How to Become a Magento Guru

Lesson 7: Magento Installation

Guido Jansen — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 20:36:30 +0000

Ok, enough about the Magento Ecosystem, let’s start the new year by start digging into Magento itself! Again, the course is not meant to make you a Magento programmer, but you will find it useful when you’re able to play with Magento yourself to try things out. In order to do so you will need your own Magento installation before preceding to the following lessons. If you have a webhost that provides automated installation of Magento you can skip this lesson, if not, here’s what you need to do:

First you will need a (proper) Magento host that supports Magento’s basic system requirements or if you want to install locally, you’ll need a fully functional LAMP/WAMP/MAMP installation, configured for Magento.
Create a database for Magento.
Download the latest full release of Magento or the Magento downloader.
Upload the files to your webserver.
Open your browser and go to where you uploaded your files.
Follow the Magento Installation Wizard.

A detailed installation instruction can be found on magentocommerce.com. If you run into problems, ask a techie to help or ask around on the Magento forum :).

Next lesson: Magento multistore.

This post is part of the free Magento Guru Course. I give you tips, tricks and tasks to become a Magento expert in 6 months. Don’t miss out on all the goodies: subscribe now to the newsletter, RSS feed or Facebook page!

Feedback 6: Competitors

Voskan Martirosian — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 08:00:26 +0000

Before telling about competitors I would like to ask if competitors for Magento already exist ;). After Guido posted a comparison of shopping cart software I was surprised to see the amount of e-commerce platforms. Actually I expected to see a couple of well known software, like Intershop, OsCommerce or Virtuemart. Wikipedia showed a huge list of e-commerce software with their pricing, creator information, latest stable version date, updates and license information.

I think the amount of the software is not a threat for Magento, but more like an opportunity to present the retailers a shopping cart solution with the best practices of the e-commerce world. Let’s take a short look at three of the open source competitors:

OpenCart

Another alternative for an open source shopping cart solution is Open Cart. This is a basic e-commerce platform meant for small business solutions. The interface looks like Magento and the menu structure too. You could say it’s a light version of Magento, like MagentoLight ;).

osCommerce
At Realvine (where I am intern) I hear from my colleges about the strange and too extended database structure of osCommerce. They were busy to migrate a complete database from osCommerce platform to Magento and not all data could be transferred correctly. Data migration is one of the most important issues the retailers have to think about before switching to another e-commerce platform.

Virtuemart
This is a shopping cart extension of Joomla! CMS providing a user friendly, basic interface. During the time I was also developing websites, I made one website with Virtuemart. If I didn’t know about the enhanced marketing possibilities, extensions (Magento Connect), and other great features of Magento, my choice should go to Virtuemart.

No related posts.

Lesson 6: Competitors

Guido Jansen — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 06:00:21 +0000

As a Magento Guru, people ‘outside the ecosystem‘ will ask you what’s so great about Magento. Since ‘being great’ is a relative statement, you’ll need something to compare Magento with. So answer this question, you not only need to know your Magento stuff, but also something about it’s competition (albeit not as in depth of course). This knowledge also comes in handy when you’re advising people about e-commerce that are actually not helped with Magento, but are actually looking for a completely different solution due to their system requirements or budget. This happened to me several times and most often results in a happy merchant who A) will be using the right product for his needs and B) will refer his contacts to me when they need e-commerce advice. Win-Win.

So this weeks assignment is to take a look at the competition for Magento. Who are they, what do they have to offer and in which cases would you advice them instead of Magento?

Some of the ecommerce platform competitors (in terms of function, popularity or market share):

Closed Source
Open Source
- Prestashop
- osCommerce
- Oxid
- VirtueMart (Joomla extension)

Some resources:

Comparison of shopping cart software

For all the readers/participants: what do you consider to be the alternative(s) / competitor(s) of Magento?

No related posts.

Feedback 5: Be a user advocate, not a system sales rep.

Voskan Martirosian — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 20:07:32 +0000

It’s very important to realize about the pros and cons of Magento. Beside the many advantages, Magento also has some disadvantages that can have some influence to the choice of e-commerce platform. One of the points the shop owner should be careful about and good informed in is the migration of data from another platform. Also at Realvine, where I am doing an internship, I notice data migration is always a difficult issue. The structure of databases are not the same in different platforms. It takes a lot of time and costs to perform a successful migration. Other issues are the high costs for support, license and development of the platform.

