Blog posts Tagged ‘speed’

Are your bells ringing this holiday season?

More and more people each year are buying their Christmas presents online and 2011 so far has been a record season. The first week of online holiday shopping known as ‘Cyber Week,’ reached record spending levels with three individual days surpassing the billion dollar threshold according to ComScore (it was only in 2010 that we saw the first billion dollar Cyber Monday!). The Magento stores are no different as they saw huge boosts in sales over last year. But the shopping season is by no means over and will accelerate as last-minute shoppers starts browsing for holiday gifts. In the US, you can use FedEx’ and UPS’ guaranteed 2 day delivery service for orders placed through December 22nd so you need to make sure your online store is ready. Here are some of our thoughts on what to do:

Review your marketing campaigns

Be sure and look over your previous internet campaigns for the year and this time last year. Try to replicate your most profitable online marketing campaigns for the rest of the holiday season. The Ultimento theme is optimized for SEO through SEO-friendly URLs and unique tagging strategy and this will help increase the extra boost you can get from paid search!

Develop a holiday category

To make it easy for your shoppers to find the hot gift item of the year, create new a new category in Magento called “Gifts” for the holidays. Then segment this category down to “For Moms,” “For Dads,” “For Kids,” etc. Once you have these categories live use them for a couple of your holiday campaigns, it makes finding the perfect gift easy on your customers which of course helps to increase conversions.

Manage delivery dates

Manage available date and time of delivery to make sure you can fulfill the orders. This becomes increasingly important over the next 10 days as we get closer to the Christmas and shoppers get nervous. Depending on where you are you can take orders through December 21st and still be able to deliver the Christmas presents on time (that is almost faster than Santa himself!)

Cross-Sell and Up-Sell

Make sure you have set up Cross Sells, Up Sells and Related Products for all your products in Magento. The Ultimento theme is set up to help display those products in an easy to view manner. You can set up each of these features by going to your Magento Admin Dashboard, going to Catalog -> Manage Products and then selecting the product you’d like to add these too. Then just go to the sidebar find Cross Sells, Up Sells or Related Products. Once you’re in one of those tabs just change “Yes” to “Any” and click search, now you can select your product and check it off to add it.

Product Reviews and Discussions

If you’re not using our review and discussion extensions yet, now is a good time to start. With the increased visitors coming to your site you can get all the generous holidays reviews! Those reviews will make sure your sales are better next year.

Keep up the Magento speed

Time is precious, especially for those who are late with their Christmas shopping. Make sure your store is fast. With the Ultimento extension you don’t have to rely on your visitors’ patience. Speed up the performance of your store thus increasing your conversion rate and lowering your bounce rate.

Avoid bad extensions

Many Magento clients are searching for ways to make their store better and haphazardly installing community extensions. They don’t realize that anytime you install an extension you are taking a significant risk. Before installing an extension you need to first research the reviews on it. Some extension will customize the site to be really slow or it’s completely down. The wrong extension can completely wreck your code base and your database beyond a manual repair.

 

We wish our customers the best this holiday shopping season and would love to hear from you. Add your comments below!

Regards,

The Commative Team

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 ;) .

Adding new color schemes to Ultimento (in addition to the existing 3 Magento themes that are currently built-in) is something you’ve asked for repeatedly. So we got to work and started the process of designing, testing, optimizing, testing again, doing more optimization, etc…

The thing is that we’re particularly concerned about performance in terms of SEO, conversions, and load speed. At the same time we want to maintain Ultimento’s extremely broad browser support (the widest browser support I’ve seen in the Magento industry by far) and keep the versatility of the design so that it’ll be easy to customize.

We have tons of great intuition. But intuition is not always enough when you want to achieve really good results under these conditions and criteria. You’ve got to test, re-test, and test again.

We’re experimenting on many different variations to obtain the best possible conversion rates and optimum usability. We’re also aiming for a design that’s not too overkill. The “overkill design” thing by the way is the most widely spread mistake amongst Magento theme designers as they want to showcase their design (in order to sell them) without worrying about whether or not their Magento themes are actually any good in terms of Ecommerce conversions!

Without further delay, here’s what Ultimento’s new Magento theme looks like: Read full post »