Also you need to plan out your MARKETING! The last thing that you want to do is stay up all night on November, 23 trying to write email copy and change your AdWords ads to holiday specific text.  Start planning now, and you'll definitely have a more profitable season with much less stress. 

So that's the overview about why, but let's go over the direction as well as the specific things you can do to make your holiday season more successful.  We'll go over checklists, specific ideas and tactics to make your store ready for the 2010 holidays.

Design Changes
You might want to change some of the main site graphics to seasonal, relevant images.  If you have pictures of people within the design, make sure they're wearing coats, and you can throw some snowflakes in the header to make it feel like winter.

Sales
Of course you're going to have a holiday sale.  But which works better, 10% off your order over $X or Free Shipping?  Start testing now! Something as simple as the wording of a deal can effect your conversion rate drastically.

Gift Wrapping
You can offer gift wrapping as an upsell during checkout.  If you're going to offer this option though, it's important to plan ahead and get this process worked out within your current procedures.

Delivery Schedules / Deadlines
You can create a sense of urgency if you put the proper messaging on your site.  For instance, "Order before December 20th for Guaranteed Arrival before Christmas!" This short message, repeated throughout the website, could be the push that someone needs to get through the checkout.

Updated Returns Policy
When it comes to gifts, one of the main concerns that people have when buying online is possibly having to return the item.  They might be afraid that the clothing won't fit properly or the item will arrive defective.  Make sure that your return policy is easy to find and easy to understand.

Add Video to Product Descriptions
One of the main reasons that customers abandon product pages is because they didn't get a good enough "look" at the product.  If you have a short video of someone reviewing the item or simply demonstrating it, it builds confidence with the potential customer and differentiates you from your competitors.  Anything that you can do that will get someone to push "Add To Cart" is crucial.

Beef Up Customer Support
Make sure that you have enough staff to take calls, answer questions, and train them to sell!  You should have multiple ways for visitors to contact you online via toll-free number, email, chat, twitter or even fax.  It can't hurt to have the pathways to contact you because if someone wants to call you, they are very close to purchasing.  On the other hand, you also want to have support for current/past customers because that is what sparks people to talk about their experiences.  Think about how Zappos.com because so popular from having incredible customer service.

New Banner Ads
If you advertise with Banner Ads, you should start brainstorming some new designs.  Also start thinking of new places to advertise, and new media buying strategies that can drive tons of traffic to your site. 

New Adwords  (PPC) Keywords / Ads
Don't wait until the last minute to add new keywords into your campaigns that are seasonally specific.  Also, try testing out new Ad Copy that has holiday style to it. Add in a coupon code, mention a shipping deadline or another offer. 

Gift Categories / Gift Guide
Organized your items into gift categories by person or price (Great Gifts for Mom, Dad, etc…). If you give visitors useful search options and filters, it lets them find what they want faster; speed is key during the holidays.

Affiliate Relations
If you have an affiliate program, get them excited about promoting your products.  Show them landing pages, new items and sales that they can promote before they start.  This allows super-affiliates to get banners made, plan media buys, start new PPC campaigns and test them out before it's too late. 

New Products
Do some research and figure out what types of products in your industry are going to be the popular items of the season.  If you're going to stock these items, remember there's significant work to do each time (ordering inventory, storage, photos, description, etc…).  So start the research soon so you're prepared to launch them in the Fall.

Shipping Deals
Shipping is the #1 type of sale that you can offer your visitors.  Having free shipping makes the ordering process seem more realistic and it makes the price seem more feasible (since there's no addition involved).  Another great tactic is to have Free Shipping on orders above $X.  You'll get a higher average order and happier clients.

Social Media
Start building your following now! Starting a Social Media campaign in November would be a waste of time; however if you have 5000 followers (on twitter for instance) by then you can turn it into a traffic generator, a communication/ support platform and more.  Also remember, 200 happy, engaged followers is much better than 10,000 random people. Get your following organically and you'll be much better off.

