Magento eCommerce solutions (originally based on the Magento Community Project):
Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) – Flexible, robust open source eCommerce software platform with rich
capabilities to market, merchandise, sell, and manage a successful online commerce presence.
Magento Community Edition (CE) – The original open source offering from Varien. This project is our
testing and experiment environment. This is not product-level software.
Magento Go – Our SaaS (software as a service) product is a fully hosted turnkey solution for small and
micro-sized merchants.
Magento Mobile – Mobile Web or native app for iPhone, iPad, and Android OS devices. Extended and
controlled from the same admin.
Except for the mobile app, all Magento products are open source, providing flexibility and modularity for
customization. (The mobile app is also offered in source code, upon specific request.)
Important: This course has a lot of information to be presented in 4 days. Sessions will begin on time and the
instructor will not have time to go over anything that was missed by students who are not present when class
begins.
Note: Please write down information from your instructor regarding class hours and facilities, instructor contact
information, and so on for the remainder of the course.
We’re now beginning the first section (shown in bold) in the course topics:
eCommerce Landscape – What’s going on out there right now? What trends are at play, and who is using
eCommerce.
What Every eCommerce Platform Must Do
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Note: This slide shows the results of a Pew survey completed in March 2010. It presents a summary of activity by
generation: the darker the blue, the more the increase in activity since the last survey. The solid line snaking up
the survey timeline indicates that More (above) or Less (below) than 50% of people are doing the activities noted
here.
What is one area of common increase among all generations? They buy products online!
The market spans generations and demographics – everybody’s doing it.
Pew Internet produces reports exploring the impact of the Internet on families, communities, work and home, daily
life, education, health care, and civic and political life. The project aims to be an authoritative source on the evolution
of the Internet through surveys that examine how Americans use the Internet and how their activities affect their lives.
Internet Retailer, the creator of the IR 500 and organizer for the Internet Retail Conference & Exhibitions (IRCE),
focuses on providing business intelligence for eCommerce.
What Every eCommerce Platform Must Do – Strategically and Functionally
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Any good eCommerce platform must provide ways for you to handle the needs of your business:
Functionally: To keep on top of logistics and management
Strategically:
To position your business in the eyes of your market
To expand as new technologies and opportunities present themselves
Being able to manage your orders well saves time and money – to quickly filter and search for an order, configure
multiple action options available to customers, and view your activity in a dashboard environment. This allows you to
grasp trends and capitalize on the flow of site information.
Remember this important first principle: eBusiness is just business. eCommerce is commerce. Don’t let the
technology trick you into forgetting everything you already know about your business and your customer.
The technology presents additional challenges and opportunities, but does not fundamentally change the nature of
retail.
In this section we look at how to present your site brand in a coherent way, so the consumer experiences continuity
throughout the site, understands you as a leader in your market, and is influenced in online and offline buying
decisions.
We look at how to reach your current customers through a variety of campaigns and automated reminders, using
social media and email to engage shoppers and keep them updated.
Reaching new customers is examined through processes like SEO and SEM, which allow you to make your site
compatible with Search best practices.
And we look at being where you customers are – how to optimize your site for mobile, and use mobile apps to
stimulate conversions.
Where we are in the course:
Increase Brand Awareness:
Control Your Brand Experience
Drive Traffic
Reach New Markets
Be Where Your Customers Are
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
How does that appear on the Web? It’s a combination of how you present your site: the graphics, your message, is
your site busy and crowded (to grab the viewer), or do you use negative space to open up the site and allow the
viewer to interact more in a more leisurely way?
How’s your navigation? Clear and easy, with products available on a few clicks, or confusing and distracting?
Does your writing style complement the site and its products? Do you build a seamless, compelling user
experience?
How many seconds does it take a user to build a trusting experience of your site? Site performance, style, and
content are the key factors.
Notes to consider: Are you a thought leader in your field? Can you present your store as the voice of experience
or knowledge in your area? Give the shoppers the benefit of your experience and your opinion to create a sense
that they can trust your store for straight information that helps them buy.
How do you differentiate yourself from other sites? Your experience and “voice” can be the difference for your
shoppers.
