The Dreaded index.php!

Posted on February 29, 2012 by admin

A lot of people get the very annoying problem in Magento where “index.php” shows up in their URLs. If you try to type in “store.com” the page will load as “store.com/index.php”. This happens on sub-pages too; if you go to a product or category you’ll see “store.com/index.php/widgets/gizmo.html”.

The solution for this problem can be tricky. There are a number of factors that contribute to how your domain is displayed in Magento and you need to make sure everything is configured properly. The settings to check for include…

Apache mod_rewrite

99% of all Magento installations run on the Linux powered Apache Web Server. Apache includes a module called “mod_rewrite” which allows an installed application to rewrite the URLs that will be requested by visitors. This feature is generally installed and enabled by default, but you should confirm this if you’re seeing index.php in your URLs.

Magento Web Server Rewrites

Go into your Magento admin and navigate to System > Configuration > Web > Search Engine Optimization > Use Web Server Rewrites and make sure the option is set to “enable”.

.htaccess AllowOverride_All and RewriteBase

On your server you should find an important file labeled “.htaccess“. This file controls certain aspects of how your site is displayed, loaded, and interacted with. You want to make sure you have two lines in this file and that neither is preceded with a “#” (which is a way of commenting out a line of code from being active). Open up this file and make sure that AllowOverride_All is present and that RewriteBase is both present and followed by the directory where you have Magento installed (i.e. “/” for a root directory installation or something like “/store/” if you site is set up at exmample.com/store).

One other thing to note, your server can have multiple .htaccess files depending on how Apache was installed and configured. Do a search on your system to make sure that any other .htaccess files (sometimes found in various subdirectories) have the above settings as well.

Resolution!

Remember to clear the cache from Magento and your browser as well as restart Apache to ensure all your changes have taken effect and you should hopefully be free of index.php!

The Commative Team

Live Magento Theme: Halcyon Classic Parts on Ultimento

Posted on February 25, 2012 by admin

www.classicpartsltd.com

Why Should I Launch My Website on Magento?

Posted on February 23, 2012 by admin

Coming to the decision to launch a new website (or change the website you’ve already got) is hard. Deciding how to build that website is even harder.

What Should I Build My Website With?

There are countless options for building a website. You can code one yourself from scratch using HTML, but you’d better be really good with HTML and stay on top of all the new e-commerce trends. You can pay consultants to build one with everything you want, but its expensive and you may find yourself calling them every time you want to make a change. We tend to think the ideal solution is to build your site on a platform, and we feel so strongly about this that we founded an entire company on that idea.

When you use a web platform you’re part of a community of developers and sellers and e-commerce tacticians that are all focused on making the best websites they can. They’re constantly fixing bugs, adding new cutting edge features, and collaborating to figure out what the customer wants. Outside developers also contribute by building apps and extensions that can tie into the platform to extend its functionality and abilities. This collective effort yields websites that are both fresh with new ideas and features, but still highly stable.

Think of a web platform as a phone, say an iPhone (not that we don’t like Android!). Lots and lots of people have iPhones because Apple is always rolling out new features, the phones work well, and you can choose from a countless selection of apps that others have made to download. Everyone changes the settings on their phones, loads different ringtones, images, downloads various apps; no two iPhones are the identical. The same goes for your online store. You need to differentiate yourself from the crowd (content, selection, add-on features, etc.) so you can make sure you have the best overall site on the net for whatever widgets you choose to sell.

What Web Platform Should I Choose?

Now, what platform to go with? There are lots of choices here, but Commative strongly feels that Magento has found the perfect balance of cost, flexibility, support, and development.

Magento is the largest web platform with over 110,000 customers.
Magento Community is free to all, but you can also pay for Magento Enterprise if you want support or Magento Enterprise Premium if you want them to host your site as well.
Magento is highly dynamic because its MVC architecture allows for easy customization.
Magento has one of the most popular shopping carts supporting all variety of promotional and shipping options.
Out of the box, Magento is integrated with various payment gateways, Google, PayPal, and all the most important web-based services.
Lastly, and possibly most important, Magento is open source. Anyone can see the code and edit it however they like. This has caused it to become extremely popular with developers and its by far the most popular platform out there to work on.

