing the data migration tool.”
3. Will the soap and xmlrpc apis change in Magento 2?
InteractOne: “Yes the soap and xmlrpc apis change in Magento 2. The new APIs are also more efficient, making it possible to return all the data associated with a business object (such as customer, order, etc.) in one call. And ‘integration-style’ APIs can create-update-delete-retrieve data based on fields common to Magento and external systems in one call, which is a more efficient way to integrate with external systems.”
4. Is it easier to just export products and customers since extensions won’t come over anyway.
InteractOne:: “The data migration tool is certainly easier to use that trying to export/import the customer and order data. The Magento 2 extensions will need to be migrated separately.”
5. What is Magento 2’s current status? Is it ready for production now?
Ryan Street: “Magento claims the first Magento 2 general release will be this quarter.”
6. When will the Magento 2 upgrade be launched?
Ryan Street: “The Magento 2 upgrade will be launched in 4th quarter. That’s this quarter.”
7. Will Magento 2 still sync with MicroBiz?
InteractOne: “Looks like MicroBiz is the provider of that connection so you will want to ask them when they will have an updated version of their connector for Magento 2.”
8. Are there any user manuals/videos for Magento 2 for more instructions?
Ryan Street: “Right now, there are some Magento 2 developer videos/manuals available through Magento, but no user guide videos currently. There will be user manuals coming 1st quarter.”
We were so pleased that Ryan Street came out to teach us and co-host our webinar, Migrating to Magento 2: Procedures, Practices and Pitfalls. With so many questions and concerns over Magento 2, we hope we were able to bring some piece of mind and knowledge to business owners and developers.
By Tom Deutsch, VP Creative Services at InteractOne
Visual Merchandising is not a new term among retailers. Have you seen an episode of PBS’s Mr. Selfridge? Based in the early 1900’s, the show spends a lot of air time showcasing Selfridge’s cutting edge merchandising innovations.
In today’s retail world, visual merchandising still plays a critical role in overall sales. Trained merchandisers (the folks “behind the curtain” strategically placing items and watching how customers shop) have product placement down to a science.
Retail merchandisers focus on store themes, overall coherence, interior design, lighting, store layout, displays, colors, and that’s just the physical part. There are scores of people also trained in the Psychology of retail shopping.
For example, watch this quick video interviewing Ken Nisch, a retail design expert on his store design with North Face.
The take-away here is that there are trained and experienced people designing and strategically planning the beautiful stimulating brick and mortar stores. Why are we not actively applying their methods to our eCommerce stores?
In the eCommerce world, merchandising has largely been ignored.
Lost somewhere between early innovators of the first decade out to reinvent the world of business and the initial reluctance of many old-school retailers to embrace online selling, merchandising fell to the wayside.
For a lot of online retailers the defacto merchandisers are marketers, designers, and product planners. This leads to haphazard product presentation and grouping for the simple elements of a promotion, not to mention an annoying chore arising out of Magento’s “related products” feature.
E-tailers who utilize merchandising professionals benefit from a shift away from the practical and toward the strategic.
With eMerchandising, merchants move beyond standard A/B testing and analytic research to increase conversion rate optimization. Not that there’s anything wrong with A/B testing and analytic research, but most retailers don’t have optimized processes in place, nor do they have the amount of traffic needed to take a purely data-driven approach to product planning and store design.
Site analytics can tell you a tremendous amount, but they can’t make decisions.
The “human” element, as applied by a merchandising professional, does not simply rely on intuition, opinion or habit. Instead of only relying on analytics, merchandisers will consider product mix, customer profiles, competitive pricing and customer behavior- on a strategic level – in making tactical decisions about design and user interface (UI). Those merchandising decisions can then be tested and optimized for a much higher conversion rate.
The Customer Connection
In the gradual process of business maturation and rediscovering merchandising, eCommerce has brought the practice closer to the customer. Forward thinking eCommerce merchandising includes creative, in-depth content, easy to navigate pages and inventive interactive customer interaction through videos and state of the art photography.
Magento merchants especially have a strong merchandising advantage built in the platform’s uber-flexible product categories, attributes and configurable products. Time to put them to use!
Building an eCommerce website in Magento can seem simple. The basic software and an array of attractive templates are available for free. What could go wrong? In addition, there are no shortage of freelance designers that assume that because they can create a custom design and piece together code that they can put together a savvy Magento presence. A developer who has devised a quick-fix to a small problem to the site, may unknowingly cause other problems that can cause the whole site to cascade into disarray.
Why those Unfinished and Abandoned Magento Site Designs happen
Magento is a powerful, but very complex software tool, development and integration cannot be left to chance. A number of Magento users came to interactOne because the site they had started to build hasn’t been finished or simply doesn’t work- for any number of reasons. As a long-time Magento Certified Partner, InteractOne has the experience and technical know-how to diagnose and repair problems with your unfinished and abandoned Magento site design, navigation, database, code, search engine visibility, or third-party extensions. We have worked with all types of Magento code manipulations and have been able to successfully complete projects that were left in varying states of disrepair.