While I appointed some issues you should look after, before choosing for Magento, don’t forget it has also big amount of advantages. It’s a powerful open source platform for all your sales, transactions, mailings, Rich Merchandising and another marketing activities. I think personally the biggest disadvantages of Magento (Professional and Enterprise) versions are the relatively high costs, but it’s inevitable for such a great platform growing every month. But as you know, if you want a real increase in your revenue, you have to invest in the tools to reach your goals.

The idea of Magento Uservoice is incredible. It really gives an impression of an open source environment everybody all over the world contributes to improve Magento. The visitors can also vote the issues of the developers to pay more attention and give more priority to some posts. In my opinion not only developers, but also shop owners, sales managers and marketers could participate to this system, because they also have many ideas to make Magento more powerful, innovative and more purposeful e-commerce platform.

No related posts.

Lesson 5: Be a user advocate, not a system sales rep.

Guido Jansen — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 06:01:15 +0000

Ok, so you want to be a Magento Guru: you’ll know (almost) everything there’s to know about the system and you’ll try to convince everyone to use it.

Great!

But don’t confuse that with being a sales representative for a Magento company trying to make as many sales as possible. You are enthusiastic about the system, but also be realistic and a critique. I think Magento in general is probably the best e-commerce platform out there. But that doesn’t mean it’s a miracle system that is going to sell stuff by itself and it’s not the perfect system (mostly because I think perfect doesn’t exist with software). It also won’t be the best choice for every businesses.

So there will be bugs, faults and strange things you and users will encounter and need to deal with, just as with any other software package. Tell them about that openly and up-front, tell them what they can do about it and they’ll be much happier users. There’s no use in ‘selling’ Magento to people who won’t be happy using it.

For example: The way Magento is build makes it a real resource hog. Great when you want many features, great when you’re a developer that wants to extend the system. Not so great when you’re on a slow server and like speedy webshop performance. Luckily, there are many, many things you can do to counter that problem by using (one or more) fast dedicated servers run by a hosting company specialized in Magento. (Also see my blogposts ‘Magento Performance: Myth vs Reality‘ and ‘101 ways to speed up your Magento e-commerce website‘ on this subject).

Tasks for this week:

Surf Google and the Magento forums and try to look at the cons of Magento. Since developments go fast, only try to look at recent (<6 months resources) to prevent listing cons that are already fixed in newer versions of Magento. Pick the top 5 most complained about (besides the performance issues mentioned above).
Take a look at the roadmap (see resources below) to find out what is being done to help prevent these issues in the future (including performance improvements).

Some resources:

No related posts.

Feedback 4: Official Documentation

Guido Jansen — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:16:17 +0000

The sales skills of Magento are amazing. It provides shop owners many opportunities to increase sale and conversion of their webshop. The function of ‘webshop’ has almost disappeared after the appearance of Magento in the race of e-commerce solutions. Selling products is no longer the only wish of shop owners. They are looking for new features to please new customers, thinking about different tactics about how to increase the amount of returning visitors. Online and offline research of the market, the customer satisfaction surveys and extending product assortment are the indispensable parts of successful (Magento) webshops.

Last Thursday I had a stage reunion, when every student should tell more about his intern. I was just waiting for my turn, to tell the audience of 40 students of Digital Communication an amazing online shop solution, Magento! To my surprise I was not the only student who had something to tell about Magento. An another student told about his intern at another company where he also is an consultant on Magento platform websites. Fortunately he didn’t told all the advantages of Magento, giving me the turn to do it;)

I think the success of Magento is also in stimulated by the website magentocommerce.com. The screencasts and webinars I listened were very clear to understand for me as a student, as for the marketers and shop owners with less technical knowledge. I will keep following the screencasts and discovering newer features in my favorite webshop solution.

No related posts.

Lesson 4: Official Documentation

Voskan Martirosian — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 10:00:47 +0000

It’s important to know all about the features of Magento, what it can and cannot do and where you can refer to when you or clients have questions about Magento. So for this lesson, you’ll start to discover all things that make Magento one of the coolest products out there. We start by looking at some video’s and reading Magento documentation.

Official Guides

These are the guides provided by Magento Inc. aimed at the users of the system: you and your clients. I would advice to always provide your clients with these as a backup reference.

