Asia Connect Technology JSC » Magento eCommerce

What is the best shopping cart?

lydh — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:48:25 +0000

If you try to ask this question on some forum or newsgroup, you will surely get many replies. Everyone will present you his favorite. My first developed online store was created with standard osCommerce platform. After three or four projects, I started to work with CRE Loaded and used it frequently for years. Although it was also an osCommerce fork, it had many advantages. I switched to Magento™ early this year and this is my final choice.

Let’s look at the popularity of those platforms now.

Google™ Trends is a great tool to check some platforms popularity by comparing it to the competition. For my short analysis, I compared:

Here is the graph:

As you can see, osCommerce still remains the most popular eCommerce platform. However, you can notice that this popularity is fading. ZenCart is stable for the past two years. And my previous favorite, CRE Loaded (much better solution than ZenCart in my opinion), is very low. Its popularity is also fading even after their team put great effort into a new website and identity.

Now, take a look at blue line. My prediction is that sometime in Q1 2009, Magento will become most popular eCommerce platform. It will surely kick osCommerce off the throne where that fat duck was sitting for many years. It was about time.

By Tomislav Bilic from Inchoo.net

Installing Magento easy way

lydh — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:45:48 +0000

Those of you who know what SVN is, feel free to skip this article. Those of you who are not familiar with SVN, this is a must-read. If you use standard FTP to upload all Magento files, you may find this process very time consuming. Magento 1.1.8 has over 6.700 files in over 2.200 folders. FTPing can sometimes take few hours on some servers. Let’s look at alternatives.

Both alternatives require SSH access to the server. I’m aware that some low quality webhosting providers do not provide you with SSH info immediately. If you don’t have SSH info, ask webhosting support. If they don’t give it to you, change webhosting provider. Make it a rule, you’ll make your life much easier.

Get yourself familiar with basic UNIX commands first.

Alternative 1: SVN

In the Downloads tab on Magento website, you will notice SVN page link:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/svn

You can see how short this page is. You have 2 commands you can run at SVN. You can chack latest work in progress or you can checkout latest stable version. If you are starting to develop a real project, you will probably want a stable version.

Let’s look at the original command:
svn checkout http://svn.magentocommerce.com/source/branches/1.1

This is probably not the exact command you wish to run on the server. It will place the files in trunk folder. I will assume two things:

You will want the clean code
You will want to specify the folder where you wish Magento to be installed

If those are correct assumptions, you will want to run a command similar to this one:
svn export --force http://svn.magentocommerce.com/source/branches/1.1 shop

svn – This is the command
export - The difference with checkout is that with an export, you get a clean copy of the code, and none of the subversion metadata, so it can’t be used to svn up or make further changes.
–force – you will overwrite all of the folders and files if they exist
http://svn.magentocommerce.com/source/branches/1.1 - this is SVN URL. Leave it intact.
shop - the name of the folder you wish to place the files into. You may set the folders name to your likings.

Read more about SVN at Wikipedia SVN Page and Subversion official site.

Alternative 2: Installing via wget

I will not be very descriptive here. This alternative is very well explained on Magento website in Wiki section:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/groups/227/installing_magento_via_shell_ssh

Both scenarios will only place files. You still need to run web based installer afterward. But, that is another story.

By Tomislav Bilic from Inchoo.net

Related products, Up-sells, Cross-sells in Magento

lydh — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:57:16 +0000

There are three types of product relations in Magento: Up-sells, Related Products, and Cross-sell Products. When viewing a product, Upsells for this product are items that your customers would ideally buy instead of the product they’re viewing. They might be better quality, produce a higher profit margin, be more popular, etc. These appear on the product info page. Related products appear in the product info page as well, in the right column. Related products are meant to be purchased in addition to the item the customer is viewing. Finally, Cross-sell items appear in the shopping cart. When a customer navigates to the shopping cart (this can happen automatically after adding a product, or not), the cross-sells block displays a selection of items marked as cross-sells to the items already in the cart. They’re a bit like impulse buys – like magazines and candy at the cash registers in grocery stores.

Upsells

This is the example of the Up-sell. Ideally, the visitor is supposed to analyze those products as they should be relevant to the one that is just loaded.

By Tomislav Bilic from Inchoo.net

Magento Search Engine Optimization Techniques

admin — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:13:14 +0000

Search Engine Optimization For your Magento Platform based website…

Magento Ecommerce and it’s community is quickly growing. One of the concerns of many Magento users and general web shop owners are SEO. Although Magento is already very SEO friendly when installed, there are a lot of things that can still need to improve upon it. Semaphore SEO Team have researched and discovered a lot techniques to optimize Magento Platform based website.