All of these reasons make an extremely strong case for Magento, but we haven’t even mentioned that they were bought by eBay in 2011! This was huge because it showed the popularity of the platform and gave it the kind of financial backing that will propel Magento going forward. eBay has promised to keep Magento open source and is even tying their development into the new X.commerce communications platform making it even easier to link Magento to other systems and data.

Clearly, Magento is strong candidate for creating e-commerce sites and a solution you should seriously consider when it comes to building the new (or refreshed) website of your dreams, and if you want your dreams to have a bit more color then don’t forget to add Ultimento to the mix!

The Commative Team

Beware Buyer Browser Bias

Posted on February 21, 2012 by admin

To be successful online you have to make sure that your sites work on all the major browsers. Your site may look great in one browser, but be disjointed and broken in another. You should always test any changes or site modifications across different browsers before you upgrade your live site.

There are countless browsers out there, but you should always ensure you’re covering the basics; Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. It’s also not just about the brand of browser, but the version as well. Chrome and Firefox have many versions, but they’re designed to be upgraded automatically so you’ll find most people using them are using the latest release.

Internet Explorer is another matter entirely. While Internet Explorer is the most popular browser in the market, you’ll find customers still widely use versions 6, 7, 8, and 9. Microsoft plans to introduce automatic updates to Internet Explorer soon, but in the meantime, check your site against older versions as each can interpret the same page dramatically differently.

With all these options, how do you know where to focus your browser testing energy? As much as anyone will tell you this browser or that browser is most important, each site’s customers are different. Go look at the last few months of your traffic browser history in Google Analytics or Omniture or whatever you use to track visitors and see for yourself. The answer may surprise you.

In fact, we looked at two different customer accounts; one that sells software and another that sells power tools. Look at how different the browser concentration was between these two sites…

Browser	Software	Power Tools
Internet Explorer 9	20%	4%
Internet Explorer 8	35%	5%
Internet Explorer 7	7%	1%
Internet Explorer 6	<1%	<1%
Firefox	16%	42%
Chrome	8%	31%
Safari	5%	14%

However your customer base is structured, these four browsers generally cover over 95% of the market. Being compatible across these browsers will ensure your site is widely viewable.

So keep up the testing and keep your sites looking sharp.

The Commative Team

Rich Snippets

Posted on February 16, 2012 by admin

If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what a Rich Snippet was… I’d be broke. It may not be the most common term, but Rich Snippets are quickly becoming one of the most important factors in determining how your site comes up in Google, Bing, and Yahoo search results.

Rich Snippets operate just like HTML tags, but they’re specialized to highlight the select kinds of information that customers want to know about and search engines want to categorize by. If you have a site for a restaurant you’d want to put tags around menu items. If you were a musician you’d tag song titles and track times. If you happen to have a Magento site selling products, well then you’re going to want tags around products, reviews, prices, etc.

Google has a great guide on Product Snippets that you should check out to get an idea of where you should start putting tags on your site, and the sooner the better. If you follow the Google Insider Search Blog you’ll see they’ve even highlighted changes to search that are beginning to make Rich Snippets more important in results.

Commative thinks Rich Snippets are only going to become more critical to the future of search. We’re working hard to incorporate these tags in to our products and the next version of Ultimento is sure to have the feature built in.

Keep your eyes open for snippets!

The Commative Team

Live Magento Theme: Raysmith Car Audio on Ultimento

Posted on February 14, 2012 by admin

www.raysmith.co.uk

Ultimento’s Optimized Magento Check-Out Extension

Posted on February 9, 2012 by admin

Magento checkout extensions are always very popular. Once you have peaked the interest of your customer and they have selected the product they want, you do not want to lose them because of a cumbersome checkout process!

The problem is that many Magento checkout extensions are potentially harmful to conversion rates and checkout usability. Several Magento checkout extensions we’ve seen out there are very bad in terms of load speed, conversions, and stability.