Magento User Guide (ebook and print format available)
Magento Enterprise User Guide (ebook)

Books

Magento Beginner’s Guide (ebook and print format available)
Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook (ebook and print format available)

Screencasts

At the moment there are 29 (mainly non-technical) screencasts available with over 1 hour and 45 minutes aimed at explaining specific Magento features, both frontend and backend. Great for getting a glimpse on what Magento can do and to see it live in action. Go to the Magento Screencasts.

Webinars

Webinars are live seminars, but online. Many of these are recorded so you can also see them afterwards: at the moment there are 31 webinars available in the webinar archive, all around 30-60 minutes in length. Some of them are aimed at development, you can skip those. Although some are a little outdated, most will contain quite interesting information.

Tasks

Because this is quite a heavy lesson with much reading and watching, you will have two weeks for this lesson.

Read the Official Guides
View all screencasts
See if you can get your hand on the sales tactics book and start reading it.
Watch some of the webinars. It’s way to much to watch all at once, but try to view a couple you find interesting for this lesson. For the following weeks, watch one every week until you’ve seen them all.

No related posts.

Feedback 3: Magento Extensions

Voskan Martirosian — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:41:21 +0000

This assignment for week 3 of the Magento Course was:

Make a whitepaper ‘Choosing a Magento extension’ for clients. Make it a step-by-step process for (new) Magento webshop owners on how to choose an extension, what to look for, and what the things are that they need to take into account for implementation (including costs).

So here it is:

Before choosing an extension it’s important to think about the present processes you’re shop will contain. The best way to do that is making of a flowchart where you step by step can write the processes and the possibilities in your shop.

As I want to inform more types of shops in my post, I will not show an example of a method for choosing the right extensions, but will write a step by step guide that will involve the most types of shops.

Step 1

Make a wish list of tasks you would like to do by your customers. As you’ve read in Guido’s post, the only way to know which extensions you really need is thinking about the features and comparing them with the present features of Magento.

So if you want to know which extensions you need, you’ll first ask which possibilities are standard Magento. The list below will help you to exclude many extensions, because they are just part standard Magento installation.

In standard Magento frontend your customers can online:

Look, compare, review, email products & add to wish list
Add products to cart, fill in the discount codes, choose shipment methods
Register, edit their account details, choose their language & subscribe for newsletter
Search in the website, look for (popular) tags, choose options in community poll

In standard Magento backend you (as a shop owner) can:

Manage orders, taxes, look at invoices, shipments, transactions
Manage products, categories, subcategories, attributes, attribute sets, search tags, product URL’s
Manage customers, groups
Create shopping cart & catalog price rules
Basic newsletter options, basic CMS
Extended reports by customers/products/search tags/reviews
Customer segmentation (Enterprise users)

Step 2

Go to http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect and search at the right panel named ‘By Categories’ for an additional features you would like to install & use in your shop. Here are two examples:

Canonical URL for Magento

FREE

This extension adds the new canonical links to the head of your Magento pages, for a more in-depth explanation. It makes for search engines easier connect your shop with social media, make your shop better accessible via Google. 13466 downloads, 50 reviews.

Advanced Reports

$129.00 (CE), $489.00 (EE)

Advanced Reports extension for Magento helps you to improve the functionality of native Magento reports and create a complete picture of your business situation.

Step 3

Contact your shop developer to ask the consequences of installing the extension into your shop.

Some extensions can cause problems in compilation with another extensions, Magento versions and hosting providers. The last one is one of the important things you have to think about. The hosting provider. Should you get enough support, is the up time high and are the specialized (experienced) in Magento?

You will also have to ask the price of implementation (how many hours) your developer will spend during installing and configuring the extension.

So collect as many information you can about the extension before using it.
Also don’t bother to take a look on the extension owner’s website to read more about him, his extensions and read the FAQs on his webpage.
After installing the extension you will need some support (including user guide) to use it.
Check the availability of support before choosing it.

Step 4

If you are done with the first 3 steps, it’s time to contact your developer to purchase (if it’s not free) the extension and begin with implementation on your development environment.

Read the user guide before using the extension in Magento
Contact your developer to fix some bugs or errors you found in the extension (if any).
Place a review on Magento Connect website to help another shop owners & developers make a choice.

