Rev up your Magento Site!
Our new Optimisation Service has been particularly successful – especially over the Christmas sales period. One of our customers saw no degradation of site performance even though their site traffic doubled to over 250,000 unique visits per month and their orders to over 30 per hour. They run their service on a single server setup with a Flint Technology support service.
We are always looking to provide really useful extensions to Magento and are guided by needs of our customers. Our upcoming Flint Giftwrap module certainly fits that bill as it is the first fully operational item level giftwrap solution available for the Magento platform. It is in beta testing at present and will be available on general release in March 2011 for both the Enterprise and Community editions.
Flint has also developed integrations to a number of email marketing and affiliate management platforms, including Lyris, EmailVision, Affiliate Window, ShareASale,Linkshare and Criteo –all of which will be available in March 2011.
New Hire at Flint Technology
We are continually adding to the team here at Flint – and have just hired a new senior developer. Filip Moravcik has worked for some blue chip organisations, including IBM, and adds a wealth of expertise to the Flint Technology development team. We hope many of you will benefit from Filip’s knowledge and experience in the new future.
Welcome to the team Filip!
Flint Technology is proud to announce its latest Magento Module releases:
Advanced Layered Navigation adds to Magento’s support for guided navigation, but allows a range of different display and ordering options, which allows store owners to present more catalogue filtering options without cluttering the page or confusing the customer.
Continue Shopping Plus extends the calls to action on the basket page and not only adds the ability to define a number of additional continue shopping destinations, but also displays these options elegantly. It also allows Continue Shopping functionality to be added anywhere on your site.
Apologies for the bastardisation of the Great Bard’s most famous soliloquy – but the use of layered (or guided as its derivants are also known) navigation can cause a sea of troubles if not wisely used.
What is Layered Navigation?
Layered navigation allows customers to filter down a product catalogue based on a number of different facets, for instance price, brand, product type. Layered navigation works in concert with the more rigid and hierarchical ‘Drop Down Menu’ navigation. If you want to find out more about how it works in Magento then take a look at this video.
Pros and Cons
Layered navigation can be a double edged sword – it can provide a wonderful way for savvy customers to find what they are looking for fast – It can also add customer confusion and create a designer’s nightmare!
What are the benefits?
- Allows customers to choose how they segment a retail catalogue
- Allows customers to drill down to the products they want quickly – by being presented with the main options for each decision making factor
Do I Need Layered Navigation? – Questions to ask
How web savvy is my target customer? If your target customer is not likely to be a seasoned internet user then you should minimise the amount of layered navigation you use, as for those who are not used to navigating in this manner, it can be a turn off.
Does my product catalogue need layered navigation? Some product catalogues have a large number of quite similar products – which can make it difficult for customers to quickly identify the exact product they need – a prime candidate for layered navigation. Other catalogues will be either quite limited, or quite diverse in nature – in which case layered navigation has less value.
What facets are key to the customer’s decision making process? If you can’t answer this then you should think long and hard about whether to implement a layered navigation system. Layered navigation has to follow the customers buying process to have any value at all!
Conclusions
Layered Navigation is best used sparingly – make sure you keep the buying process as simple as you can for the customer. Only if there is difficulty for customers in understanding or finding the product they need should it be the prime navigational method.
Flint Technology has developed modules for the Magento platform that allow store owners to refine and simplify their layered navigation and allow a more intuitive customer experience –
For more information have a look at the Flint Module Store.
Previously we looked at factors that affect the visitor numbers to your site), but if these have held up then your problem is one of conversion.
Conversion – On Site Performance
Getting the tools of the trade right
- Goals & Funnels
- Search Query parameters
- Ecommerce Functionality (be careful if you do multi currency transactions!)