Others just make it too complicated: You should only have one step for the check-out but make it easy to use!

Don’t combine checkout steps into a single crowded step

We have no idea why so many checkout extensions we see combine the checkout steps into a crowded 3-column design and promote this as if it’s a positive thing.

Here’s a screenshot taken from one such extension to illustrate the point:

Even the savviest shopper can get confused with such a layout! Not to mention most internet shoppers are eager to complete their purchase quickly and move on. Which fields are you supposed to fill out first? Why are there so many options everywhere? It’s really overwhelming – especially if you’re just buying a shirt or a pair of shoes! It doesn’t get much worse in terms of usability and conversions in our opinion!

Don’t overwrite Magento’s functionality

Many extensions also completely overwrite Magento’s checkout functionality which is a big no no in terms of ability to safely upgade, stability and security.

What that means is that you’ll run into countless issues and problems with new Magento versions and other 3rd party extensions (such as payment methods, shipping methods, etc) down the road.

Don’t weigh down your checkout page

In addition these extensions add their own style files, template files, and layout files to the checkout page which will affect load speed and page performance, resulting in slowing down one of the most important page of an online store!

Don’t trust anything but numbers

If you’re trying out a Magento checkout extension, you should make sure to test conversion rates with A/B testing (you can use Google Website Optimizer for that if you want a free and quick implementation). One company did test conversion rates and saw a huge decrease in conversion rates when compared to the original Magento checkout process! We don’t find the result surprising at all.

Look for an alternative

You can stick with the native Magento checkout functionality and that’s fine. Except for one thing: The very first step is very confusing to users. We don’t believe you should ask customers to think about anything but paying for your product when they reach the check-out stage:

Fortunately this first step is seamlessly removed with Ultimento’s fully integrated Magento theme with an Optimized Checkout Extension. The benefit is that the check-out extension does not affect any of the checkout functionality and all the possible scenarios you could want to include.

If you want users to sign up for your newsletter at checkout we have enabled that through the newsletter check-box with a bunch of possible scenarios you can configure in the admin.

The Commative Team

Sales Are Good!

Posted on February 7, 2012 by admin

comScore just released retail spending data for the fourth quarter of 2011 and the numbers are impressive. Sales came in at $49.7 billion for an increase of 14 percent year-over-year. Total e-commerce for 2011 reached an astonishing $161.5 billion! Despite the dreary performance of the economy over the last few years, this quarter represents the ninth consecutive year-over-year period of growth in e-commerce sales.

The online space has continued to grow as more and more consumers have shifted their spending online to take advantage of better choice, more information, simplicity of transaction and the convenience of home delivery. Speaking of shipping, during the holiday season a record 52% of transactions included free shipping, a rapidly growing trend and key offering for online retailers.

With so many customers continuing to move online, Commative knows how important it is to differentiate your site from the crowd. Make sure you spruce up your store with the right graphics and promotions. Add the important content that will help convert orders and improve your placement on Google and Bing. Most importantly, stay connected with your customers and always look for ways to keep them engaged.

Keep up the good work!

The Commative Team

What is Pinterest

Posted on February 4, 2012 by admin

Ever heard of Pinterest? This once little known site for sharing products and pictures that people love has exploded! We at Commative hadn’t even heard of the site until a certain significant other used it to create a Christmas shopping list.

The site works on the idea that users can “pin” pictures of the things they like online and provide links back to where they found those items. Then their friends can see what they like, share their own items, and quickly get to the product pages of the items they want to buy. Needless to say, this is clearly a powerful product for anyone running an e-commerce site.

Even more important than the promise of another “social” avenue for increasing e-commerce is actual proof. According to a recent study on the growth of Pinterest, the site is now driving more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn, combined!

We’ve already done a few custom integrations of the Pinterest “pin” button on customer sites and you can bet that Ultimento 3 is going to have the feature included. The web is always growing fast with new sites and new ways of increasing sales and we promise we’ll always be on the cutting edge so that our customers have the best sites possible.

Happy Selling!

The Commative Team