Contrary to what you may think, there are actually more than three people in the Magento community. Web resources like Magento Commerce provide a fair indicator of what one might expect out of the Magento community. Of course, you can also always read up on our meetups if you really wanna see where the Magento nerds really congregate…
Of course, there are plenty of events going around in this world that honor Magento. If you read our posts below, you can see some of our stuff written about the Magento Imagine conference which is held each year. Many of the posts below will also serve to help you with common Magento issues (see ‘Top 7 Reasons You Might Be Experiencing Magento Slow-Down,’ for example).
So where else do Magento folks congregate, if not in person? Well, there are many other places on the Internet, such as the Magento Expert Forum, where our kind Magento users who are constantly banging their heads against the walls will be posting their complaints and questions.
But aside from the people who are simply using Magento, you can also read the answers from many experienced Magento developers such as… ourselves.
Magento’s one of the best e-commerce tools around, but remember that at times it is a tough nut to crack. If you’re ever having issues, don’t hesitate to go see the various Magento forums for support… And of course, if you need true support, you can always contact the experts here at Hara Partners directly. We know our stuff… Otherwise, we wouldn’t have all those certifications.
So now you know that the Magento community is an all-great, all-embracing collective, why not jump into some of our events, and visit the forums for advice whenever you need it?
With the change in the trend over the past couple of years, a lot of people are moving towards e-commerce and can be seen opting for them. However, one of the most crucial as well as critical things that need to be understood is the fact that only the setting up of a web-based store that offers development services is not going to be enough. In order to boost performance, it needs to be upgraded and updated on a regular basis. Therefore this post is dedicated to providing web optimization tricks and strategies that are backed by Magento that can change the way things work for you regarding online dealing:
Magento- Bridging Gaps Between Merchants and Crowds
According to the head of payments and strategies of Magento, understanding the crowd and being aware of their preferences is of significant importance in the light of the current business environments. Magento is not an unknown name when it comes to the platforms and development platforms that is estimated to be handling a merchandise volume of worth a huge 155 billion dollars. The facts make it pretty evident that if you partner with Magento their experience and knowledge will benefit you greatly. The partnership comes with many benefits of which being able to download extensions and being able to connect to the Magento Marketplace are two prominent ones.
Top e-commerce website navigation: intro to Magento
For building an online store, Magento is considering an as best open resource, which is helpful for providing omnichannel experiences. In 2008, it is released first, now it has grown continually and as a result, it becomes a part of the famous e-commerce platform.
If you are facing problem regarding Magento login functionality issue then you need to fix it as soon as possible. The login issue faces both people that are admin back end and customer facing front end. The reason occur when we resolved it. This issue also known as the looping issue, as the screen redirects the same with the help of password and username.
Magneto is your first choice if you are running an online store due its quality, flexibility, credibility and customization. It is a huge platform giving you a proper commerce base. If you want to have a credible commerce platform you just need to buy a Magento website.
Magento is an e-commerce platform that provides solutions to engaging customers online and expanding business. Their cost-effective platform allows the user to concentrate on their store or website content, while Magento works in the background to help the user enhance the look, feel, and functionality of such.
Why use Magento?
As Magento helps the user enhance the feel of their site, the user can concentrate on the content, and entice a visitor back to the site. Their flexible and scaled-to-size solutions allow well-placed management of this.
Why Google Analytics AND Magento together? What can they do for you?
Here’s the link. You will have seen in part one how Google Analytics performs with analyzing website traffic and statistics, and how it can be utilized to drive traffic and people to your site. Also noticeable is how Analytics tracks the location of a visit, and how much time they spend on the site.
With Magento a simple solution to focus on expanding your site/store/other business, Google Analytics can be used to great effect – to analyze what for, where, when, and perhaps even why and how visitors are coming to your site – and how? Through their cell or laptop? That may make a difference as to how long they will spend, as browsing or searching must be streamlined no matter the device.
Information must also be easily accessible. In this regard, Google Analytics cannot track, but it will show how long people spend on the site, so if the time is too long, that could be a signal to readjust the accessibility of information.
As Magento can provide the tools to succeed online, so can Google Analytics do likewise to make sure everything is laid out exactly the way it needs to be.
Anyone who’s even vaguely familiar with web design probably knows how important a theme is for their website. A theme has largely two types of users: the audience-type user who sees the theme from the aesthetical and usability perspective; and the creator-type who goes through an additional layer of the theme experience by taking part in building the Magento themes.
For the audience-type user, a store experienced is defined by the store’s capability to fulfill his or her tactical and emotional demands. But the second user who must fill the creator role might be looking more for efficiency—i.e., the ability to complete a set of developmental tasks which will determine the store experience.
Since designers already have the graphical end of things covered, we’ve compiled a list of tips that will help you with maximizing your work-flow efficiency in Magento.
1. Maximum Customization Power
Magento allows you to update the look and feel of your store in the category and product level, which gives you more power to market and promote the product (in addition to granting you a store with endlessly unique design).
Have you ever imagined presenting each product in its own customized product info page? Magento lets you do just that, by providing you a qucik way to customize your product presentation in a per-product and per-category basis
2. Multiple Magento Themes
Magento allows you to load multiple themes at once, allowing you to swap between a default store design and temporary event/season-specific ones—all at the command of a few key strokes.
3. Uninterrupted Workflow
Thanks to the help of Magento’s fully object-oriented programming, all modules are immediately accessible via template tags from any template files. And because Magento comes feature-rich straight out of the box, you’ll never again have to be dependent on a programmer to finish all the simplest tasks for you.
Magento also thrives on an extensive network of knowledgeable community members that include the official Magento team, so you’ll never have to think twice about where to go for guidance once you need it.
