I’m getting rid of them all now at very competitive prices! It’s first come first serve so don’t miss out on the right domain name for your project!

Here’s the entire list:

Templates/CMS related domain names:

• actiontemplate.com – $499
• cmsaction.com – $499
• templatecms.com – $499
• templewebsite.com – $499

Magento related domain names:

• magentoaction.com – $499
• magentoqa.com – $499
• magxprt.com – $99
• markento.com – $999

Web related domain names (ideal for web apps or web firms):

• netisite.com – $499
• empoweb.com – $499
• enpoweb.com – $499
• websitesphere.com – $499

Awesome misc domain names:

• rainspat.com – $499
• spin57.com – $499

Contact me if you’re interested in any of these domain names for sale – I expect to get a lot of interest so I’d recommend hurrying!

Note: prices are non-negotiable .

My other projects are now for sale as well so feel free to reach out if you think you might be interested.

Follow my new personal Twitter account @noamkerner and stay tuned with my future adventures!

I’m always traveling a lot but being on the road is certainly no excuse for not keeping you all up to date so here’s a new edition of our product blog series!

What’s new with Ultimento:

Ultimento’s showcase series is growing – highlighting several new live Magento Ecommerce sites running on Ultimento every week. We’re proud of what our customers do with the best Magento theme ever created .

The highly anticipated Ultimento 2.0 was released a couple of months ago, more recently followed by Ultimento 2.1 and 2.2. These regular free updates ensure that Ultimento remains at the very top of the Ecommerce space.

Ultimento’s affiliate program is continuing to break records – if you’re an affiliate marketer, or interested in becoming one go ahead and sign up!

Ultimento is featured on the official Magento Connect’s home page and on the Themes category page!

Oh and today you could even get $100 off Ultimento Max! Valid until midnight today only (10/31/11) so act now!

What’s new with Magentist:

Magentist continues to lead the way with its Magento themes and Magento extensions! There’s a 2-for-1 permanent promo on top of which you can get any extension at 50% when purchased with any theme. Now how good is that?

Magentist introduced the only Magento checkout extension that’s worth your while – check it out!

The Magento Pack is the ultimate pack of Magento themes and extensions available, bundled in a convenient pack at over 80% off!! Don’t miss out.

What’s new with Magento Expert:

Magento Expert is continuing to be the most vibrant community powered website in the Magento community. It’s not really a product of ours so talking more about it doesn’t belong in this product blog update but we’re happy with it’s continuous growth since my last update on it 6 months ago.

That’s about it for now!

I wrote a few articles on the question of the acquisition by Ebay and since I’ve recently been asked if I had further thoughts on the topic I decided to share them here.

If you’re in the Ecommerce business and there’s just one post you’re going to read today – make it this one!

Magento’s growth and the connection with eBay

Ebay first acquired 49% of Magento back over a year and a half ago. The exponential growth of the Magento market jumped to new levels after the initial investment from Ebay and is now going even stronger since the acquisition a few months ago (we see that in traffic, market demand, and sales).

The market is booming with an ever wider audience, more traction, etc… My take on this is that this market will continue to grow and that companies who are able to position themselves in a privileged position (such as our Magento Network with its reputation and history) will greatly benefit from the integration with Ebay’s various projects under X.Commerce.

The future of Magento as a stand alone platform

It’s been clear for over a year and a half that Ebay was going to purchase Magento eventually (after acquiring 49% of it) as part of Ebay’s efforts to dominate the Ecommerce space. It’s also clear that Magento will remain a stand alone solution while at the same time being at the core of other offerings such as X.commerce, MagentoGo, etc.

There are hundreds of thousands of merchants who use Magento – and that number is growing steadily every day. Ebay’s strategy is to appeal to all possible audiences by offering different products, starting with Ebay itself for tiny merchants, hosted solutions such as MagentoGo for small businesses, Magento Community edition for small to large businesses, and Magento Professional and Enterprise editions as well as CGI Commerce (which was also recently acquired by Magento) to very large merchants. It seems that all of the above will be under the X.Commerce banner. Ebay also owns Paypal.

To me, Magento will continue to thrive as of in itself – much like Paypal, Ebay, or CGI Commerce will continue to thrive independently. After all, no one would throw away a booming market that’s fully branded, extremely profitable, and has millions of users (hundreds of thousands of active merchants). All of these components will continue as stand alone solutions that are also integrated into the X.Commerce vision.