This Forrester 2009 study shows the projected increase in the influence of the Web in offline purchasing.
Proactive shoppers use the Internet to search for product information and reviews. They can be directed or referred to
your site and have their purchasing patterns affected by your message.
Note: These are examples of store and site tools you can use to drive business in either direction and make it
easier for customers to find products at store locations.
Using the Adder Scent Boot style number, you can quickly find it in the catalog and purchase.
Click to find store locations – buy it here online or go to a store to convert.
Quick Response bar codes next to product images in print - scan with a mobile phone and direct the shopper
to your site for conversion or to a mobile site for a shopping cart build.
Pyow! lets you insert coupons in a MailChimp email campaign. Your customer uses the scannable coupon in
your store or is directed to your website. You can scan printed coupons or smartphone coupons, and you can
find out how many coupons were used.
Where we are in the course:
Increase Brand Awareness:
Control Your Brand Experience
Drive Traffic
Reach New Markets
Be Where Your Customers Are
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Important: It’s cheaper to reach out to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new customer. An existing
customer already has a relationship with you. In Magento your website is a powerful way to gain users’
permission to continue to communicate with them.
Note: Magento allows you to segment out your users based on past behavior on your site. Build lists and
campaigns around these new segments.
Some extensions, like the MailChimp extension, allow you to easily track user activity through email offers. Brono
and Constant Contact are other emailers.
Combine Magento expertise with these other targeted extensions to create more robust campaigns.
Also, RSS – overlooked by many – is a great way to keep customers in touch with your latest campaigns and offers.
Incent them to sign up for your RSS by offering discounts on pricing, shipping, and so on.
Making your URLs search engine friendly is the practice of removing your long, un-search-friendly query strings from
your URLs and using meaningful identifiers for your pages instead.
Instead of
http://www.xyz.com/press/releasedetail.asp?pressid=5
you can use the simpler
http://www.xyz.com/press/newproduct
Magento’s URL Rewrite Management tool helps you do this.
In Magento Admin > Categories > Products > Pages – the URL key automatically creates an SEO-friendly key
based on the title.
Note: All of these methods are permission-based and involve the customer giving you permission to contact
them.
Magento is generally configured to send out automatic and alert emails directly, and customer lists can be exported
for use in third-party tools such as MailChimp or others.
Are you having trouble getting people to review your site? You can use Facebook tools to allow comments on
your products and your site. Magento provides an easy Facebook interaction. You can also get the extension that
allows Facebook login to your site. This auto-populates the customer’s login info to your site, creating a more
seamless experience on your site.
To set up a Facebook store, you publish your Magento product information using Magento to export to a product
that will embed it into a Facebook page. You will want to create a specific Facebook-sized iframe site and theme for
your new Facebook page.
You can modify these themes to fit the market that uses a particular technology or software, such as Facebook.
Overview: Review where we are now in the course:
Increase Brand Awareness:
Control your brand experience
Drive traffic
Reach new markets
Be where your customers are
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Overview: Review where we are now in the course:
Increase Brand Awareness:
Control your brand experience
Drive traffic:
Reach existing customers
Reach new customers
Reach new markets
Be where your customers are
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Student Notes:
Notes for search engine optimization (SEO):
SEO involves optimizing your website for organic search results. It’s an entire practice of emarketing.
Each search engine has its own algorithm that determines what shows up when you search.
You need to use the tools Magento provides, but you can also go further with general SEO best practices.
Student Notes:
Notes for SEO:
SEOMOZ comes up with ranking factors in use by search engines each year or month (!) to help keep
merchants up-to-date with trends in search. This is a great resource for you.
As you can see, the top ranking factors do not include those that are driven by your technology. However,
there are many other factors that play a role so it is important to consider each of them to maximize your
“search engine friendliness.”
Of those factors listed, only #4 is influenced by your platform. Magento helps you put keywords in the title
tags.
Product descriptions, title tags, depth of content – you provide this stuff. This accounts for 60% of the total
effect.
Technical factors make up maybe 15% of the total. Magento accounts for all these factors and helps with
features and functionality to keep you from ignoring key issues like these.
Note: These are the elements judged most negative: cloaking, spam, poor performance.
