These modules will make your ecommerce website run more smoothly, providing a better shopping experience for your customers. Whether you’re in the retail, manufacturing, or hospitality industry, there will be many suitable add-ons available for you to use to improve your websites functionality.

Some Magento modules are free and can be downloaded online, whereas others you have to pay for. Each has its own specific purpose and you will find some more useful than others, depending on what you are looking to do with your ecommerce site. Two popular free add-ons are the Enterprise Suit ERP and Sweet Tooth Rewards. The Enterprise Suite module provides businesses with information such as incoming orders and stock quantity. It also enables website owners to update prices and other product details more efficiently. Sweet Tooth Rewards is another fantastic free extension which creates a loyalty point system for a Magento website. Customers earn points by buying products regularly and can then use these points to purchase more products as they gain more and more. This is a great tool as it attracts new customers and keeps existing customers happy!

Although there are a number of free add-ons available, if you’re looking for something a little more advanced, or that does something specific for your website, you will have to purchase them. Prices vary depending on the type of module that you’re looking to buy. Magento Cybertill integration is a module that automatically fetches your stock levels and updates your website with the correct information, ensuring that your customers can’t purchase something that is out of stock. This is a useful tool as it allows you to see when you are getting low on particular items, and need to re-order them. With Cybertill there are a three ways in which you can integrate it with your Magento site, basic, advanced or completely, with the two latter options you will gain more benefits such as customers and sales integration and other simple object access protocol services.

There are also add-ons which ensure your ecommerce site produces suitable XML product feeds for Google Base, as well as tools that make updating information on your website much easier, such as the Magento Press Release module that allows you to create, control and publish press releases is a simple and efficient manner.

Magento Modules help to create a better shopping experience for customers, as they enhance your website and make it more user-friendly. As well as improving your website for customers, these add-ons help to provide you with knowledge and important information that could help you improve your business in the long run. Although there are a large number of modules on the market, all of which have different purposes, if you can’t quite find the right one for your site, web developing experts are able to make tailor-made ones, ensuring that you enhance your website to its full potential.

Social media is now playing a bigger and bigger role in online promotion, there are literally millions of people using social sites such as Twitter and Facebook everyday in the UK alone for example.  With social media apps running smoothly on smart-phones and tablets, people can now interact with each other on the move and at any time during the day; social media is definitely here to stay and continue growing for many years.

Usually social media was an after-thought for ecommerce websites, something you would ‘bolt-on’ to the side so people could connect.  Our latest Magento site (launching soon) for the superb interior design brand Graham & Green combines social media with ecommerce from the word “go“, here are a few ways you can integrate social media and ecommerce to increase sales and brand awareness:

Facebook Shopping

Did you know that you can now run a full ecommerce website on Facebook?  The average visitor on Facebook looks at over 40 pages and spends many minutes on the social network; if you could filter that devoted traffic into your Company page then not only is your brand reaching a new potential customer but that person could also buy something from your store.  As Facebook fights to keep users on the sites for longer (with add-ons such as Bing’s search bar for example) then social shopping will become more mainstream and trusted we believe.

Twitter Buttons

Make it as easy as possible for people to tweet about the product they want to buy from your ecommerce store with a tweet button.  If you sold amazing shoes for example then make it as simple as possible for someone to tweet about a separate product with a message like: “OMG I so want these amazing pair of butterfly shoes: http://bit.ly/eyaUSW“.  The shortened URL could possibly get clicked on many times and bring many people to your main ecommerce store, if a celebrity tweeted about your product then expect thousands of hits!

Email Sharing

This is a very basic function is allowing people to email themselves and perhaps their friends/family too about the product.  Again this will link to the actual product page with either a full URL or a shortened one with a URL shortening service.  Although used rarely, visitors to the site WILL use an email sharing function like this eventually.  If you make the visitor agree to be sent promotional materials then this function could help build up your email marketing campaign.