In addition, since the first investment by Ebay Magento has made tremendous efforts to make the platform’s new features more and more stable in terms of compatibility with previous releases. And that trend has been very beneficial (basically since Magento 1.4). That means that merchants will continue to have a clear and simple upgrade paths when Magento continues to evolve with the upcoming versions, without affecting 3rd party products and store customization.

Magento’s growth continues

Take a look at the Google Trends graph for Magento vs Ecommerce (note the recent growth since May which emphasizes the added traction that Ebay brings to the platform):

Another interesting point is that there seems to be a recent growing trend of companies chosing to enter the Magento market. Here’s for example a recent press release on a business acquiring a small niche Magento extension shop: http://www.pr.com/press-release/340285.

If your business is in the Ecommerce space, I hope this gets you thinking .

Related articles mentioned in this post:

• Now is the time to invest in Magento
• Magento – eBay: the saga continues
• Our Magento network’s traffic and sale data

You see, when you’re on a phone call or meet with people, everyone involved is “stuck”. You can’t take your time to reply, think about what you want to say properly, do some research, or prioritize.

A phone call or meeting interrupts your work flow, disturbs your focus, and puts you in a position where you have less control over your time and resources.

You can choose to get off your email while you’re working, ignore chat windows, etc… When using passive communication methods you can prioritize and decide what requires your attention more urgently and what doesn’t matter as much.

Passive communication methods are more respectful of people’s time and priorities. They’re also usually much more efficient – people tend to be more concise, precise, and effective when they have to write things down.

You can also keep track of your conversations and exchanges and refer back to them down the road.

Of course don’t apply this to your personal life .

Some related posts in this Productivity Tips series:

• Focus on the next step
• Work when you’re productive

The problem is that most checkout extensions are actually harmful to conversion rates and checkout usability.

All Magento checkout extensions I’ve seen out there are very bad in terms of load speed, conversions, and stability.

Don’t combine checkout steps into a single crowded step

First of all I have no idea why but all checkout extensions I’ve ever seen 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 what I mean:

Even the savviest users get confused with such a layout! Not to mention most internet shoppers eager to complete their purchase quickly and move on. I mean – 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!

There are a ton of checkout extensions but somehow they all combine all checkout steps into one crowded page with 3 columns. It doesn’t get any worse in terms of usability and conversions!

Don’t overwrite Magento’s functionality

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

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

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 – actually slowing down 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!

Well, that’s expected to anyone with any sense of design and usability.

Look for an alternative

You can stick with the native Magento checkout functionality and that’s fine. Except for the very first step which is very confusing to users:

Fortunately this first step can be easily and seamlessly removed with the Optimized Checkout Extension without affecting any of the checkout functionality and all its possible scenarios.

If you want users to sign up for your newsletter at checkout you can incorporate this very simple extension which adds a newsletter check-box with a bunch of possible scenarios you can configure in the admin.

Links mentioned in this post:

• Google Website Optimizer
• A/B Testing the One Step Checkout Magento Extension
• Magento Conversion Rate Optimization – Cart and Checkout
• Optimized Checkout Extension
• Newsletter Checkout Extension
  

All 3 sites provide products and services for the popular Magento Ecommerce platform and I thought it’d be interested to share some of our traffic and sales data and the trend they show over the past 7 months.

30,000 unique monthly visitors across the sites + continued growth:

Big monthly income across the network + continued growth:

Though July is often considered a “low season” month for most businesses, our traffic and profit data continue to show the same steep growth. With the recent release of Ultimento 2.0 the future is looking brighter than ever and profits are continuing to rise steeply.

This data reinforces what I wrote recently about Magento’s growth (since the acquisition by eBay) . Also take a look at the Google Trends graph for Magento vs Ecommerce (note the recent growth since May):

I hope someone finds these interesting!

Related posts:

• There’s never been a better time to invest in Magento
• Magento + eBay – the saga continues

I also shared how at the time Noam Design was a web design company we got so many inquires from people with “great ideas” who never do anything with them (not to mention the guys who want to sign an NDA).

More recently I’ve talked about how “innovative” ideas are usually just more of the same.

Don’t talk it to death. Just do it.

Now do yourself a favor – if you have an idea or a project or something you want to do in life, please – don’t talk it to death. Just do it.

There isn’t anything to plan since planning really is just guessing. If you want to involve other people in your project there’s no need to schedule a time to talk about it.

Just commit to your goals and get going. Right now .