- Affiliate URL tags
- Filters to exclude internal traffic
What Have You Changed? – Sudden Conversion Failure
Stock Levels
Trust and Convenience
Conversion failure comes as a result of two main factors - Trust & Convenience. By Trust one might include the general tone of the site (does it look like it represents a good quality business, in line with the goods it is selling?) Is the price fair? Is the site following best practise security? Does the customer trust the business to deliver the goods required in a timely manner? By convenience one might mean intuitive usability clear and informative design, as well as acceptable delivery times. All conversion failures can be traced to either of these two factors – after all a buyer does not buy from you because either he does not want to (trust) or because he can buy more easily elsewhere!
Coming Up Next
If your sales revenue has just dropped off a cliff it can be pretty scary – and sometimes quite difficult to see where the problem lies. If you don’t have an analytics package in place (at a minimum Google Analytics) you will have an almost impossible time trying to ascertain the problem – it’s like driving at night with no lights! For detailed information on what data analysis package to buy you can do no better than going to eConsultancy and reading their latest analytics buyers guide.
Back to the present though – and assuming you have an analytics package, how can you use it to ascertain where the problem lies? The first step you need to take is to see whether the problem is in traffic levels or conversion – Have the numbers of people coming to your site dropped off or are they still coming to the site in the same numbers but for some reason are not buying?
Acquisition – Looking at Traffic Channels
If traffic levels have reduced your investigation will now centre on what traffic channels have been affected and whether the drop has been gradual or sudden. Is it your natural search? Or have pay per click numbers dried up? Or is the problem with affiliates, comparison engines or direct traffic? Each of these channels will have specific drivers – which may be affecting a drop-off. Also bear in mind that a change in your traffic composition (ie your mix of different traffic channels) can have a marked effect on revenue – as different types of traffic can have very different buying characteristics.
Factors Affecting Natural Search
For sudden traffic drop off the biggie here is changes to the main engine search algorithms. This will have an immediate effect – especially if you, or your SEO support, have been engaging in “Grey area” SEO techniques. For a summary of SEO best practice there is no better resource than Econsultancy.com – who publish an excellent SEO guide (you need to subscribe but it is well worth the expense).
Another question to ask is have you changed anything that might affect your search engine indexation and/or visibility. Have your web developers done any development or changes to your server configuration that might be affecting search engines indexing your site? Has your site’s server response time slowed markedly (as Google apparently now assesses site speed too). Is your sitemap being regularly updated?
Comparison Engines & Affiliates
There are two main potential issues here – firstly is your product feed operating correctly and have your competitors changed price (and therefore made traffic gains) recently? There may be further issues once the visitor gets to the site but these will be discussed later.
Pay Per Click
This should be fairly easy to pin point If you use Google Adwords, or similar, your dashboard will show the way in no time – and the problem is usually about budget.
You may need to re configure your campaign to ensure the budget you do have has a reasonable return – and that often means finding more specific key phrases rather than bidding on more general terms. Configuring PPC budgets is a subject that needs more that a few lines to cover, so if your problem is in this area then either speak to a professional – or have a look at the PPC best practice report from our good friends at econsultancy.com again!
Direct Traffic & Referring Site Problems
Problems in this area are either similar to natural search (ie what have you changed in your platform configuration) - as people bookmarking or using links into your site may not be arriving and therefore going somewhere else. For longer term problems the area to look might be more in Customer Retention – as returning traffic is more likely to come directly to your site rather than via a third party – which we will discuss later.
Between traffic levels and conversion – Bounce Rate
When traffic first hits your site it needs to be presented with relevant content to ensure it does not “bounce” straight off it again. If your traffic channels begin to send you less relevant traffic then it will not find your site content of interest and will not stick around. If bounce rate has been increasing over the longer term then a review of your site keywords and PayPer Click campaigns is essential. For sudden problems, a regular cause of this is unscrupulous Pay Per Click rewarded affiliates – who don’t care if traffic is relevant or not. Another cause can be problems with your affiliate feeds – especially if your prices change regularly - a feed that hasn’t been updated will have links to your products with prices that do not correspond – and if the price of a product is greater on site than it was on the comparison engine then an immediate bounce is likely.
Coming up next – How to analyse on site conversion problems
For advice and solutions contact us or call +44 (0) 20 7060 6512
Flint Technology has just released a module for Magento that allows store owners to use the industry leading Commidea payment gateway.
