Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook 60
Dmitry Dulepov writes "Magento is a very popular open source e-commerce platform. It was created by the company named Varien in 2007. Varien worked with osCommerce but it did not suit Varien's expanding requirements. After writing more and more changes to osCommerce, Varien finally wrote its own e-commerce software from scratch. It took Varien seven months in 2007 to publish the first public version of Magento." Read on for the rest of Dmitry's review.
Since that time, Magento started to get popularity, and now it is one of the most popular and advanced e-commerce solutions available. The list of companies who uses Magento is huge. | Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook | |
| author | William Rice |
| pages | 292 |
| publisher | Packt Publishing |
| rating | 9/10 |
| reviewer | Dmitry Dulepov |
| ISBN | 1849510121 |
| summary | If you are a Magento store owner or store designer who wants to boost sales, then this book is for you |
Magento is very powerful. But power comes with its costs. Magento can be complex to users. Fortunately there are lots of books available for those who want to set up their web stores using Magento. Some of these books were released by Packt Publishing, the company known to focus on practical books.
Recently Packt released a somewhat unusual book. It is called Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook. The book is written by William Rice, who is a software training specialist from New York city. As a trainer, William has a way to explain difficult concepts in an easy way: a gift necessary in case the of Magento. Each chapter consists of several topics. Topics break down into four parts:
- Getting ready
- How to do it...
- How it works...
- There's more...
Each section is a set of instructions that tell the reader how to quickly and efficiently achieve their goals.
Chapter 1 is about making users come to your store. It talks about adding meta tags, optimizing images, creating site maps and keeping them up to date. The very first topic tells how to add meta tags to product pages. The "Getting ready" section describes constraints and requirements to fulfill before the task can be performed. For example, for meta tags it says that access to the administration interface is necessary, and research should be done about the best keywords and customer expectations. The "How to do it..." section follows with detailed instructions about adding meta tags. It asks the reader to log into the Magento backend, select the correct menu items and edit products. Most of steps are illustrated with large images and example content in them. Thus it becomes very easy to follow directions. Example texts are also very good.
The "How it works..." section shows the reader how to verify that keywords and description appear on the page. It also describes how search engines may use this information to show search results for the user. This section also talks about choosing better keywords.
The "There's more..." section provides useful links that should help the reader to get started with the task.
Other advice in this section includes optimizing image usage by using better titles and descriptions, improving the site's title, adding a site map and making Magento update it. All advice comes with great level of details. If the reader is completely new to any of these topics, she or he will have no problem following these instructions.
Chapter 2 talks about the importance of placing products on shopping sites. It gives a complete set of instructions to add products to Google. Google is a major search engine, so any shop would benefit from having Google list its products. As in the previous chapter, the reader is guided from the very beginning (such as creating a Google account) to the final step. The instructions are written so that the reader can proceed to the step she or he needs directly (for example, use his existing Google account).
Chapter 3 talks about creating information pages in Magento that would drive people to product pages. Selling is like a science. It is not enough to drop in a couple of good looking images and dummy text to start making cash. To sell products effectively, one needs to make customers want to buy those products. One of the ways is to write about shop's goods in an attractive way. This chapter shows how to write about products and make customers love them. It is not typical blah-blah advice that anybody can find online for free. It is a real guide on creating a version of the page, looking at it critically and improving it. Most such pages will become landing pages when users search for products.
Chapter 4 talks about making pages more interesting to users. This includes adding video, writing stories and changing the layout of product pages. Also it shows an interesting technique to customize products for customers. Each of us likes to feel as if a product is made specially for us. This chapter explains how to make it and gives examples.
More good advice in this chapter is about images. Any reader will get a very interesting hint on using images better. The author of this review really liked the idea and had to resist the temptation to repeat it here. Unfortunately, this review does not allow me to explain the necessary level of details of this nice technique.
Chapter 5 describes how to increase sales with upselling, using related products, cross-sells, etc. With upselling the customer can get more products similar to the one purchased. That really works. Upselling can help customers to get more of they want. Related products play a similar role, but they show products that look alike or close in some way to the product that the customer wants to purchase. There are also other options to sell more products. They are described in this chapter.
Chapter 6 is about using promotional pricing effectively. It is not a secret that we all love promotions and discounts. Magento products can have a set of rules that define price change when more items are added to the cart. This chapter teaches how to use these rules.