Does this sound familiar?
Issue 1
“We paid a developer thousands of dollars to develop our eCommerce site. Months later, it’s not completed and we can no longer reach them.”
Issue 2
“Our Magento site is complete, but no one on our staff knows how to manage the site.”
Issue 3
“The site build-out has been completed, but we have no idea how to migrate our data from the old site to the new one.”
Issue 4
“Our Magento site design will not work and many components are missing.”
Other situations that may be a cause for your site to sit idle is that a one-time employee who was your eCommerce site leader is no longer with your organization. Transition of any type can be stressful for any organization, furthering the issue is the fact that your internet sales are contingent upon a smooth transition forward. InteractOne can partner with your team to conduct in-depth training for your new and existing team members to ensure that your organization continues to receive the full benefit of your Magento eCommerce site. Training can take place in person, online/webinar or correspondence.
Let interactOne’s Experience get Your Site Back on Track
Regardless of what caused your Magento eCommerce site to go idle, InteractOne’s experienced team of developers can come alongside your company and get you back on track! Let’s get your unfinished and abandoned Magento site design back on track!
Contact interactOne to discuss your distress story and learn more about how we will help.
Magento 2012 Update Survey Indicates that Merchants Choose Magento
Merchants choose Magento is the headline news in the October 2012 eCommerce survey, from UK developer Tom Robertshaw, found 35,218 sites in the Alexa Top 1 Million, finds Magento, with a 23% share of the market, is the leading eCommerce software platform. This is a 4% increase since the February 2012eCommerce survey. Equating to 8,087 sites, Magento has seen growth in every single edition since the survey began 2 years ago. It sees a 20% growth rate since the last survey in February alone.
Magento isn’t the only one. The popularity of Zen Cart continues to increase, up 12 percent to 4,451 sites. Both Magento and Zen Cart have released new versions since the February survey.
While both VirtueMart and osCommerce take a dip in numbers. Conversely, both PrestaShop and OpenCart see significant increases.
With the constant updates to firewalls and security software, online merchants can grow to feel that their IT coordinators are keeping them safe. Unfortunately, several common vulnerable areas are directly in the Magento administrator’s control.
We are used to thinking about and protecting against viruses or other automated, large-scale threats. The concept of a hacker, an individual sitting in a chair somewhere, may seem quaint, but the threat is as prevalent as ever and requires vigilance.
Hackers use automated tools that search for common names frequently used for administration panels. After locating an administration login on a website, they’ll repeatedly try to gain access by using software that can guess thousands of possible username/password combinations. To help make your Magento Store more secure, follow these two simple pieces of advice.
Disguise Your Admin
The Magento default administration console is called “admin” but it can be changed easily. You need to use an FTP program to access your site. In the app/etc/ folder you’ll see a file named “local.xml”.
Locate the following code near the bottom of the file:
You’ll notice in the frontName tag there’s the current path to your administration console. In this example and by default, it is named “admin”.
Change it to something that you’ll remember but that no one else will guess – the important point is that it is no longer “admin”. In this example, we’ll rename it from “admin” to “interactone”.
<frontName><![CDATA[interactone]]></frontName>
Pay attention to what you edit. Only replace the word “admin” and don’t change anything else on the line. Your finished code will look like this:
Save the file and upload it to app/etc. You will now be able to access your store’s admin by going to /interactone instead of /admin. Going to /admin will result in a 404 error (or “page not found”), both for you and for the hapless hacker!
B3 C@refu1
The second tip should be used with anything that you do online: don’t use an easy-to-guess password! Hackers are already on to using numbers instead of letters, so don’t think for a second that “4dm1n” is a clever or secure password. Even “P4ssw0rd” is already on most brute-force lists that hackers use to guess passwords. A truly secure password should contain at least one capital letter, one symbol and one number. It should also be at least 8 characters long. An example of a strong password would be “Z5ydK#v!Sg”. It may be difficult to type, but no one will guess it, plus you can employ a password manager (RoboForm is one we like) to remember even the strongest passwords and give you secure access.
In any retail environment, a slice of your traffic will be nothing more than browsers. They have no money, no way to pay or intent to purchase. They’re just looking. The problem is, most online retailers overestimate the size of this slice. Not everyone who leaves your site without purchasing is a deadbeat. Were they scared away by your registration process? Did they get lost? Did they need to see more product details? Dismantle the barriers and watch the number of abandonments shrink.
What Environment Have You Created?
If online commerce were simple, we’d all be on a beach drinking pina coladas through rolled-up cash. Unfortunately, simply building a website isn’t enough. Thoughtful consideration must be given to design and navigation structure. Skeptical? As any sales experts will tell you, every purchase is made within an environment; great products, price and service will not overcome a poorly designed environment. In the late-90s, we recall trolling around on a government surplus auction site. The products were desirable, if you could bear to dig through the multiple levels of sub-menus, reference numbers and category lists. Because of the confusing navigation, auction closing prices on this site were usually lower than market value, evidenced by the items selling a few days later on Ebay at a much higher price. The point: an unpleasant and puzzling site will choke your stream of prospective customers, eliminating all but a brave few. What do people do when they are confused? They hesitate, they lose confidence and they begin to disengage. Intent to purchase fades with each unsure click. If your shopper is frustrated or disoriented, they’ll leave. This has been proved and quantified during the last century of brick and mortar retail but it applies even more acutely online, where entry and exit are nearly effortless.