Some Tips to Optimize Magento Based Website.

By default your Magento install the title “Magento Commerce”. To make it Search Engine Friendly you need to use keywords in your title because search engine put more weight on your title of your magento shop as well as the description too. To make the changes into default title “Magento Commerce”Go to Configuration Tab => Design => HTML Head. Create a good and descriptive title for your website with your related keyword of your products. This title will be used for several non-content pages also without custom title, e.g. “About Us”, “Contact Us” and the “Popular Search Terms”.

Also for your category pages you need to do some changes into your website configuration

For Category go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set “Use categories path for product URL’s to “no”.

To set the details for each category. Go to Catalog => Manage Categories.

The most important fields are: Meta Description, Page Title, URL Key

SEO for Magento Web Sites

admin — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:08:28 +0000

Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform which has many advanced features and is arguably one of the most adaptable e-commerce platforms available and incorporates many SEO features. The approach for optimising an e-commerce site is broadly the same as that for any other web site however there are a few caveats.

Titles and Meta Information

These days many e-commerce platforms allow you have friendly URLs, unique titles, meta information and so on. Even when these items are not available, plug-ins have been developed to add these functionalities. In Magento titles and meta information can be added when adding products.

Content

Creating good quality content is still the key. Avoid using manufacturers descriptions. Images are important in e-commerce sites. As the search engines cannot index the content of images, it is important to use the alt and title attributes of the img tag to add useful descriptive content. Use of headings and subheadings for products types and judicious use of the keywords are all important. Instead of the product code, include more generic keywords after product names. For example on a page about HP colour laser printers, Instead of HP 2700 this could be HP 2700 Color LaserJet Printer.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

Search engine friendly URLs are found in the system settings. Remember to refresh the cache in order to see these working.

Content Duplication

One of the greatest problems with these packages is their ability to display the same page in different categories and also by category, price, etc. This can lead to, non-malacious duplicate content issues. Ideally, one would like to make the site a one-to-one mapping of URLs to pages. How can this be achieved?

Currently, there is a problem with the way in which the URLs are rewritten and duplicate content can occur in many ways.

One temporary solution is to simply stop the search engines from indexing the pages that are likely to cause problems. Copy and paste this code into a robots.txt and upload it to the root directory of the Magento install.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/advanced/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /var/

Disallow: /catalog/

Disallow: /customer/

Allow: /catalogsearch/result/?q
Sitemap: http://www.domain.co.uk/sitemap.xml

This will prevent the directories from being indexed by the search engines and should cut down on the duplication.

Magento – Filter by multiple categories

admin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:12:49 +0000

We know that we can call a block to show products in your home page or in any CMS page. We MUST specify category ID:

{{block type=”catalog/product_list” category_id=”5″
template=”catalog/product/list.phtml”}}

Now, what if I want to show products from multiple categories or simply show all my products?

Well, here’s what I did. I created a custom module to extend some core classes, and I did it this way:

Activate custom module

app/etc/modules/ModuleName_All.xml

true local

Set up the module

Here, we set up our blocks and extend our Colletion class.

app/code/local/ModuleName/Catalog/etc/config.xml





0.1.0





ModuleName_Catalog_Block






ModuleName_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Mysql4_Product_Collection

Listcategories class

app/code/local/ModuleName/Catalog/Block/Product/Listcategories.php

class ModuleName_Catalog_Block_Product_Listcategories
extends Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List{

//same function from Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List
protected function _getProductCollection(){

// get simple product collection
$this->_productCollection = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection();
$this->_productCollection->addAttributeToSelect('*');

// if we receive categories parameter we filter with our custom function addCategoriesFilter
// currently there's a addCategoryFilter, but only accepts 1 category
// if no param is passed, simply show everything
if($this->getCategories()!="")
$this->_productCollection->addCategoriesFilter($this->getCategories());

return $this->_productCollection;
}
}

function addCategoriesFilter

Now, we have to extend Mage/Catalog/Model/Resource/Eav/Mysql4/Product/Collection class and add the addCategoriesFilter function:

app/code/local/ModuleName/Catalog/Model/Resource/Eav/Mysql4/Product/Collection.php

class ModuleName_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Mysql4_Product_Collection
extends Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Mysql4_Product_Collection{

public function addCategoriesFilter($categories){

$alias = 'cat_index';
$categoryCondition = $this->getConnection()->quoteInto(
$alias.'.product_id=e.entity_id AND '.$alias.'.store_id=? AND ',
$this->getStoreId()
);