4. Minimize Debugging Time
Have you ever wasted precious hours looking for the unclosed markup scrutinized by your validator?
The validator may tell you what’s wrong, but it never seems to be able to tell you what’s happening.
Magento’s modular backend brings with it a modular template system that minimizes the amount of (X)HTML you need to handle at once. That means less fuss for you so that you could focus on the truly important things in life.
If you’re looking to upgrade Magento with a few useful extensions, we can provide a rundown for you in terms of which ones might be useful for Magento performance optimization. All of the software mentioned below can be set up to work concurrently on a Magento installation.
Using APC as an OPCode Cache Module
Starting with the PHP 5.5 branch, Zend Optimizer+ is directly built into Magento. However, if you’re running an earlier version, you’ll want to install an OPCode Caching module. Our favourite is Alternative PHP Cache – APC.
PHP is an interpreted language. This means that each time a PHP snippet is requested, it reads all of the files and “compiles” them into something that the server can execute: OpCode. OpCode caching caches this generated OpCode, leading to decreased timings when repeat requests are made.
Magento often has hundreds of included files in a single request meaning some real savings can be made, which can mean great things for
OpCaching with APC is system-wide. There is no need to set up Magento to use it—PHP will use it by default.
Memcached
Memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but originally intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. Simply put, Memcached alleviates Magento’s heavy hits on your database by caching data away from it.
You’ll need to install Memcache (a PHP extension), and install Memcached – the Memcache Daemon on your server. Across a load balanced / multi server solution, Memcached only has to reside on one server, and the others can all use it. This provides a centralised source for cache management.
Varnish
Varnish is a caching reverse proxy. It’s actually also a http accelerator, it can act as a load balancer and a fail-over system. As a basic concept, it will cache the generated HTML from a page, and serve that to a user rather than making a call to the Magento Framework. This leads to some pretty speedy load times. Magento is very slow to initialise, and if you want your first byte speed down to anything under one second, let alone under half a second – then full page caching is the only way to achieve this.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, your store should already be fast and you should be looking to reduce server resource—however, Varnish is a great way to reduce your speed to < 300ms.
Varnish requires at least a single page view in order to prime the cache, so it means that your un-cached performance still needs to be high. There are cache-warmers out there (crawlers that will run over your site and prime the cache ready for customer visits) – but we’ve not found any we’d recommend thus far.
Usually, Magento stores fall into two categories, and these will give you an idea of how to configure Varnish.
If your site has relatively low traffic, then you’re going to have a bigger trade-off. Either your TTLs need to be high to ensure a greater hit-rate, or you get up-to-date content. It’s a fine line between them – obviously you can’t have aggressive caching, but frequent changes to content. They don’t play well together. You could, in theory run some sort of cache primer, but I’d expect that it wouldn’t be worth it due to having potentially thousands of URLs.
Magento’s Community edition is offered for free. It was created as open source software. That means anyone can download this edition without having to pay.
Additionally, users are free to make changes with it in order to meet their needs. Millions of users around the world have taken advantage of the features that the free edition provides. In fact, many of them have already developed extensions and adopted other customization techniques.
Small businesses benefit the most with this free edition. They use the basic features and take part in development through the site forums. Many tips and tricks have also been discovered to make the Community Edition even more powerful.
Magento Enterprise Edition
There are many Community Edition users that think the platform is not enough. Some users need additional advanced features while others are looking for more customization options that the free version cannot provide.
The Magento Enterprise Edition was created to address this concern. This platform actually shares the same base as the free version, but it has added more functions to accommodate the needs of users with different business requirements.
Moreover, the premium version is completely backed by the Magento team. This edition takes businesses to a higher level of e-commerce.
Why Go With Enterprise?
Magento Enterprise increases online revenue with the use of new features and functionality. HaraPartners as a Magento solution partner are experts that will provide assistance to merchants to help understand and appreciate the Magento Enterprise Edition. Have your site evaluated to determine if Magento Enterprise is for you. The evaluation includes:
What is involved to move a site from Community to Enterprise
A comprehensive understanding of your current e-commerce assets
How to meet your long term business goals
Contact Hara Partners today for a free Community Edition to Enterprise Edition evaluation and to see if you qualify.
Magento uses both customer tax classes and product tax classes to determine the rules which are used as the basis of tax calculations within its Magento Tax Setup.
Tax rules are a combination of customer tax class, product tax class, and tax rates. Each customer is assigned to a customer group, which in turn is associated with a specific tax class. Products are also assigned a tax class when each record is created. Magento determines the tax by analyzing the tax class of the products in the shopping cart, the tax class of the customer, and the region where the transaction takes place. The region can be determined by the customer’s shipping address, billing address or shipping origin.
Add a New Customer Tax Class and Apply It to Customers
Customer tax classes define which types of taxes are applied orders placed by customers that you have assigned to customer groups. You create customer tax classes and assign customers to them depending on the type of customer. For example, in some jurisdictions, wholesale transactions are not taxed but retail transactions are.
To add a new customer tax class:
From the Admin panel, select Sales > Tax > Customer Tax Classes. You see the list of existing customer tax class names, as shown in the following figure.
To add a new customer tax class, click the Add New button in the upper right.
In the Class Name box, type the name for your new customer tax class. For this example, use “Retail Customer” for the class name.
Click Save Class.
You can now see the Retail Customer class displayed. Apply the Retail Customer class to a customer group from your store by going to Customers > Customer Groups. Select the newly created tax class called Retail Customer and click Save.
Apply the Customer Group to a customer in your store by going to Customers > Manage Customers. Select a customer from your store and in the Group column, click the dropdown to select the customer group that is associated with the appropriate customer tax class for this customer.