Cart Abandonment Recapture
You can automate the recapturing of an abandoned cart by sending an email to the user with the previous cart contents. 

Gift Receipts & Gift Messages
Have checkout options to add a note or gift receipt to the order.  This way, there's proof of purchase but the price isn't in the box.  It works especially well when offering gifts that are sent directly to the recipient.

Backup Server / Increased Bandwidth
If you're doing media buys and adding a huge budget to your AdWords account you might want to upgrade your web server to make sure that your site doesn't go down during periods of high traffic.

These are just a few of the things you can do to prepare your site for the holidays and increase your conversion rate. If you want a full report with over 50 site optimizations that you can use any time, holidays or not, opt in below and we'll send it right over!

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• Magento Upgrades
• Plugin installation & Configuration
• Bug fixes
• Template / Theme Tweaks
• Custom features or custom plugins and
• Switching web hosts

We don’t limit the number of issues or fixes you can submit, it’s all based on how long it takes to fix everything.

Luckily, we’re (really) good at this.

If you ever paid for a legal retainer, it’s almost exactly the same. The lawyer will deduct the hourly fee from the pre-payment whenever you need them to look over a contract or advise in any legal situation.  Redstage Magento support works the same way.  If you need help with any aspect of your Magento store, you log a ticket and we get to work.

Ok, so back to the point.  Why a retainer based system?

Deducting hourly from a retainer allows us to provide the highest level of service to our support customers.  First, the retainer doesn’t expire.  You can use 2 hours one month, take one off with no issues or tickets, and then use 5 hours the next month.  It let’s us provide a level of safety and security to the a Magento user because we’re there when you need us, just by logging a ticket.  You can have 100 issues, and it doesn’t matter since it’s all based on the time it takes to complete the tasks.  If it’s easy for us, it’s cheap for you.

We time the retainer work to the second, so the client gets the most for their money.

I apologize if I sound sales-y, but as a marketer, Magento support is a fun sale… Magento users come to us all the time after having bad experiences with developers who weren’t ready for the complexity of the Magento platform and we need to step in and help out.  It took us a couple years to become Magento masters but we’re one of the best around, so it’s fun to talk about.  Our development team likes working with Magento!  If you’ve ever searched around on twitter for Magento, the average developer is frustrated but we’ve gotten over the learning curve and know the system inside and out.

Don’t just take my word for it; we have clients who tell us things like this:

“”THANK YOU!!! We all finally feel confident that we have found the right partner for our new business.“

-Sharon, Founder, Charleston Naturally

That gives us a warm fuzzy feeling… and it proves that the retainer system works!

Now, I have to ask… If you need anything Magento related, call 1-888-335-2747 and we’ll set you up w/ a retainer, or a full project if you’re just starting out (full design & development).

I hope you understand a bit more about what we’re all about and if you have any questions, leave a comment below!

Thanks!

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Also, you can follow this list here http://twitter.com/RedstageMagento/magento-authority!

If you have any others to add to the list, leave them in the comments below!

	royrubin05 Roy Rubin
	inchoo Magento Developers | Osijek, Croatia
	YoavMagento Yoav Kutner Magento
	magento_connect Magento Connect
	magentofeeds MagentoFeeds
	magentopodcast MG-Podcast-Team | Aachen, Bayreuth
	hashMagento #magento Following
	ask_magento Reported to be inactive. Follow with Caution! Thanks Jeff!
	magento_uk Magento UK | London, UK

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• 5 Reasons Why Retailers Should Add Ecommerce to Facebook | Kyle …

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The real question is, will people impulse-buy products on their phones? Having a great interface for mobile e-commerce is awesome but will smartphone users buy clothing or books on their phone, rather than wait until they get to work or home and use a regular computer?

Maybe the real opportunity is to sell other types of products via mobile or have additional incentives to use the mobile site instead of the regular site.

What do you think? How will e-commerce website utilize this technology?

Leave a comment below!

