Magento is an open-source content management system for e-commerce web sites. The software was originally developed by Varien Inc., a US private company headquartered in Culver City, California, with assistance from volunteers.
Varien published the first general-availability release of the software on March 31, 2008, under the name Bento. Roy Rubin, former CEO of Varien, later sold a substantial share of the company to eBay, which is now the sole owner.
According to research conducted by aheadWorks in October 2014, Magento’s market share among the 30 most popular e-commerce platforms is about 30%.
Below you can see several of our posts about Magento, with topics ranging from uploading product images to Magento requirements, enabling a theme in Magento mobile, and ten easy fixes to Magento mistakes… We know, at this point you think we gave it all away. But not really. There is way more to know and learn about Magento than you may think.
Magento’s Unique Opportunities:
Well-Known E-Commerce Platform
Over 240 000 e-commerce owners worldwide use Magento as the primary e-commerce platform. In the impressive client list we can see companies like Nike, Olympus and Paul Smith. The platform is used by very large companies aswell as small entrepreneurs.
Magento Connect
Magento has a impressive market with all sorts of extensions / plugins. This makes it possible to purchase new functionality and hopefully easily implement in your own instance. This can save companies months of development. For us as a web agency we have saved countless of development hours thanks to the community at Magento connect. Sometimes we give back and published extensions at magento connect ourselves. You can see what people are writing about our work here.
Flexible and Powerful Platforms
Magento has a very intuitive administration area with extremely flexible and powerful tools for marketing, search engine optimization and product management. This makes it possible for e-commerce owners to customize the store to the specific needs. Its designed to be scalable and can be transformed into every need.
In Magento, to change the logo you simply have to specify a new URL path to the logo. If you want to place the logo in the same folder as the default one, you’ll have to use cPanel’s File Manager or FTP. Each logo is relative to the template you are using. If you change the theme on your website, you’ll have to upload the new image.
While this may sound complicated, it keeps the files and folders of Magento organized.
With your FTP program (in this example we’ll use FileZilla), go to the root folder of Magento
Go to skin/frontend/default
From here you’ll need to select the template you are using. Currently we’re using the “modern” template so we’ll click on that folder
Now, click on the images folder
Select the logo file, and upload the file
Setting the path to the logo in Magento
Now, that you have uploaded the image of your logo to Magento, we’ll need to tell Magento where it is. Changing the file path or URL to your logo in Magento is easily accomplished in the Magento Admin backend.
At Hara Partners, we’ve been specializing in Magento for a very long time, but sometimes other e-commerce websites will ask us why Magento is the best choice for their e-commerce platform.
The simple answer is that no other e-commerce system except Magento will offer you with the same depth of rich features and powerful inbuilt functionalities.
Why Magento for Open Source
Magento is an open source platform, which means that it can be downloaded for free. Developers can modify the source code and add features and functionality by creating or installing add-ons and plug-ins as per your business requirement.
Thousands of developers from around the globe are simultaneously working to make it bigger, better and even more customizable than it already is. This not only results in a cost-efficient solution, it also provides a higher grade of quality for the product, since thousands of pairs of eyes are much more likely to catch bugs and find solutions than one pair of eyes.
Easier Site Management
Magento has the feature of handling multiple stores. You can even operate stores on multiple websites; Magento helps you to manage them from one admin panel. All the sales and customers can be managed from a single database. This saves a lot of time of placing orders and managing sales. It also has other features such as multi-language, multi-currency support, international support, product browsing, shipping, order management etc.
Scalable Platform
Magento can be molded into whatever you want it to be. You have a small business or large enterprise; it can adapt your small business requirement or your complicated and sophisticated requirements. Magento is highly scalable and flexible that can be customized to serve any business model. Store Owners can expand the platform up to their anticipation provided that they work with a Magento expert team.
Search Engine Optimization
If your website does not get traffic visits through search engines then you are not going to achieve a return on your investment. Search engines love Magento because it creates very clean URLs, tags and descriptions with keywords. This directly helps in sales and revenue generation. It also has powerful tools such as Up-Sells and Cross-Sells that encourage the users to order for more products.
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.
Celigo’s been in the Netsuite game for a while, but there are many reasons to switch over from their NetSuite Connectors if that’s still what you’re using.
Hara Partners’ NetSuite-Magento Connector
We offer 50% off the life-time of your license when you make the switch from Celigo to our Netsuite-Magento Connector. In addition, you can benefit from a lower total cost of ownership by saving 50% every year.
We keep the two systems clean, and back our offer with a 100% Money Back Guarantee in case you’re not satisfied.
More About the Netsuite-Magento Connector
The Hara Partners NetSuite-Magento Connector synchronizes the two systems seamlessly in real-time.
Inventory is kept in sync between Netsuite and Magento
Product information can be managed in either system and dynamically pushed to the other
Orders are sent from Magento to NetSuite in real-time
Shipping information is sent back from NetSuite to Magento after fulfillment
Customers are created in the NetSuite CRM
We also offer daily Inventory Sync to keep stock levels consistent across platforms. The inventory syncs can be scheduled to meet your business needs. For example, if your warehouse only receives orders during the day and commits inventory to stock during certain times, model this through the NetSuite-Magento Connector. Should your business be active around the clock from different global warehouse locations, update them in real-time across states or continents. You have the flexibility to set any interval of your choosing (daily, hourly, event based etc.).
What Else?