Cloaking: Is the user a user or a spider or spy? Cloaking is used to show one site to users and another to spiders.
VW was kicked off the SEO scale by Google because they cloaked by showing different sites to different “users.”
Link acquisition: How do you get more links to come to you? You must be more valuable, important. It shows you in
a position of authority.
Bottom line: Don’t try to influence SEO ranking through manipulation.
Important: Keywords in your title tags are the top factor giving you control in SEO appearance.
Be proactive in providing meta data for your page titles – it aids in search friendliness and give you control of the title
content, rather than having Magento tools provide it for you based on page content.
Magento will populate meta information based on the meta information entered as the default in Admin /
Configuration.
Note: Google no longer factors keywords for ranking, while other search engines might.
For more information, see: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/
Note: The meta description often shows up in many search engine results as a summary of your site. So it can be
a big help in getting your message into the search engine results pages.
A well-written meta description presents visual appeal and summarizes the who, what, where, when, why, and how of
it all. Be unique and descriptive!
Notes for using SEO-friendly URLs:
Use plain descriptive terms in your URLs, replacing query strings with meaningful identifiers.
Configure your category landing pages with summary keywords to differentiate them from product
pages. This adds to the indication of the depth of your site.
Magento gives you simple URLs. You have the ability to configure URLs to the root of your site or to the
path of the product description. You define the URL Key.
Use the canonical URLs setting in Magento to avoid duplicate URLs.
By custom defining your URLs for each product, you give yourself better searchability.
Generally, direct product URLs to the root.
Note: Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the
link's destination. Build product and category descriptions knowing that they feed into the anchor text, so you can
ensure that your links are easily understood and followable for your shoppers.
Note: Use heading tags in your page templates, and insert keywords in the heading tags for increased click-
through and searchability.
Tags let you target specific content for a particular page. Just don’t overuse the h1 tag – use h2, h3, and so on to
provide variety for Google to notice.
Student Notes:
Notes for sitemaps:
If search engines are having trouble crawling your site, a sitemap can help. A sitemap is a list of all pages in
your site. You can weight pages here and influence search.
Some sites have a large number of dynamic pages that are available only through the use of forms and user
entries. The sitemap files contain URLs to these pages so that web crawlers can find them.
Multi-store instances: This example shows various stores that each have unique structure and content. Tailoring
your search information in this context is very useful for getting your distinct stores found and for directing traffic to
your products.
You can leverage Magento’s caching, indexing, compression, CDN, compiling – which are tools at your disposal to
improve the performance of your website.
Google Merchant Center (previously called Google Base): Lets you submit any type of online or offline content,
which then becomes searchable on Google. Items you post can be given attributes, making them easier for people to
find when running related searches.
Nextag: A comparison shopping site – click on an item type to see multiple places to buy and the price range for the
item.
Buzzillions : A user-generated review site that provides product feedback and persona typing from reviews from
various types of users.
You can export product information via CSV file to a comparison shopping server. Magento lets you automate this
process to keep it updated more easily. You can custom format the data, making it easier for you to get your product
information onto those sites. You create an export profile for each specific site’s requirements for export.
Overview: Review where we are now in the course:
Increase Brand Awareness:
Control your brand experience
Drive traffic
Reach new markets
Be where your customers are
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Note: Magento provides multiple ways for you to reach new markets:
Languages: Magento provides capabilities for you to create your retail store site in more than one language,
so you can reach out to your vertical demographic in additional cultures, either locally where multiple
languages are spoken, or by targeting expanded geographical territories.
Targeted microsites: Magento allows you to easily target different customer segments. For example, you
could have a retail store site and an outlet/clearance site that are both managed with one Admin backend.
Magento doesn’t “do translation” but through the Language File it provides phraseology for useful situations; for
example, cart phrases, currency, theme language, etc.
Magento supports many features that help present your sites in multiple locales:
Magento is a fully global platform
Multiple versions
Over 60 languages
Multiple currencies, taxes, and payment methods
Full internationalization of online channel
Ability to specify shipping destinations per shipping method
Ability to specify billing addresses per payment method
Because of their focused content, these sites can separate out products, campaigns, or other content, yet still share
the catalog, inventory, and customer data of the parent.