$categoryCondition.= $alias.'.category_id IN ('.$categories.')';

$this->getSelect()->joinInner(
array($alias => $this->getTable('catalog/category_product_index')),
$categoryCondition,
array('position'=>'position')
);

$this->_categoryIndexJoined = true;
$this->_joinFields['position'] = array('table'=>$alias, 'field'=>'position' );

return $this;

}
}

Now on a CMS page you call your block this way:


{{block type=”ModuleName_catalog/product_listcategories”  categories=”14,16,18″
template=”catalog/product/list.phtml”}}

How to change URL key for category from Global into Storeview

admin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:03:24 +0000

When you use multi-languages, You want category url for each language is difference.
Example:
For category is Electronics
you want in the English it will is www.yourmagentosite.com/electronics
However in the other language( French example) it will be www.yourmagentosite.com/frenchname.
However in magento: the url key for category is always is Global. So when you change it for a storeview, it will be changed for all storeviews.
The url_key in manager attribute only apply for products, so change it will don’t work for category.
So we need to change in the database:
Please goto the eav_attribute and you will see the url_key.
example in magento 1.3. I saw url_key for category is 33, so I run this SQL:
UPDATE eav_attribute SET is_global = ‘0′ WHERE eav_attribute.attribute_id =33
and it work fine.

How to add SSL-support in Magento

admin — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:56:19 +0000

We have got many requests lately about how to add SSL (https)-support in Magento. Here is instructions on how to add SSL-support to a Magento-installation.

Who needs SSL?
SSL is important for stores who want their customers to be sure everything they enter in the Account-area and Checkout-area is encrypted along the way from their browser to your server. Stores with payment-gateways where the customer type in their creditcard-information directly in Magento and is not transferred to a secure page at the creditcard-providers servers will also need SSL.

So what do I need to get started?
First of all, setting up an SSL-certificate can be complicated depending on your hosting-company’s facilities and it can also mess up the Magento-store – so make sure you know what you are doing at any time. We do NOT take any responsibility for the setup, blabla. You know the deal.

So, back to what you need. First of all you of course need a valid SSL-certificate. You also need a dedicated IP-address on the server you’re running Magento on. And last, you need proper access to the Magento-server (SSH-access).

Step 1: Get the SSL-certificate and install it
There are many companies offering SSL-certificated. Some cost a lot of money (those displaying your company’s name in green text in the left side of the URL in the browser – which most Online banks use. The cheaper ones, which are just fine for your needs offer a plain, secure certificated. RapidSSL is a company who sell the cheap ones, which works perfectly well.

Installing the certificate is different on most hosting-systems so this you’d need to check with your hosting-provider or give Google a try.

Step 2: Get your own IP-address
If you’re not very much into servers, Apache and hosting in general I’d recommend you just asked your hosting-provider to give you a dedicated IP address for your particular site. Tell you are going to use SSL and they should know what you’re talking about. Most hosting-providers charge a few extra bucks per month for a dedicated IP address and as long as they’re not talking about tens of dollars every month it should be fine.

One important thing with the dedicated IP address is that it makes thing much easier if you get the IP set up on your domain before you install Magento, as you’d most likely need to move Magento to a new location on the server if you decide to add SSL at a later time.

Step 3: Adding SSL-support in Magento
Ok, this is maybe the easiest part. First you should, depending on your server-setup, symlink your “secure” directory to your “public” directory. SSH into your server and – if you are using DirectAdmin – go to the following folder:
./domains/yourdomain.com/

Now type “ls -l” and you should see a list of the folders. Now type the following command:
“ln -s private_html public_html”

This command might need be run as ‘root’ so make sure you have proper access to your box.

Alternative in DirectAdmin:
If you have the proper permissions in DirectAdmin you can go to Domain Setup -> Click your domain, and then enable “Make private_html symbolic link to public_html”. Click on Save and it should be symlinked automatically.

Now you must log into Magento Admin -> System -> Settings -> Web and make sure the Secure Base URL is set to https://www.yourstore.com (the Unsecure URL must not be changed to https).

Congratulations! If you’ve done everything correct you should now see that you automatically get https in the address-bar on both the Account-pages and Checkout-pages.

From silverthemes.com

Magento and Wordpress

admin — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:48:14 +0000

With the latest release of Magento 1.3, there really is no escaping the fact that Magento is the number one software for your eCommerce site. With it’s flexibility and scalability there is very little you can’t get Magento to do in an eCommerce environment. Granted, the CMS options could be and perhaps should be a bit more flexible compared to the rest, but they do the trick. There only one thing Magento can’t do and that is blog.

