Zend certified PHP/Magento developer

Last-minute Holiday Retooling: How to Extend Your Magento Capabilities

In the lead up to the busy holiday period, retailers are frantically attempting to drive as many customers – and sales – through their doors as physically possible. For bricks and mortar operations, this means crafting a unique in-store experience. For online and multichannel ventures, some last-minute tweaks to the webstore may be in order.

As one of the world’s most popular e-commerce platforms, Magento is often held up as an exemplar – at other times, it is lambasted for its complexity. The reason for this polarisation is the fact that Magento is an open source platform, allowing anyone to access its base code and develop specific solutions and integrations. At the same time, this has lead to a fragmented development landscape, which can very easily trip up the unwary.

Ryan Thompson, Director of Partnership at Magento, believes that merchants need to utilise Magento’s open source nature as a strength in the lead up to Christmas. In seeking out quality partners and technologies, any retailer can increase their potential for holiday sales.

“We have a huge number of partners that utilise our software to extend and integrate with the Magento platform,” Thompson says. “We call these technologies ‘extensions’ and are able to distribute these through our version of an app store, which we’ve dubbed Magento Connect.

“We now have over 7,000 extensions that do all kinds of things, from providing email marketing, CRM, integration – anything that helps to extend what Magento does.”

The benefits that these developers add to Magento’s offering derive from the value they create in adding new features to Magento, or in streamlining its existing feature set for a specific need.

“When you look at the resources and time it takes to build a Magento site, what you see is the developers understand Magento the best know where they can rely on certain third party capabilities. Sometimes it’s justified to build a bespoke solution for a particular problem, but a developer with experience will also consider an existing solution where it’s applicable. By offering a variety of quality extensions, we can therefore save merchants time and money.”

Ryan Thompson’s List of Key Magento Extensions

  • One particular extension that’s helping many retailers to keep costs down in our Temando extension. As the holiday shopping period heats up, merchants will be looking to take advantage of economies of scale and Temando certainly presents a viable option to achieve this through shipping and delivery. By providing an extension for Temando that plugs into a Magento back end, we can help merchants streamline these processes.
  • When discussing maximising conversions, we hear about shopping cart abandonment all the time. Bronto and Listrak are both email marketing providers that we work with, and they’ve both built really nice extensions for Magento. These allow merchants to easily set up messages and reminders for shoppers that can be triggered when a consumer abandons their cart. Merchants can strategise around this technology to offer similar products or added promotions to try and tempt that consumer to complete a purchase on-site.
  • In a similar vein, there’s another software called One Step Checkout, which will be sure to help increase conversions. What they’ve done is take a few steps out of the standard Magento shopping checkout, making the shopping experience simpler and quicker for consumers.
  • A really interesting trend is the prevalence of ratings and reviews on e-commerce websites. Merchants can use this user generated content to help educate other potential purchasers and there’s a company called Yotpo that has done some really good work in this area. They’ve built a ratings and reviews engine that ties really nicely into social media. If I’m a shopper and I buy something, Yotpo can encourage me to leave a review, which includes ways for me to share it with the public via social media. This will help drive additional awareness in the marketplace, driving more traffic to the merchant while also qualifying potential customers in the process.
  • One of our newer partners is called Springbot. They’re helping merchants pull together a lot of their data together through Magento in order to develop some comprehensive analytics, helping to automate marketing intelligence. This kind of software allows merchants to easily decide how to prioritise various marketing campaigns.
  • SLI Systems is also one of our search partners, and I know they have a pretty strong presence in Australia. By releasing an extension for Magento, merchants are able to take full advantage of SLI’s experience and technology in site search, making it easier for customers to find products quickly.

The extendibility that Magento allows makes it very easy for merchants to offer an optimised, crafted experience for its customers, particularly during a busy shopping period like Christmas.

While concerns may exist regarding complexity and the struggle to keep development costs low, Thompson says these headaches can be avoided by seeking quality solutions partners, of which there are a growing number locally.

“We had our first Magento Live event in Australia just a few months ago and part of the motivation for that is the sheer amount of activity we’ve seen in Australia recently,” Thompson says. “Not only are there an increasing number of retailers using the platform, but we also have quite a solid list of solutions partners that are helping them to develop and expand on the Magento platform. There’s really quite a vibrant and growing ecosystem in Australia.”

Magento’s Recommended Local Solutions Partners:

Sydney – eWave, Netstarter and Exceed

Melbourne – Balance Internet, IE Agency and WeAreDigital

 

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