Chapter 7 shows the way to engage customers using customized e-mails, RSS and newsletters. There is also a discussion of using social networking to increase sales. Newsletters are slow, and are considered to be spam by many customers; social networking is ascending. This chapter gives valuable advice about using social networking to boost sales.
Chapter 8 is about getting the customer's feedback through various tools. While there are tons of shops on the Internet, many people go to Amazon first (and often buy there). It happens because Amazon not only sells, it also allows customers to review products. When people read good reviews, they become engaged. Seeing a positive review highly increases the chance that more customers will buy the product. This chapter tells the reader how to manage feedback from customers.
Chapter 9 talks about a complex topic of internationalization and improving international sales. Magento has several ways to translate products and pages. This chapter shows the best way to do it. Also the reader will learn about installing language packs and adjusting URLs for international stores.
Chapter 10 talks about creating a wholesale stores. Wholesale customers are different from regular customers in several ways. In particular, they usually do not pay sales tax. This chapter describes how to use the same physical Magento installation to serve both types of customers. It gives several serious benefits. For example, the amount of products will always be correct.
I was really fascinated by this book. I knew some basics but I found that this book contained so many useful techniques that I am glad I came across this book. It is really useful. William Rice is a great author and once again he wrote a great Magento book. Many ideas will also be valid for non-Magento store owners, but Magento users will benefit a lot.
Would I recommend this book? Definitely! This book is a must for any Magento shop owner.
The copy of the book was provided to me by Packt Publishing. Packt Publishing never asked me to write anything particular or change my texts. This and all my other reviews represent my true opinion about reviewed books.
You can purchase Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
And 1 big tactic, buy the enterprise version for.. (Score:5, Informative)
PA-DSS Certified. Else you have to use remotely hosted payment pages as the Community Edition is not PA-DSS certified. And that takes effect by Visa et. al starting Thursday. It's either that or have your systems PCI Level I certified, which is easily $50k - 100k+ to go through that nightmare. (We've done both PA-DSS and PCI Level I. PA-DSS was far less painful both in the pocket book and time to meet all their requirements for certification. It took longer to get the paperwork pushed through than it did to code in all the features they required. PCI Level I, on the other hand, was damn near a 2 year process.)
From over a decade of creating & deploying E-commerce apps, if you cannot accept credit cards directly on your site and send people to any other hosted payment page other than paypal, you level of cart abandonment dramatically increases. As soon as the customer goes to a 3rd party site, especially if you are a small mom & pop e-tailor, the abandonment rate can be as high as 90% (usually we saw around 70%). This is despite the fact that sending the total to say First Data's checkout page hosted by First Data is FAR safer for everyone rather than having the mom and pop store sent the payment from their server. But with all the fishing scams and warnings, folks have gotten it into their heads that if they are sent to a 3rd party site payment page not to trust it. And unless you've dealt with merchant accounts, chances are you've not heard of Orbital (Chase PaymentTech) or First Data even though combined they are the backend processors for 95% of all e-commerce transactions).
Friends don't let friends use Magento. (Score:4, Informative)
I used to be a system admin at a web hosting company, and all our customers who used Magento were constantly having problems. First, it's a first-class resource hog. Basically, you need dedicated hardware to run it. Even on a VPS, it would cause node problems on a relatively frequent basis. Second, it's incredibly fragile. There were some customers who just couldn't leave well enough alone and kept trying to add plugins and whatnot. They invariably would screw up file permissions or trash their database tables, and next thing you know, we were having to restore from backups that were likely 24-36 hours behind (customers tended not to do their own backups, thinking our backups for emergency system restore were the same as "i better make a working copy before i screw with this") -- frankly, I don't know how they ever made any money with their sites. They probably didn't. In short, using Magento will make tech support laugh at you, system admins hate you, and kittens die tragic, horrible deaths by being subjected to John Waters films.
Re:And 1 big tactic, buy the enterprise version fo (Score:3, Informative)
I have a osCommerce shop for years, recently finished my 3.0a5 shop that needed a lot of bugfixes, also I had a lot of own modules that needed translation to the new software, all is working well.
But...
This post is about deploying 3rd parties for CC handling.
More and more of these services are changing along offering behind the scene links for CC processing to keep your clients in your webshop.
Mine is Ogone and htye offer DirectLink that does just that.
Transferring to 3rd party websites is very 90's.
Re:First of all, it isnt popular. (Score:1, Informative)
10,000+ lines of code? More like 10,000+ files... actually 54,000+ files, iirc.
Re:Friends don't let friends use Magento. (Score:2, Informative)