For example, you can offer alternative shipping, promotions, or other inducements, but still process orders using the
parent infrastructure.
You can create a separate website or a separate store – for example, to provide different pricing for wholesalers, and
so on. You can target access to the site to only certain viewers.
Overview: Review where we are now in the course:
Increase Brand Awareness:
Control your brand experience
Drive traffic
Reach new markets
Be where your customers are
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
“In this mobile era, winning brands must be 'experience enablers' and Magento Mobile will create a cohesive and
fulfilling brand experience for consumers who connect via their mobile phone – anytime, anywhere.”
– Michael Serrano, North Face EMEA
Important: Mobile and social media are experiencing rapid growth. Within a few years the majority of transactions
will occur through mobile devices. So, ROI will be long-term as the market shifts.
Configure your site for mobile. Magento Mobile enables customers to experience your brand via mobile devices on a
variety of platforms, including our optimized theme for iPhone, iPad, Android, and others.
Integrate mobile with your Magento storefront and manage multiple platforms from one installation to extend your
reach.
Note: Magento Enterprise Edition includes the capability to have optimized mobile themes. The iPhone theme is
now included with the latest version of EE.
There are extensions to support Android mobile themes, for example:
Is social media right for your store? Is it required? You can make that determination in a variety of ways.
You can add links to your store’s Header/Footer, or get robust – add commenting on your site through Facebook, and
so on. Post a quiz on Facebook and answer it on Twitter to get cross-platform engagement. Use social media as a
customer engagement tool. This leads to revenue generation.
Important: Have a strategy first! Nothing looks worse than a stale social presence. Be able to maintain it.
It can be difficult to measure the impact of social media. But there are so many channels being exploited, it pays to
engage your customers here if they use these platforms.
Here are some social media monitoring tools and services that you can research:
Social Mention
Trackur
Radian6 (more robust tools)
TweetDeck: You can monitor key phrase use. Customers comment, and you can respond to them.
Note: Backlinks are links to your site from other sites. Backlinks make you look like an authority others are
referencing, which adds weight to your search ranking factors.
Important: Social media references are becoming more heavily weighted as ranking factors – number of tweets,
etc.
Overview: Review where we are now in the course, and what’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness:
Control your brand experience
Drive traffic
Reach new markets
Be where your customers are
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Student Notes:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue:
Make It Easy to Shop
Merchandise Effectively
Use Promotions to Inspire Purchases
Remove Surprises and Roadblocks
Let Them Buy!
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
What’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue:
Make It Easy to Shop
Merchandise Effectively
Use Promotions to Inspire Purchases
Remove Surprises and Roadblocks
Let Them Buy!
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Review the learning objectives for this section of the course:
Make it easy for customers to shop: Use easy search and navigation layouts to create easy routes to
products.
Merchandise effectively: Use up-sells, cross-sells, reviews, ratings, and other tools to present your products
in a way that eases customer doubts, answers questions, and leads them to the shopping cart.
Use promotions to encourage conversion: Use coupons, timed sales, hurdle-based discounts, free
shipping, and so on.
Remove any roadblocks: Provide tax and shipping estimators, in-store pick-up, simple checkout
procedures, multiple payment methods (there are 4 in Magento), and use Trust Seals to remove concerns.
Let them buy! Use simple checkout, multiple payment methods, easy alternative ordering methods, and so
on to help customers complete the sale quickly and easily.
Buying online is a process… and at the moment of sale, the person is converted from a visitor to a purchaser. A
conversion is made.
Note: This is a higher-level funnel than you would find in Google Analytics. Many visitors are just window-
shopping. Some are comparing pricing or shipping costs, etc.
Important: Keep in mind that your website isn’t about something… it’s for someone.
It’s all about the customer: What is your site doing to win their business?
Performance: They don’t want to wait.
Landing pages: Show them what they came to see – don’t make them search after they have clicked to see
something.
Find it quickly: Search should be optimized so they can see the product lines quickly and make their
choices.
Remove any doubts about you as a seller: Put them at ease.