Readers who liked this post also liked:

• What are your ambitions?
• Starting a business takes a tremendous amount of energy

Sure you can follow their respective Twitter accounts (@ultimag and @magentist) and subscribe to their respective blogs (Ultimento’s and Magentist’s).

But sometimes it’s nice to have everything in one place . So we’re starting a product blog series where we’ll post short monthly digests with the highlights of the past month. Just continue to stay tuned to this blog (either via RSS, on Twitter, or via our monthly newsletter) and once a month we’ll publish a short summary of what we’ve been up to with our projects.

Here’s the first edition:

Ultimento

Ultimento 1.6 release notes

Just a month after the release of Ultimento 1.5 here we are proud to present Ultimento 1.6! Read the release notes

New free category landing pages!

It’s known that category landing pages are a great tool to promote your catalog, run promotions, and provide direct access to specific sub categories and products that yield a good ROI. View screenshots

Sneak peek: new Magento theme included in the next Ultimento version

Hey guys! We’re currently working on a new Magento theme that will be included in the next Ultimento release and I wanted to share some screenshots and maybe even get some feedback . What Ultimento’s new Magento theme looks like

Check out Ultimento’s raving customer reviews

I love getting feedback from customers who use Ultimento – whether on the public discussion, via the private help desk, or through the 3rd party review system that’s implemented on the official Magneto website. Check out the raving reviews

Support scope on Ultimento’s Magento themes and extensions

We give truly awesome support on Ultimento’s Magento themes and Magento Extensions. We just love getting these thank you emails with praises and exclamation marks! How we deal with the few crazy customers

Ultimento 1.5 release notes

The highly anticipated Ultimento 1.5 is here!! I’m really excited about this new release – as always we’ve included tons of new features and major improvements, as well as more improvements to the code and further optimization for maximum speed, SEO, and conversions. Here are the highlights for this new major release: Read the release notes

Free Magento extension: Disable Admin Notifications

Tired of all these popup notifications that show up when you login your Magento admin? This free Magento extension will give you control over whether or not they appear! You can now easily disable admin notifications in your Magento. Download the free extension

Magentist

Google Analytics tracking bugs

Many Magento users report that their store’s traffic and ecommerce conversions are not properly tracked by Google Analytics. How to properly implement Google Analytics tracking

How to fix Magento’s currency switcher bug

Magento’s currency switcher won’t work on the products shown on the homepage? Get the fix now

Newsletter subscribe at checkout

Dramatically increase newsletter subscription rates with our newest extension! Newsletter Checkout Option Magento Extension! What it does

Discussion plugin update v1.1

We’re excited to announce a new release of the Discussion Extension for Magento! It’s faster

Sometimes we’re so deep into whatever it is we’re doing that we forget we even had ambitions. You know, the “when I grow up” type of ambitions. The “this is how I want to live my life” type of ambitions.

We all know that “the time is now”. Right? I mean, didn’t you just nod your head? We know that whatever we do right now is what defines what we’re doing now that we’re grown-ups. Obvious. But we tend to forget.

Make an effort to remember that how you spend your time every hour of every day is what shapes your life. There is nothing else. This is how you live your life. Then ask yourself: is that what I want? If it’s not, do something about it. Right now.

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Magento has recently been acquired by eBay and the news have shaken the entire eCommerce industry. Businesses that grew around the Magento ecosystem are worried (again) – but do they need to?

Back a year ago or so

eBay was the first and only investor in Magento, taking over a minority stake of the company (49%). Following the investment there was a lot of worries and rant throughout the Magento community. Users want a platform that’s reliable, transparent and open source and developers want a predictable roadmap. In short, people don’t like risks.

Since eBay’s first investment, Magento only grew bigger and bigger and its ecosystem has only become more profitable. This is good news for everybody – if Magento and eBay make money – they’ll keep investing in the platform which in turns will attract more publicity and traction. And that means more business for 3rd party developers and better products for end users.

Today with eBay, Paypal and X.commerce

Now with the new Xcommerce plans, people are questioning whether or not it’s a good time to stick with Magento.

For sure there’s a risk. How will the eBay acquisition influence my Magento business? Should I invest more in the platform or rather look to diversify my focus? Is it worth it to develop new products for Magento? But where there’s risk there’s also potential – in fact the greater the potential, the greater the risk. Potential and risk often go together.