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Their description of the new offering is:

“Magento Professional is an eCommerce platform for businesses who want to enter the world of eCommerce without the complications and long implementation cycle associated with developing a solution with Magento Community open source code. Designed for businesses who are working with a qualified Magento Solution Partner, Magento Professional has been thoroughly tested and warranted, and includes revenue-generating features not found in Magento Community.

Magento Solution Partners are able to produce Web stores that meet their clients’ unique business needs, with a clear and easy upgrade path to Magento Enterprise.”

And the cost for these features: $2,995.

Gift Certificates/Cards (Physical and Virtual)

Customers can buy physical or virtual gift certificates to your website. This is a huge feature for the holiday season, as gift cards have become very popular in the past. I know from experience! In the past 3 years I’ve gotten 3 Virtual Amazon Gift Certificates. It’s easy for a customer to use your website to buy a gift certificate and give it to a family member or friend for their Birthday or other Holiday.

Customer Store Credits

Store credit is great to manage product returns without actually having to process the monetary refund. It saves time during your back office processes as well as keeps your customer’s money in your account. The customer can use that credit at any time to buy something else on your site.

Here’s a video showing the Gift Cards and Store Credits Feature:

Reward Points System

A rewards system is a great way to entice repeat customers. It’s a known fact in marketing that it’s up to 10x easier (and less expensive) to get a customer to buy a 2nd time than it is to get them to buy the first time. A direct rewards system can make repeat customers even more likely to come back.

(you can get tons of tips like this in the quick guide in the top of the right column! Just opt in to the Newsletter!)

Strong Data Encryption

The PA-DSS requirement is coming up on July 1!

Read more about the Magento Professional Edition here.

If you want to know more about Magento Professional, please call us at 1-888-335-2747!

Anyone else pretty excited about all of this?! It’s going to be awesome to see the mobile platform and all of the possibilities! Looking forward to it, Magento!

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• Click For More

Using a template for your e-commerce site can work, it won’t work as well as if you have a Custom Magento E-Commerce Brand design. However, when you’re starting out you can use a modified template to get used to Magento and get started with your e-commerce business.

We went through and found a bunch of sites that have TONS of Magento themes. Here are some of our favorite Theme sites and top template from each.

http://www.silverthemes.com

Silver Themes has some extremely clean and crisp designs. Their themes run as low as $125.00 and up to $150.00, and based on certain features it can run higher. The link to their demo store to preview the themes doesn’t seem to be working though. It links to a fresh install of Magento.

Aside from that, these templates are very nice. One of my favorites is the Megastore Theme.

This theme has a very simple, minimalist design that would be easy to adapt to most businesses that are selling a variety of products.

Here’s a link to the Megastore Theme page.

Most of the Silverthemes Themes are layed out the same, with top & left navigation, 3 main feature banners in the center and a basic layout.

There is one that stands out called Sigyn Pro which is a much darker and grungy theme. Very cool.

Here’s a link to the Sigyn Theme.

Take a look a their other themes, at Silverthemes.com.

http://www.templatemonster.com

Link to Magento Themes Page

TemplateMonster has the largest selection of themes we found. They have 150 different Magento Templates ranging from $160 to $250 for the regular price, or $1100 to $7500 for the unique price. The unique price, when purchased, pulls the template off the site so it therefore becomes “unique”.

TemplateMonster’s themes are all fairly different. They cover dozens of industries and product types, color schemes and layouts. A bunch of them rely on high quality stock photography to really come alive, which makes them a bit less “out of the box” than a simpler theme. Basically, you’ll need to customize those graphics to fit your business before using the theme for your store. Overall, with the selection they have, you should find something to start with. I’ll show you a few examples below.

I like the look of this theme. The vibrant colors and the real “Home Depot” feel make it work for a store selling power tools. However, when you’re looking through and choosing a template, remember that anything that is a graphic and has anything specific in it will have to be redesigned. In this template, the “Free Shipping” graphic and 4 featured products will have to change if you don’t offer free shipping at that price level or have those products at those prices as well.