Give them an easy way to buy: The combination of all the above lends itself to providing a simple way for
the customer to get where they need to be, physically and emotionally, in order to purchase.
Optimizing revenue generation is about making choices that help move your visitors from one stage to the next.
What we know about customers is that they’re busy. They’re not into your website, they’re looking to fulfill their own
need. And they’re poor searchers.
So it’s a balancing act – how do you address the needs of all these people, depending on where they are in the
process?
What you can do is know you customers well, and balance the content of your landing pages to lead people
through the process.
What’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue:
Make It Easy to Shop
Merchandise Effectively
Use Promotions to Inspire Purchases
Remove Surprises and Roadblocks
Let Them Buy!
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
In the same way that in a physical retail space we would not make the merchandise hard to get to, or the cash register
hard to find, we have to pay attention to the same details online.
What’s the desired course of action? Make the next step obvious. Don’t give people too many options on the page.
You have to strike a balance between features and functionality and usability.
This all goes back to the very beginning, in how you set up your catalog. The categories determine the way products
are organized on the site.
We’re talking about organization, information architecture, and navigation.
These Magento features help your customers find what they’re looking for:
Layered navigation, which is enabled through categories and product attributes
Featured product banners, which can be easily swapped out and activated on a schedule
Search with the autocomplete feature
Searchers tend to be higher converting, so they start further down the sales funnel. Because of this, it is well worth
your time and attention to focus on improving your site’s search capabilities. It’s also worthwhile to examine your site’s
search results to find out more about your customers.
Here’s an example of a site that provides extensions for Magento Commerce, including ones that help you improve
your site’s search capabilities:
Note: You can use the Search Terms widget to let people know what others have searched for. Often shoppers
will take the most used path to find what they want.
People do pay attention to what other shoppers are doing. Popular search terms, tags, and product ratings are
powerful influencers.
What do we mean by hybrid search? This is guided selling.
Examples of hybrid search:
Shoppers identify a general category and the site helps them narrow it
Shoppers identify a specific product and the site helps them accessorize it
Shoppers identify a need and the site provides recommendations
You can start by running a search terms report and then taking the top ten phrases people are searching for. Use the
results to help you think about how to give a wizard-like approach to the user.
Using a hybrid, drop-down search, you can search by price, by type, by country, etc. to narrow the search quickly. It
also helps present things to the user that they might not have thought of.
The term “searchandising” refers to the way you want your search results to be presented.
Some search tools allow you to apply weighted scores to product conditions; for example, you can rank results based
on relevance [40%], margin [20%], stock level [20%], sales velocity [10%], customer rating [10%].
Note: Veering away from pure relevance-ranking is controversial, but it can produce “better” results, especially if
your site search receives a lot of general “head” terms that return a very large number of matching items.
Notes for usability:
Does Red = “stop?” This is not supported by studies – it may just be that it stands out.
Don’t use grey on grey – it looks disabled.
Important: Most browsers cache a local version of your site for faster reload on repetition. So the first time they
visit the site is the longest load time, and then subsequent loads will be faster as repeated. “Click Death” refers to
repeated or subsequent visits – they must load quickly – within 3 seconds from the cache.
Notes for reducing load time:
Reduce image, CSS, and JavaScript sizes to improve page load time
Use clean underlying HTML code to allow the page to render more quickly
Work with your host and system administrator to tune servers if necessary
What’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue:
Make It Easy to Shop
Merchandise Effectively
Use Promotions to Inspire Purchases
Remove Surprises and Roadblocks
Let Them Buy!
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Note: These four shopping personas are outlined in the slide:
Competitive: Those who know what they want. They are logical and fast. They want fast service – search,
cart, buy.
Spontaneous: Hip, stylish customers – fast, impulse oriented, usually lower price-point.
Methodical: Categorical and detail-oriented shoppers who are slower, use navigation, and search more.
Humanistic: Relationship-oriented – emotional, slower, what are others buying?
These are conversion optimization concepts. You will have certain percentages of these shoppers represented on
your site visits.
What’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue:
Make It Easy to Shop
Merchandise Effectively
Use Promotions to Inspire Purchases
Remove Surprises and Roadblocks
Let Them Buy!
