100 Magento Videos & Tutorials

Posted by Anthony Latona | Posted in General | Posted on 16-04-2010

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Learning Magento can be a tough process. Luckily, over the past few years as Magento has gained popularity, the community has grown and contributed incredible amounts of information about the program.

We looked around the web and found 100 videos that showcase various features and additions to Magento that can help you install, set up and work with Magento E-Commerce. We had to put them in 9 different pages
since loading 100 embeded videos was taking so long. Each page has a category or 2, and a bunnch of videos!

Hopefully this will serve as a resource in the future as you work with Magento, or as an inspiration to get started! If you like this type of post, and would like more like it or anything specific, leave a comment below! Thanks!

And if you have any questions, feel free to get in tough with us regarding Magento Development or Magento Support!

Categories:

General Walkthrough (19) | Magento Installation Videos (7) | Advanced Installation (10) | Content Management (12) | Specific Extensions (24) | Payment Related (6) | Product Management (17) | Shipping (3) | Template Installation (1) | User Management (1)

General Magento Walkthrough

This set of videos show basic information about Magento setup, configuration and features.

Magento – Frontend Tour

Magento DataFlow

Magento – Backend Tour

SiteGround Magento Multiple Stores Tutorial

Magento Administration Screencast Part 1

Magento Administration Screencast Part 1 from dZero Design on Vimeo.

Introducing the Magento Enterprise Edition

Magento Enterprise Edition – Content Staging and Merging

Enterprise Edition: Security, Permission Roles, Encryption, PA-DSS and Logging

Designers Guide: Creating Themes

Magento Theming

ScreenCast: Magento Reward Points System

Magento: Editing Text Pages

Transactional E-mail

Enterprise Edition: Private Sales

Search

Screencast: Introducing Magento Widgets

Disable Caching During Site Development

Disable Caching During Site Development from steve warshaw on Vimeo.

Magento Admin System – Video Guide

Magento – a quick review of the admin area from Shayne Sanderson on Vimeo.

Maximizing Magento Webinar: Getting the Most out of Multi-Store Management

Magento – How to Change the Favicon

Posted by Antonio David | Posted in General | Posted on 13-04-2010

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Changing a Magento site’s favicon is one of the most frequently overlooked tasks.  But it’s just as important as customizing the logo, implementing a unique theme, and changing email templates.  Best of all, it’s the easiest thing to do.  Once you have your favicon, it’s just a matter of uploading it to the right locations.

Where do I upload my favicon?

Traditionally, we used to be able to place the favicon in the web root and it would automatically be picked up by the browser.  With Magento however, this “default web root” convention is overridden by new paths, as defined by two <link> tags in the document <head>.  We can discover what those new paths are by simply looking at the page source.

Look for:

<link rel="icon" href="…" type="image/x-icon" />
and <link rel="shortcut icon" href="…" type="image/x-icon" />

These (look at the href) are where you should upload the favicon.

How come I can’t see my favicon?

There are a few reasons why, even after uploading your favicon to the aforementioned locations, you still see the default Magento favicon.

  • Servers may cache favicons – If you’re running an Apache web server, try reversing these “Cache Your Favicon to Speed Up Your Site” steps.
  • Browsers may cache favicons – Try viewing your site using a browser that hasn’t yet visited the site.  If it works in a different browser, but not your original one, then you have a browser-cache issue. Since the process of clearing favicon cache varies from browser to browser, check out “Clear the Browser Cache to Display Your Favicon”.

Selling & Upselling with Psychology & Human Behavior

Posted by Anthony Latona | Posted in General, Marketing | Posted on 05-04-2010

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Ted.com is one of my favorite websites ever. The entire site is filled with some of the most interesting, captivating, thought provoking and mind blowing presentations from the world’s top geniuses and experts. I highly recommend clicking around Ted.com and learning something…

I recently watched this particular video called, “Are we in control of our own Decisions?” by Dan Ariely. Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist and wrote the book “Predictably Irrational” (Official Site). His TED Talk is brilliant and has a few ideas that we can use in our online marketing and on our e-commerce websites.

Watch the Video here:

Default Options

One of my favorite takeaways from this video was the idea that a majority of people will simply agree with or comply with the default option. This was evident in the studies that showed the countries with high and low rates of citizens willing to donate their organs. If the question was, “check here to opt in” the country had a low acceptance rate, and when the question was “check here to opt out” the acceptance rate was extremely high.

organDonators

How can you use this in your marketing?

You can use it in an upsell process. You have to be VERY careful, and transparent when you’re doing it so customers don’t become alienated by your website or flood your customer service number with complaints. Don’t just add extra cost to the checkout, make sure it’s apparent to the customer that it’s happen. There are many marketers and checkout processes that do (usually in the domain registration space (GoDaddy is king), web hosting and info marketing).

Think about this. A product is in your inventory and listed on your site for $10. After the customer gets the product in their cart, and gets to the checkout there is an automatic upsell before the order confirmation. This upsell charges $X that might change the shipping or improve the actual the item in some way by adding a feature, it could be a warranty, insurance, or even an extra product (for example, if you sell glasses, upsell a cleaning and repair kit). If the upsell’s price is marginal (based on the price of the original item, probably adding around 10% – 20% to the order), and the upsell is included by default, you might expect a low rate of opt out based on the data shown by Ariely in the video.

optinOptout

The upsell should be very obvious though so the customer can easily choose to opt out. Just imagine all of your order values increasing by adding in a few upsell options in your checkout and making them the default choice.