If you’re in the Magento industry today and are able to establish yourself, this can mean great success down the road as Magento’s audience continues to widen and you’ll be in a privileged position to leverage the new Magento/eBay future offerings.

So as @magentist tweeted recently “stop worrying about eBay, Xcommerce, Magento 2, and what not! There’s never been a better time to invest in Magento so get back to work .”

I run a Magento business that’s made of several branches including Ultimento and Magentist and we focus entirely on the free and open source Community Edition of Magento. We’ve been with Magento since the very beginning back in 2008  and when the paid editions came out, I made a decision to only support the CE – at least for a while. We grew our business around the CE and the market grew so steadily that we didn’t feel threatened at all by the other Magento offerings. Quite the opposite! Today we’re more successful than ever and the new acquisition of Magento by eBay is actually helping bring ever more users on board with Magento. I see it in our sales every day and I bet the trend is only going to continue!

Read more about how the Magento community is reacting to the acquisition:

• Magento, X.commerce & the community comments on the webshopapps.com blog
• eBay acquires Magento – comments on the inchoo.net blog

For a while you simply pay more attention to something you were before overlooking or ignoring.

Over the last few years, I spent a lot of energy thinking about my business strategy and direction. But the last couple of months have been particularly intense for me, not giving me time to sit back and reflect much. A few days ago I realized I haven’t been paying enough attention to where I was going.

And now it seems that everything I do, read, or hear is related to “where I’m going with my business”! This morning I stumbled upon this:

“Starting a business takes a tremendous amount of energy — far more energy than most people who have been employees all their life typically even imagine — so it’s really important to pay attention to what it is you’re pouring your energy into. It needs to line up with what you want your life to look like.

So with that, I think I would say one of my axioms these days is this: Make sure you own your business, rather than your business owning you. There’s an article I read about once a year that relates to that: “The Good Life and How to Get It.”

Take retreats, by yourself or perhaps your spouse or business partner if it’s appropriate, regularly. I can’t say strongly enough how important it is to pay attention to where it is you’re going. If you don’t step out of the intense stream of the day-to-day, it’s very easy to find yourself on a path you don’t really even want to be on.”

By Donovan McNutt, Founder & President of GeekDesk, on his company’s story published yesterday by 37signals.

That’s right on the spot for me .

Readers who read this quote also read:

• Steve Jobs on how to live before you die
• Productivity comes from interactivity and the exchange of ideas and talents

In sports, collaboration is usually in-person. Professional tennis players or runners have an entire team of people training with them. They “collaborate” with training partners, share their efforts with friends and family, and they eventually “publish” their results when they go out to compete.

Involving other people and collaborating requires a context where not only that’s possible – but also emphasized. It’s hard to collaborate via email or telephone. Telephone bothers every body and often interrupts your work flow. Emails get quickly buried and are just not made for collaboration.

How can you create the right context for collaboration, sharing, and publishing in your business? Give it some thoughts.

Readers who found this article interesting also read:

• Commit to your goals
• Break ‘em down to small actionable chunks
• It’s all about the ingredients – not the recipe

Break your goals down to small achievable chunks

In my work I try to break my goals down to small tasks/actions that are concrete, practical, and somehow defined in time. Something like “today I need to do this small thing and that other task”. For example if you’re goal is to “get fit”, an actionable task can be to “go to the gym today at 5pm”. But in fact, even that’s not concrete enough. It’s hard to motivate yourself to just “go to the gym”. But if you have a very specific workout planned for the day – such as 4 series of pushups (40 pushups in the first series, 30 second break, 20 pushups, 30 second break, 15 pushups, 30 second break, and 12 pushups), 3 series of pull ups, and jogging twice around the lake in the park. That’s an actionable task you can accomplish and get done. And so on.

Since you also need to commit to every task you create like this, it helps to write them down somewhere somehow. Athletes often have a weekly workout agenda printed out on a schedule.

Try to apply this concept to your business. Every day.

Other posts in this series:

• Prioritize and differentiate
• Don’t work when you’re not productive
• Get off email, Twitter, and Facebook
• How this productivity tip series started

The very first step towards achieving anything in life is realizing you want to get there. You don’t go on a hike if you don’t want to climb the mountain and get to the top. Once you’ve discovered you have a goal – you need to commit to it in some way or another. Writing it down somewhere is one way.

So committing to a goal is the very first step – with the prerequisite that you realize you have a goal of course .

Check out these related posts I wrote recently:

• An alternative to organization and planning
• Know how to prioritize