Apps

If you have a brand that people will come back to again and again (for example a trendy ‘Male Clothing’ brand) then an app for smart-phones and tablet computers may be a good option.  Some ecommerce platforms now integrate with mobile sized shopping apps and allow people to purchase on the move, this is great for repeat custom but hard to get new customers on board with.  Getting people to download these apps is a PR agencies job; our partners at JPR Marketing have some great viral marketing ideas to get Apps on to people’s smart phones including a free competition entry for app downloaders and quick, personalised App access from the end of the normal checkout process using saved payment details.

Here at Juno we believe that the right technology can overcome even the biggest competition and save time, effort and money.

Our developers have been researching and testing Magento ecommerce sites and have now produced the perfect framework for our latest ecommerce clients.  The advanced Magento framework is ideal for site visitors, search engine optimisation (SEO) and back-end management.

The first website to take advantage of our new Magento technology is DiecastStars.com, seller of Diecast Models.  Diecast models are scale miniatures of real cars, planes and motorbikes, the most detailed models have tiny engines inside, opening doors and steering wheels that work.

We encourage anyone to have a look around the site and notice these key technical features:

Filterable Navigation - Specific model cars can be quickly narrowed down with dynamic, filterable navigation.  For example you can filter down results with a path such as this: [Cars > BMW > Blue] and find all the blue BMW model cars in stock.  Instead of creating millions of empty pages the filterable navigation dynamically misses out any filters that will provide zero product results.  The smart filters also use standardised canonical tags to ensure that every unique page of filtered results is indexed by Google without confusion or repetition.

Perfect URL structure – Forget parameters, symbols and masses of hyphens, our Magento URL’s perfectly describe the page’s content and structure.  Category sub-folders are used to split up and categorise the products giving descriptive URL’s such as [http://www.diecaststars.com/diecast-model-cars/bmw/blue] for the blue, BMW model car result for example.  This clean URL structure works wonders for on-site SEO and Google has very quickly indexed the entire site.  These URL’s also help with click-through-rates on the SERPs and become a unified structure to perform link building on top of.

Massive Search Bar and Navigation Bar – The more ways people can find products the better.  With a massive search bar and extensive navigation drop down we cater to all site users from window shoppers, category searchers and very specific model searchers.

Page Caching – Magento is famously slow for the amount of PHP scripting it does server side and each second counts when it comes to making a sale.  We have finally implemented a foolproof method of caching Magento which doesn’t effect the dynamic shopping baskets, see how quick the site performs on a regular landing page: http://www.diecaststars.com/autoart-models/

Secret Touches – A few of our secret touches are used to ensure Google indexes as much of the site as possible and each product’s data is used as much as possible to help the overall site out.

Resulting traffic from this work from the word go has produced impressive graphs such as this one:

The site has yet to enter the top 3 results for it’s main keywords, the SEO team say traffic will top over 1000 visits per day in about 3 months times once their work takes hold in Google.

If you would like to discuss our Magento ecommerce solutions then call us now on 0845 544 1766, we look forward to hearing from you…

One of the major challenges that I have faced so far is the templating system of Magento. It is different to systems I have used in the past but makes a lot more sense in the fact that everything fits together the way it should.

You can really see that Magento has been clearly thought out and developed in a way that helps the system fit together nicely.

I will be making regular posts about my progress with Magento and how I am using it at Juno Web Design to create cutting edge websites.

Magento eCommerce

Magento eCommerce

I have just started here at Juno Web Design and already I can see a great deal of WordPress and Magento development going on. Something which I too hope to pick up whilst i’m here. It has become clear that Content Management Systems seem to be very popular for website development at the moment and the fact they can be customised to their needs is important.

I hope to be very involved with new Magento and WordPress sites over the next few months and hope that my development here at Juno Web Design in Nottingham will really help my career and Juno develop into something great.

I will be posting more about my development here at Juno Web Design in Nottingham soon and hope you will come back to read it.

Over the next few weeks, we will be divulging our hard earned Magento secrets in an attempt to resuscitate the Magento online community and provide a training ground for any one looking to venture in to the Mangetoverse!

Visit the PHP coding section of our forum to ask any Magento related questions now and we will help you as soon as possible.

Here is the latest design which has been agreed and will be implemented on the site swiftly.

Magento Web Design | Sunglasses Save