Price functions on a similar curve. More shoppers will tolerate clumsy navigation if your prices are discounted deeply. The danger online, however, is that your bargain-basement competitor will build a more elegant site than yours. After all, building a good site does not necessarily cost more than building an awful site. However, using price to control demand is an obvious and direct hit to your bottom line.
What Are Your Elements of Design
Effective online retail design utilizes visual coherence and simplicity rather than decorative or striking elements. Many non-retail sites, for example architectural firms, generally aren’t based on use – their aim is to display and impress. Inversely, Amazon.com is an online retail behemoth for a host of reasons, but edgy site design isn’t one of them.
That doesn’t mean your retail site should be the equivalent of a pair of tan slacks. Retailers can and should build a sense of brand identity and consistency using well-chosen and applied design elements.
Dimensionality is one technique that adds interest and is often employed in menu bars – layering, mimicking stacks of paper or ribbons give shoppers subtle visual cues that can aid navigation by more clearly identifying different pages, functions or operational areas within the site. A light hand is best; brash or overly emphasized elements fall flat.
A subtle shift in a clicked element is a great use of JavaScript animation, whereas rotating menus and fly-outs could either distract or repulse.
Well-designed icons impart meaning, engagement and brand identification. Overuse of icons or decoupling them from text can lead to a phenomenon called “mystery meat” in which your visitors have to guess what that button does.
Similarly, a few speech balloons might be a good thing, but 10?
What did I click?
Good retail site design walks the line between giving obvious information and giving too much; If a page only has two or three buttons, simply changing the color of one when it is clicked is not going to do the trick. Design for the sake of decoration leads to clutter. Web design elements are best employed when they allow your shoppers to see where they are, what they can access, how to get there. Further, they ought to find what they want easily, whether or not they have to go to another page.
Reward your shoppers with great, solid design and they will reward you in turn.
InteractOne designs and builds e-commerce websites, with a whole-site approach that emphasizes content, SEO and capturing meaningful data. In business since 1998, InteractOne scales its approach to fit the needs of a range of clients from start-ups to Fortune 500 stalwarts.
We all know the frustration of receiving the dreaded “blue screen of death” on our computers when running an application. Most times that error is brought on by inconsistencies in the software or the hardware just isn’t processing the information efficiently. Equally damaging is when, as a retailer making a footprint on the internet, your site gets hung up as a customer is trying to make a purchase. The slow Magento response time will cause even the most patient shopper to hit “refresh” numerous times, close the browser and restart, or worse yet- leave the site altogether.
Unfortunately, the problems may only present themselves on your end well after they have been painfully obvious to the consumer- costing you time and sales. As with any computer or program, software bottlenecks are bound to happen- but ensuring your site runs at peak performance is a paramount concern.
Don’t suffer from an underperforming slow Magento site any longer.
If you are experiencing slow Magento site and performance problems on your Magento eCommerce site, InteractOne can do a complete review of your Hosting, Code, and core systems to evaluate, expose problems and restore speed and functionality to your site.
In September 2011 a client from Chicago made an initial contact to InteractOne (more of a plea for help) because their Magento site would not interface with their internal networks and would not process payments correctly. An Abandoned Magento Site Design.
Not long after that, another company from Columbus (Ohio) made a similar contact. They had paid well over 5-figures for a design to their site (which was a Magento Community Edition deployment) that they had spent close to a year on. The designer they hired published what seemed to be a nice looking page for them; the problem being they compromised the core code of the CE installation which would hinder future projects and prevent them from upgrading to newer releases all together.
There was another instance of a company using a non-Magento certified developer that made a nice design, but clearly didn’t understand that a custom wire frame design is possible within Magento- BUT, if it isn’t designed properly that customization would become cost-prohibitive quickly. The site, as it turned did not get developed and the client spent money that they should not have spent.
Unfortunately there are some (very talented) designers out there that, since they know HTML and have done some eCommerce sites before, feel that they are experienced enough to tackle a Magento installation. Designing Magento sites is not something a designer can do while training themselves during a project, and what usually happens is 5-figures into the project the designer may concede that they are in over their heads and the client is left shuffling on how to make the best of a bad situation.
Yes, the development costs may be more initially, but in the long run- the rate you would pay a Certified Magento Partner to design your site is invariably the amount of training that is invested in the programmers. Don’t get caught in the trap of surfing the internet for a cheap or flashy design from a company that hasn’t been properly trained. Things “may” turn out OK- but our experience tells us that there is a good possibility you’ll end up paying for the site twice. Don’t let your site be abandoned in design