Take a look at the Tool Store page, and the Tool Store Demo. This template as of now goes for: Regular Price: $180 / Buyout Price: $5400

This furniture store template has a great color scheme and layout. I particularly like the effects and details used in the graphics. Again, be aware that these images are just examples and will most likely have to be customized to suit your products and offers. These are more generic than the Tool Store theme above but unless you’re selling very similar items, this is another example of a template that looks good, but is not “out-of-the-box”. It’s a great start though if you have a medium to high end furniture store.

Check out the Furniture Store Page, and Live Demo. This theme now goes for Regular Price: $180 / Buyout Price: $5400

This theme for a Men’s Fashion store is very slick and expensive looking. A lot of the look of this template relies on the product photos, so make sure you’re ready for that. However, the overall look and feel, and colors are a great start for an upscale online clothing store.

Take a look at the Men’s Store page, and Live Demo. This theme now goes for: Regular Price: $180 / Buyout Price: $2800

The “Woman’s Store” theme looks great, with bright colors and a more generic design. Since TemplateMonster gives you the Photoshop files you can easily customize these graphics which are mostly text to suit your needs.

Check out the Women’s Store page and Live Demo. This theme goes for: Regular Price: $250 / Buyout Price: $7500

I really like this theme! Regardless of what you’re selling, this is a cool design that uses excellent colors and transparency
to display your products in a really high quality way. The catalog page is laid out very nicely. One critique… change the product page font color to something a bit lighter and more legible. Otherwise, great theme!

Check out the Sneakers Theme page, and Live Demo. This theme goes for: Regular Price: $250 / Buyout Price: $3200

Last one from TemplateMonster. I like the design effects on the background and right column graphics on this theme. I hope that TM gives you the fonts you need to change those graphics since they look great but will need an update. This is a very fun and inviting theme!

Take a look at the T-Shirts Theme page and Live Demo. This theme goes for: Regular Price: $180 / Buyout Price: $2650

http://www.hellothemes.com

HelloThemes Magento Themes

HelloThemes has a great portfolio of Magento themes. Most of them look like they are for electronics stores but a couple are for clothing/fashion sites. Here’s a snapshot of their portfolio. You can even get all of their themes for $300, which is a good deal. Check it out.

Nice, Clean Design. Some social media elements on the homepage make it a bit more modern. The content slider at the top will need to be filled with product / sale features. Overall, the theme is nice, and generic enough to display nearly any product line.

Demo | Info

Dark theme, very cool. The effect on the background graphic brings it all together. Also, using CSS text-shadow on the right column filter titles as well as the category title adds a cool look to the catalog page.

Demo | Info

The “HelloGlam” template looks like a t-shirt store from the thumbnail but seems to have been repurposed to be a lingerie store (in the demo). In reality, it would work for any woman’s apparel store as the design is clean and very girly.

Demo | Info

ThemeForest.net

Link to ThemeForest Magento Themes

ThemeForest has 46 Magento Templates that are in teh $60 – $10 range. Take a look at the different styles and layouts they offer on their site. Since it seems that there are submissions from various template designers and developers the themes vary quite a bit.

The yarn theme has some cool graphic effects in the header and offers a great way to display artistic, organic or “green” items.

Take a look at the demo or get more info here.

The Antiqua theme is another one that has a nice graphic feel to it, epecially the lined paper drop down menus and neat textures throughout the template. Very cool for anything handmade!

Demo | Info

These were the themes that really stuck out but there are hundreds more that are excellent as well. If there’s a site that we missed that has a bunch of themes or a particular one that you like, post it below in the comments! Thanks for reading!

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It’s the same principle as if you had a restaurant. You can hire the best chefs, have the best ambiance, wait staff and ingredients but it’s in the middle of the Sahara Desert or the Island from LOST, I bet you’re not going to get much foot traffic going by or too many phone reservations. You want to be on the busiest street in town!