We also allow you to manage your inventory in NetSuite and share full visibility with Magento. The tight link the NetSuite-Magento Connector establishes allows you to aggressively sell against your stock numbers. Whether you sell through multiple channels, including eBay, Amazon and other marketplaces, or you sell wholesale (B2B) and retail (B2C) out of the same inventory, you can configure the NetSuite-Magento Connector to support this logic.
Closing Thoughts
If you’re still scratching your head over some of this information, you can read more on our Upgrade from Celigo page, and read more about our Netsuite-Magento Connector on our NetSuite-Magento Connector page.
What Magento Private Sales Can Do for a Business’s Online Store
Any business utilizing Magento should seriously consider installing Magento Private Sales. Magento is an eCommerce platform which gives online retailers the utensils to sell more products. Ultimately, this means that the business will make more money.
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.
Are you looking for a job as an E-commerce Coordinator or Manager but don’t have the experience or chance to prove yourself yet?
We are looking for an entry-level candidate who is seeking a career in e-commerce & technology consulting as an operations person.
This is a 3-month long unpaid boot camp. This e-commerce operations internship will provide you with relevant real-life traiing to work in any e-commerce and online store operations and merchandising role.
The Deal
This is a 3-month long boot camp.
What We’re Looking For
Someone who’s good at what they do and takes pride in it.
A drive to work in a fast-paced technology company.
Ability to analyze and assess situations, use common sense and provide an effective solution.
An introduction and referral to 20-40 e-commerce businesses
Expectations:
You will be exposed to a vast array of tasks around e-commerce, raning from product import, to merchandising, copy writing, seo management, to sales, customer service, server maintenance, and managing a store
We want you to explore and document e-commerce processes
You will learn processes in-depth and will receive guidance and reviews by experienced e-commerce professionals
Requirements:
Demonstrate why you would be the best candidate for this program
Provide a strong writing sample, along with your history
Responsibilities:
Executes online content creation tied to product and promotion uploads for multiple ecommerce stores
Works with design and programming teams to implement changes, new features, and bug fixes
Facilitates online store settings and maintenance tied to products and promotions
Manages online product catalog on a daily basis, add new items and maintain database
Develops creative ideas and improvements for site content, enhancements and site functionality
Assigns Ecommerce Merchandisers with inventory planning and sales reporting
Prioritizes and manages product lines to ensure quick and accurate posting to the website
Magento default installation already has a predefined custom 404 page. But is it enough to help visitor/customer get back on right track!?.
You can customize the 404 page in Magento. If your site visitors try to go to a page that does not exist, you can display a personalized message to them, or maybe provide a link to another page. Editing the 404 page is accomplished in the Magento Admin Backend.
<strong>Step 1.</strong> Log into your Magento Admin Backend
<strong>Step 2.</strong> Go to <strong>CMS ->> Pages</strong>
A new version of Photo Gallery, Photo Gallery Pro Ver. 5.0, was recently announced in the marketplace, which allows for more opportunities to visualize products and show customers their best properties. Furthermore, powerful configuration options also allow merchants to organize the gallery easily and promptly.
Photo Gallery Pro is an add-on within Magento that allows merchants to create photo galleries, and customers to visualize the products offered within an e-store. The program allows you to read album descriptions, browse photo thumbnails, full-sized pictures or view a slide-show depending on the options that are selected.
Visitors can view additional images of any product in the store, as the module allows one to link photos to any product page. It’s a perfect solution for e-Commerce stores to increase customer response with an alternative content. Photo Gallery also offers SEO-friendly URLs and multistore support.
In this era of cut throat competition, companies are constantly striving for newer ways of marketing tools that can ensure to upkeep their contest in the consumer market. Netsuite is one such incorporated business management software that enables business to harness the power of the leading cloud software as a Service technology.
Netsuite connector for Magento
Magento is the foremost professional open-source ecommerce solution that can be customized and hence the merchant can exercise complete flexibility over the appearance, substance, and functionality of their online store. Magento’s users can use Magento’s marketing, search engine optimization and list-management tools to create customized ecommerce sites that can best meet the customer’s business needs. Magento is also the most supported platform for third party solutions that can take your online store to the next level.
While Netsuite is a proven back office application, its integration with Magento can provide businesses with powerful business management portal with state-of-the-art e-commerce features.
However an ideal Netsuite connector for Magento can be a challenge considering the various issues with their type and structure integration. There are various considerations to be measured before integrating Netsuite connector for Magento.
Consideration before integrating Netsuite with Magento
Next, Make business plans depending on the type of industry, such as if an order meets certain criteria, they are imported, its status updated and so on. Proper work flows and control structures should be formalized so that the order amount with all subtotals and line items in Magento get transferred to Netsuite with all detail for further processing.
Proper execution of a Netsuite connector for Magento also requires formulation of an emergency management system that can handle the issues if some exceptional errors occur in the system. A business has to specify a proper product support system and a product roadmap that underlines the product’s features and their outcomes in detail. You will be pleased to hear that we at Hara Partners fully support disaster recovery and fail over scenarios, and that our NetSuite connector for Magento is updated and tested for every new release of NetSuite and Magento. In addition, the development team continues to update the Netsuite connector for Magento on an ongoing basis making it better every day.
There are a number of options available for the integration of the Netsuite connector for Magento available at different rates depending on the complexity of the data mapping and level of advanced automation. While customers are expected to import and export all data between the Magento and NeSuite systems, Hara Partners can help with this process to reduce the time to go live.