Price Anchoring (forcing a Good Deal)

The other takeaway that I thought was excellent and applicable was the price anchoring technique that The Economist magazine uses to drastically increase the number of subscribers that would take a higher priced item. They offer a web only, print only and a web + print option. The Web Only option is $59, the print only is $125, and the web + print is $125. Look at the results that Dan Ariely got from polling students at MIT, with the print only and without the print only options.

The results when the print only deal was an option:

withcombo

and the results without the print only option:

noweb

This is incredible! When people think they are getting a good deal, they are likely to take the good deal but when there are two distinct and different options, price usually wins. Try positioning your products, shipping options or upsells in a way that your customers are getting something for nothing or getting a great deal… A/B test and see what happens. Brainstorm how you can do it like The Economist Magazine did it.

Think about Amazon.com – they offer free “super saver” shipping on any orders over $25. I know that I’ve added an extra product or two into my cart just to get over the minimum price, usually sending it to over $30. I doubt I’m the only one… have you ever done the same thing? This increases the average order value for Amazon which improves their marketing ROI and average $/Visitor among other important stats.

Thanks for reading! Have any feedback or some other ideas from the video? Leave some comments below!

What is Your Favorite Open Source E-Commerce System? Vote Here!

Posted by Anthony Latona | Posted in General | Posted on 30-03-2010

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What is your Favorite Open Source E-Commerce System? Over the past few months, I’ve seen a few new systems emerge and they are rapidly gaining traction, building developer communities, and introducing new extensions, capabilities and features. Obviously, we’re big fans of Magento mainly because of the scalability, community and out-of-the-box feature set (as well as it’s current popularity).

As newer systems become more popular, we would like to hear your feedback as to which you like, or think can compete with Magento’s popularity and growth.

After you vote for your favorite system, leave a comment below letting us know why it’s your favorite. Was it a great experience with a client? Are you currently using the system to run an e-commerce business?

On the other hand, you might be a fan of a hosted solution like Shopify or Volusion, or a multi-channel solution like GSI or Websphere – we would be happy to hear about those as well! Leave your comments below!

What is Your Favorite Open Source E-Commerce System?

View Results

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If you want more information about any of these systems, here are short descriptions links to their official sites.

Cube Cart
http://www.cubecart.com/
“CubeCart is an “out of the box” ecommerce shopping cart software solution which has been written to run on servers that have PHP & MySQL support. With CubeCart you can quickly setup a powerful online store which can be used to sell digital or tangible products to new and existing customers all over the world.”

Magento
http://www.magentocommerce.com
“Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform built on open-source technology that provides online merchants with unprecedented flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their eCommerce store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface features powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by Varien’s support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.”

Open Cart
http://www.opencart.com
“OpenCart is an open source PHP-based online shopping cart system. A robust e-commerce solution for Internet merchants with the ability to create their own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost.”

OSCommerce
http://www.oscommerce.com/
“osCommerce has attracted a large growing e-commerce community that consists of over 231,400 store owners and developers who support each other and extend osCommerce Online Merchant with add-ons being contributed on a daily basis. To date there are over 5,900 add-ons that are available for free to customize osCommerce Online Merchant online stores and to help increase sales.”

Prestashop
http://www.prestashop.com
“PrestaShop™ is a professional e-Commerce shopping cart software that you can download and use for free. The big advantage of open-source software: you’re never ‘locked’ to expensive commercial software. Our dedicated team and growing user community join forces to fix bugs and add new functionality at a rate proprietary software companies can rarely claim. Join the Open Source revolution!”

Spree E-Commerce
http://spreecommerce.com
“Spree capitalizes on the dynamic nature of the Ruby programming language to provide the most flexible commerce platform available. Spree has been designed from the ground up to be as open and extensible as possible. You no longer have to be frustrated with the limited set of choices provided by most platforms. Spree is maintained by an active team of developers who continue to refine the code based on lessons learned from the challenges of real world deployments”

UberCart
http://www.ubercart.org
“Ubercart is an exciting open source e-commerce package that fully integrates your online store with Drupal, the leading open source content management system. This is a killer combination for anyone looking to build a community around a product, sell access to premium content, offer paid file downloads, and much much more!”

Zen Cart
http://www.zen-cart.com
“Zen Cart™ truly is the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. The ecommerce web site design program is being developed by a group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think ecommerce web design could be and should be done differently.”

Magento’s Vision for Open Source eCommerce

Posted by Anthony Latona | Posted in General | Posted on 24-03-2010

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This is an old video of Roy Ruben from Varien talking about his vision of open source eCommerce and Magento. It was shot almost 3 years ago and shows the motivations of the company behind the system.

I first saw this over at TechCrunch’s article about Magento’s Funding.

The best part of that article is the end where they mention, “The roadmap for the future is apparently paved with additional products, with a number of “Mobile Commerce, Saas offering and other products/services” coming later this year.”. We can’t wait to see where the investment money goes and hope that the rumors of a mobile commerce app is very exciting.

Do you think that the guys at Varien were successful in their vision over the past 3 years? Leave a comment below!