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Appeal to various levels of customers. Try coupons for lower-priced markets and hurdle-based promotions to keep
people buying at higher levels of average order value.
Note: The scarcity concept works best for already committed buyers who need that final nudge.
These promotions are easy to do in Magento – you can show inventory availability on the product page.
Hurdle-based offers: For example, you could offer a promotion for orders over $100.
Catalog price rules: These rules affect product descriptions in the site.
Shopping cart price rules: Use these to present additional offers during the cart phase of checkout.
Whether these are tied to coupons or not, they can tip the customer over the conversion point by offering
something more for their action.
Magento Enterprise Edition allows you to set up customer segments to dynamically identify customer groups
based on specific characteristics.
You can then dynamically target different content and promotions to those groups.
You can generate reports and export customer information, as well as optimize marketing initiatives based on those
segments including shopping cart price rules and banners.
Note: Customer segment information is constantly refreshed, so that customers can become associated and
dissociated with a Segment as their information changes.
What’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue:
Make It Easy to Shop
Merchandise Effectively
Use Promotions to Inspire Purchases
Remove Surprises and Roadblocks
Let Them Buy!
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
What’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue:
Make It Easy to Shop
Merchandise Effectively
Use Promotions to Inspire Purchases
Remove Surprises and Roadblocks
Let Them Buy!
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Notes for designing your site for easy checkout:
The “Next” button should be more prominent than the “Back” button, etc.
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML: All the changes and refreshes happen on the same page, rather than a
total page refresh.
Magento native checkout is accordion style, which breaks the page down into separate steps. This provides a
faster refresh than a multi-page process.
If you’re interested in providing One-Step checkout, you can get an extension for Magento and test it for your site.
Important: Studies show that a one-step process is 20% worse than the default Magento style for getting a
shopper through the process. So consider whether this provides a better user experience!
Important: Always test your configuration changes to see how they affect usability.
Note: When you change many things in the same week, you have a less than scientific test environment,
because you have changed many things at once. So try to test whenever you change major functions or make
major additions to your site.
Where we are in the course, and what’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue:
Make It Easy to Shop
Merchandise Effectively
Use Promotions to Inspire Purchases
Remove Surprises and Roadblocks
Let Them Buy!
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Where we are in the course, and what’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue
Save Money:
Help Customers Self-serve
Improve Your Efficiency
Integrate to Other Tools
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Help customers self-serve by using order tracking and support information that lets them manage ordering without
assistance.
Improve efficiency by:
Versioning your content to create staging events – launch new offers when they have been fully prepped
Using import/export utilities to move batches of customer and order information to other utilities
Scheduling content publication
You can also integrate with other tools, including third-party extensions, to add new features and functionality to
your store – particularly in the areas of accounting, order processing, and analytics.
Where we are in the course, and what’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue
Save Money:
Help Customers Self-serve
Improve Your Efficiency
Integrate to Other Tools
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Two major areas where you can affect customers to proactively manage their experience of your site:
Implementation Costs: Running the Business
Order Tracking and Management: Support Information
Notes for cost of support:
Phone-based support is the most expensive to provide.
Live Chat is second most expensive.
Email support is the least expensive.
Magento’s ability to create rich content pages allows for FAQ pages from real questions, with updates from real
questions you get via customer service. The same goes for updating product information.
Example: Creating an order success page – “Thanks for your order” – gives you the opportunity to present a What
Happens Now offering from the store to tell the customer what will ensue, and that they don’t have to do anything
more, etc. This removes confusion about the process and empowers users to move on with confidence.
To do this, you create a CMS Block and publish it on your order success page.
Versioning content: Without it you have a convoluted process of making new content available, with a lot of manual
steps such as copying and pasting, and forgetting which version is the one you want to use.
With Magento Enterprise Edition, the process is automated. You can schedule content to be published at a specific
day or time.
Student Notes:
Magento allows for import/export of a variety of information for many uses:
Migrating from another system? Create a sample product and export it to Excel with proper formatting, then
import to the new site.
Reinstalling Magento? Use Import/Export to save (export) and migrate (import) data.