Where Magento is becoming the dominant software for eCommerce websites, is WordPress already the most popular blogging software out there, and with good reason. WordPress can be used in a number of different ways but using WordPress as CMS plus blog engine is what is does best.

So if you’re serious about the online presence of your web shop you should want to take a look at combining Magento and WordPress.

Advantages of integrating Magento with WordPress

There are a couple of advantages of integrating Magento with WordPress:

- With WordPress added to your store you give your customers and regular visitors the ability to interact with you more than when you would just offer products.
- Instead of just offering products you have the possibility to offer extra value by providing interesting links of interest in your field, which in effect establishes you or your web shop as an authority on your subject.
- An added WordPress blog gives you the opportunity to work on your search engine optimization (SEO). Linking to your products in right way will not only make sure your visitors know what’s going on and what you find important but the Search Engines will know this just as well! To learn more about SEO visit this article on Magento SEO by Yoast.

Thing to consider when looking at integrating Magento with WordPress

Let’s say you’re still working on releasing your Magento website, or better yet when you have yet to install Magento. You will have to figure out what to do with your url and your installations of Magento and WordPress. Here are a couple of things to consider:

- Depending on the size of your shop you could install your Magento installation in a subfolder (http://www.yourdomain.com/shop) or sub domain even(http://shop.yourdomain.com) and let WordPress handle the root of your domain with it’s static pages and have the blog functionality work as your news section.
- When you have a larger shop you might want to install Magento in the root of your domain and use WordPress as a subfolder called /blog, /news or something of your choosing.
- Try and go for matching themes on your Magento and WordPress installation as much as possible.
- When you really want to create a large community combined with your web shop, do consider a variation of WordPress called BuddyPress. BuddyPress enables you to have your own social network combined with a large site. Although this may seem like a step too far in most cases this is definitely worth checking out when you are building a large online store.

How to integrate WordPress into your Magento store

Straight out of the box Magento can not communicate with WordPress and vice versa. So it’s up to you to make them share information. Right now there are two ways of going about that.

The first is immediately the easiest one. Lazymonk wrote a Magento extension for WordPress integration. This extension allows you to integrate WordPress into your Magento installation if, and only if both your installations are installed in the same database. For installation details check out the plugins page.

The second way of going about this involves you tweaking a bit of code in your Magento Theme. We’ll use the RSS import function of Magento to import the latest articles via your WordPress feed output.

What we need to do is create a file which will contain the code used to import the RSS. Let’s give that file a name something like import_blog.phtml and the following code into that:

< ?php $channel = new Zend_Feed_Rss('http://www.yourdomain/feed'); ?>


< ?php echo $this->__('Latest Articles form the Blog') ?>



< ?php foreach ($channel as $item): ?>
< ?php echo $item->title; ?>
< ?php endforeach; ?>

Place this file in your themes folder so it will look like so: app/design/frontend/default/name_of_your_theme/template/callouts/blog_import.phtml

All you would have to do is call for this newly created file in your Magento theme. Most themes have a column on the right so let’s assume that’s where you want to import your latest blog posts. You would need a code similar to this one:

Be sure to add this code to your catalog.xml located in app/design/frontend/default/name_of_your_theme/layout/catalog.xml

Please note that in the code you can change things like Latest Articles from the Blog to anything you like. Also, for better handling and tracking of your feed you can use Feedburner to deliver your feed. You would then use the feed url specified by Feedburner in the first code.

Adding your Logo to your Magento Store

admin — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:42:09 +0000

Adding your logo to Magento is probably one of the easiest procedures there are.

You will need to have your own logo, whether its a .GIF, .JPG or .PNG. We will recommend you use a .PNG as its transparency works great for the web.

All you will need to do is overwrite the current logo (if your using a .GIF image) in ‘skin/frontend/default/images/logo.gif’.

If you are however, using a .PNG image or any other format then just place it in ‘skin/frontend/default/images/‘.

Once you’ve done that go ahead into your Magento Backend, for example: ‘http://yourdomain.com/admin/‘ and go to System > Configuration. Select the ‘Design‘ tab and scroll down and select the ‘Header‘ tab. You will see something that looks like this:

Change ‘images/logo.gif‘ to ‘images/logo.png‘. Logo Alt Image represents the text that will display when you hover over the logo image. Type in your store name, this is good for Search Engines.

Hope that helped and stay tuned!

From hellothemes.com