Lesson 3: Magento Extensions

Guido Jansen — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 07:22:09 +0000

Last week in Lesson 2: Magento ecosystem I mentioned Magento Connect: the extension database for Magento connect. As you subscribed to the RSS feed, you’ve seen that 32 new extensions were added to the database. My feed reader shows an average of 44,1 posts (= new extensions) per week so this was a relatively ‘quiet’ week for Magento Connect…

This week I’d like to dig a little deeper into the use of Magento extensions: the peaces of code with which you can extend Magento’s own functionality.

In my opinion, the extendability of Magento itself and the existence of a marketplace filled with many (4600+) extensions is a big part of the success of Magento. The same is true for systems like WordPress, Joomla and also for the iPhone with its Appstore. But this also creates a problem for us as advisors. Clients might see certain functionality available as an extension and immediately assume this to be 1) free or very cheap to implement and 2) easily to integrate with their current shop en extensions. Sometimes that’s true, most often, there’s a little more to it…

Quality indicators

How to assess the quality of an extension?

Look for the website of the developer. Is he focused on Magento or is he a Jack of all trades?
How many extensions did he developed?
When was the last time those extensions were updated? Do they work with the latest Magento version?
If your client is on the Professional or Enterprise edition: does it work with those Magento versions?
Look at the reviews and the forums. Are their many complaints and bug reports? Are messages mainly positive or negative? And how does the developer respond to those messages?
Is their some form of (commercial) support available?
Give it to your developer (if you’re not one yourself) to assess it’s code quality.

Other considerations

If the quality checked out that’s great! But not enough for a ‘go’ on implementation. Here are some other considerations to be made:

Does the extension do what your client wants it to do? Does it do less, does it do much more or does it do things different (all three options can be a problem). Let your client in on this because he’s (hopefully) the best person to tell you what he needs and doesn’t need.
You develop a Magento shop for your client. But if you (or your client) installs extensions, who’s responsible for the correct working of the extension, the compatibility with other extensions an upgrades? Is it your problem to fix within the project or on an hourly basis? Or is it the primary responsibility of the 3rd party developer? Discuss this carefully with your clients before installing any 3rd party extensions.
Magento Community is a free product, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost any money to research, implement, training, host, maintain, configure and adjust. The same goes for ‘free’ and commercial extensions, don’t forget these ‘hidden’ costs and try to explain these costs to your client.
Less is more. Also when it comes to extensions. I’ve seen sites come by with 30+ extensions from many different developers. These sites are horrible to maintain, horrible to upgrade an it’s almost impossible to keep the extensions compatible with each other. Only implement what is absolutely need to either 1) sell more or 2) make the backoffice processes much easier. If it doesn’t do one of those, why use it?
I hope this one is obvious, but let’s emphasize on it once again: never install new extensions in a live environment. That’s where the development environment is for so use that. Oh, and make a backup before you do so.
Often, if Magento doesn’t provide a certain functionality, the options are A) develop functionality on our own or B) use an extension.

As you might’ve noticed: it’s actually a lot about communication with your client and managing expectations. If you get that right, you’re halfway there.

Tasks for this week:

Make a whitepaper ‘Choosing a Magento extension’ for clients. Use the information above, supplemented with your own findings. Make it a step-by-step process for (new) Magento webshop owners on how to choose an extension, what to look for, and what the things are that they need to take into account for implementation (including costs).

Feedback 2: The Magento Ecosystem

Guido Jansen — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:33:37 +0000

The advantages of an open source system are unlimited. People all around the world are working hard to create more valuable extensions, adding new features and enhancements. After my first Magento course, I thought ‘So the developers create it, and the retailers use it!’. The second course let me know I was wrong.

Integrating Magento in an organization is only the first step. The sales managers have to think very hard how to get more customers on their websites, to increase the conversation rate. Or they just need to follow some valuable information on the blogs like Inchoo, BlueAcorn, Redstage or Visualwebsiteoptimizer. I was really surprised when I read some very interesting articles about enhancements of check-out, usability, Magento Connect extensions and different research methods. All these sites I mentioned give us very important information about ‘how to sell more’ for free! Tens of Magento best experts share their experience with sales managers, consultants and students like me!

Of course I am going to subscribe to all these websites and read the ‘Best Practices’ of the Magento Experts. My bookmarks-bar is already full with feeds, so it will take some to read them all ;)