Bulk editing of product data: For example, you could do a bulk update of new pricing:
Export data into Excel, create a formula to update pricing, then Import data.
Export sales and other data to QuickBooks, for example, for accounting and tax work.
What’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction:
Engage Your Customers
Create Brand Advocates
Reward Your Best Customers
Understand and Respond to Your Customer
What’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction:
Engage Your Customers
Create Brand Advocates
Reward Your Best Customers
Understand and Respond to Your Customer
As the merchant you need to find out which keywords buyers associate with your products. Are these different from
the designer’s ideas, or from the store owner’s concept?
You can use customer-generated tags to help identify these terms.
Notes for tags:
Tags are descriptors that you can assign to any product to help you organize and remember them. They’re
essentially keywords or keyword phrases.
Any logged-in user can add as many tags to a product as he or she wants and rename or delete them later.
Tags will be viewable by everyone browsing the product, and will be displayed in a block on the
product info page.
The Admin has to approve a tag the first time it is used, before it appears in the frontend.
Once the tag has been approved by the store owner it is available for use on other products, and will not
have to be approved again.
User-created content (tags) on your site:
Empowers users to function in their own language.
Empowers the merchant to understand the customers better by using their own terminology and culture.
What’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction:
Engage Your Customers
Customers as Brand Advocates
Reward Your Best Customers
Understand and Respond to Your Customer
What’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction:
Engage Your Customers
Customers as Brand Advocates
Reward Your Best Customers
Understand and Respond to Your Customer
Create private sales by importing lists of targeted customers that you have purchased, and then using Magento
Segmentation to isolate targeted segments of your customer list.
Note: Enterprise Edition is the only edition of Magento that allows for this level of segmentation.
What’s coming up next:
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction:
Engage Your Customers
Customers as Brand Advocates
Reward Your Best Customers
Understand and Respond to Your Customer
The Magento database captures data on visitors, buyers, how many are at which levels in the buying process, etc.
Extensions and third-party apps allow you to explore and exploit that data.
Dashboard extensions in Community also give you information on customer activities and status.
Important: What you do with this information is the most important factor.
Note: 1.9 and above versions of Magento allow copying and pasting of js code in the Admin area to set up
customer tracking.
Examples of automatic transactional emails:
You can automate an email to go to the customer 3 days after product arrival. How do you like your new
<product>?
“We have received your email change. By the way, thanks for being a customer, and here is a discount on
your next order.”
Note: You have control over the content of the emails. You might decide to include some marketing in the
transactional emails you send.
What we covered in the course:
eCommerce Landscape
What Every eCommerce Platform Must Do
Increase Brand Awareness
Generate Revenue
Save Money
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Which of these are you most likely to do? (There’s no right or wrong answer)
a) Set up the database (functional)
b) Define target customer groups (strategic)
c) Configure checkout options (functional)
d) Design a promotion (strategic)
e) All of the above
f) None of the above
Day 1 Poll 2: Customer Retention / Customer Acquisition
Which of these ranking factors is influenced by your eCommerce platform?
a) Keyword focused from external links
b) External link popularity
c) Diversity of link sources
d) Keyword use anywhere in the Title tag (correct answer)
e) Trustworthiness of domain based on link distance from trusted domains
Day 2 Poll 2: Reaching New Markets
Poll Topic – Reaching New Markets
Which of the following is an effective use of a targeted microsite?
a) As a hub for a marketing campaign
b) To target specific a specific customer group
c) To focus on a specific product line
d) To offer wholesale pricing
e) To reach customers who speak other languages
f) All of the above (correct answer)
Which of these ranking factors is influenced by your eCommerce platform?
a) Keyword focused from external links
b) External link popularity
c) Diversity of link sources
d) Keyword use anywhere in the Title tag (correct answer)
e) Trustworthiness of domain based on link distance from trusted domains
Day 3 Poll 2: Reaching New Markets
Poll Topic – Reaching New Markets
Which of the following is an effective use of a targeted microsite?
a) As a hub for a marketing campaign
b) To target specific a specific customer group
c) To focus on a specific product line
d) To offer wholesale pricing
e) To reach customers who speak other languages
f) All of the above (correct answer)