Just having a storefront (physical or online) is only part 1/2 of the equation. An excellent website, with memorable branding, good prices etc… is a great start but the other (and arguably moreimportant) factor is getting a ton of people to your site so you can make sales!

So it’s imperative that you promote your site and get as many visitors to see your products as possible. There are numerous strategies including Paid Search, Social Media and Search Engine Optimization.

Let’s go through an overview of each type of marketing.

Paid Search

Pay-Per-Click advertising is an easy way to start getting traffic to a new website. The most widely used PPC services(in order of popularity) are Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN (Bing) AdCenter.

The best part about Paid Search Advertising is that it is Non-Interruptive marketing. Most advertising (TV, Billboards, banner ads) interrupt the target and force them to look at an advertisement. The genius behind Paid Search is that you can put your ads in front of people who NEED your products or services by targeting a specific keyword, or phrase.

Think of it this way… if someone searches for “improve my golf swing” the ads are all about books, videos and other training that sell the answer to that exact issue. There’s little guessing when you’re dealing with a search term submitted to a search engine like Google. The person “Googling” the keyword phrase, is looking for a solution to their problem or a cure for their pain and you can easily slip your marketing right in front of them when they are searching. It’s extremely effective and that’s why Google makes billions of dollars selling this advertising!

Social Media, Networking and Bookmarking

In the past couple years, a there have been books written about Social Media Marketing. It’s a very hot topic with the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Buzz & Wave, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and thousands of others socially based websites.

Social Media presents business owners with the opportunity to communicate and connect with prospects and current customers in a way that was never before possible. If you had a website that had golfing equipment, you can socially target golfers by searching their Twitter Tweets, Facebook Interests, and tons of other socially shared data.

In the same way that paid search lets you almost get into your prospects head, SMM uses their submitted and public data to laser target your marketing to communities of like minded people all over the world.

Facebook Pay-Per-Click is also something worth checking out since you can target people demographically with a ton of specificity. You can even target them based on what they “Like”, and more… check out this post written by Ed Dale (a BRILLIANT marketer): Facebook Bombshell.

Like I mentioned earlier, the strategies, psychology and specific plan for each Social Media site could fill a wing of a library. If anyone out there wants more info about Social Media Marketing, leave a comment below.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a fundamental source of traffic. The difference between Paid Search and SEO is that SEO is based on 100’s of variable that the Search Engines use to organically rank the results of a keyword search. The more “relevant” your website is for the particular search term, the higher in the results it will show up.

The actual, specific algorithm that Google, Yahoo and Bing use is a mystery but there have been thousands of marketers that have broken through and figured out what counts and what doesn’t.

There 2 types of SEO: On-Site and Off-Site. On-Site SEO includes the content, linking, structure and code on your website. Off-Site SEO includes the sites that are linking from other places on the web to your site.

The most important part of SEO is a strong inbound linking strategy. Yahoo recently wrote a nice overview of how to get inbound links, here. Basically, you can go out to forums, blogs, article sites and social networking/bookmarking sites and post links to your site. The other way is to get links naturally by posting EXCELLENT content to your site and getting links from bloggers and other sources. On the web, content is KING.

Conclusion

The final lesson for this post is that none of these strategies work without an overwhelming dedication to promoting your business online. Put yourself out there, and tell everyone to tell everyone else about your idea and make it spread.

One of our friends, Mike who owns SuteArrival.com, is a great example of this e-commerce entrepreneurial passion. He’s always tweeting, status updating and promoting his website. He learned from some of the greats like Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com, and Gary Vaynerchuk who are incredible marketers who everyone should follow and study as well.

So with that overview complete, make sure that you keep learning more about traffic generation and studying the new trends in these areas.

What would you like to know more about specifically? If you have any questions and would like more information about marketing your website, leave a comment below! I would be more than happy to dive into any topic above in more detail.

Or give us a call 1-888-335-2747!

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 Administration Screencast Part 1 from dZero Design on Vimeo.

Disable Caching During Site Development from steve warshaw on Vimeo.

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

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”.