Commidea are experts in supplying credit card processing solutions. Their credit card processing solutions are used by high street retailers, hospitality, mobile retail, ecommerce and call centres.
The gateway was developed to Commidea’s ICP XML V3 specification and supports full 3D Secure functionality as well as CVS and address verification. It can be used for ‘Authorise Only’ as well as ‘Authorise and Settle’ transactions. Flint also plan to update this module in the next few months to Commidea’s Version 4 specification, which includes token based transactions.
Visit our module store for further information and buying options.
If you have spent much time using Magento in a production environment then you will know that the order management facilities (Back Office screens) could be better. They are fine for a few orders a day, but when you get more than 20 it can be difficult to manage. Never fear – because with the addition of a few modules you can really get the most out of the back office platform, and prevent frustration, confusion and poor customer service .
Here are a few of the most useful and best value:
Print Order
It sounds simple – but printing off an order without going into individual orders and creating an invoice can be a bit of a bitch. Step forward the Admin Order Printing extension. This is totally invaluable (yet free!!) little module from piotrn. Have a look at www.magentocommerce.com/extension/1054/admin-order-printing-extension .
Simple Order Export
This is great if you don’t need to get into the depths of Magento Webservices – and just want a CSV export of your orders – so you can manipulate the data yourself. You can find it at www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/slandsbek/extension/1350/simple-order-export. The module is free, but if you don’t mind paying then there a number of slightly more sophisticated options out there – including modules from xtento.com and magestore.com.
Invoices and Packing slips
The standard Magneto invoices and packing slips are tiny – and it can be really difficult to redesign them to your specifications – not to mention that any modifications can get lost in the Magento upgrade path! This module not only gives you much more flexibility in invoice design but also allows you to print on integrated labels. It does cost the princely sum of $59 – but as your developer will charge you at least twice that to even look at your invoice layouts it is money well spent. Have a look at http://store.fooman.co.nz/extensions/magento-extension-pdf-customiser.html.
Ship and Invoice
One click ship and invoicing – means you don’t have to go into each order to invoice it, and then again to ship it – something that can get annoying if you are trying to get through a large amount of orders efficiently. The module also allows you to do your orders in bulk. You can get more information at http://store.fooman.co.nz/extensions/magento-extension-order-manager.html
A further quirk of Magento is that it assigns separate numbers to orders, invoices and shipment notices and credit memos – which can cause unnecessary confusion – so step forward another neat little module from those guys at Fooman – and this problem is solved – take a look at http://store.fooman.co.nz/extensions/magento-extension-invoice-order-number.html
Add additional Order Statuses
Having the ability to add custom statuses means that you can provide your customer with a richer information flow, while at the same time having a suitable categorization internally to be able to handle the multitude of stock situations that any business might face. It costs $59 – but it’s worth it! http://amasty.com/order-status.html
Conclusions
By adding all these modules you have the beginnings of a useable and scalable order management platform. Of course, once you get to a certain size you are going to outgrow the Magento order management facilites completely, and once that happens you need to talk to somebody about the right order management/logistics platform. At Flint Technology we have provided small scale custom solutions as well as developing a complete integration to the ORDERactive platform from MNP (which you can get more information on HERE) .
If you need help then please GET IN TOUCH.
As the Christmas season approaches and retail traffic starts to build, it becomes ever more critical to have your Magento installation optimised to be able to handle these extra customers without slowing down the site. The bottom line is that on an optimised site, customers will get a better experience– and that makes them more likely to buy from you.
Flint Technology have developed and aggregated a number of tools and processes to maximise Magento performance and we have seen improvements of 20-30% even on well managed sites.
At the most basic level there are a few things that sophisticated store webmasters can potentially do themselves, such as:
Ensure that the ‘Flat Catalogue’ facilities are enabled
Install a module called Fooman Speedster
Install and configure a PHP accelerator
Minify JavaScript and CSS
But there is a lot more that can be done ‘under the hood’ with Apache, PHP and MySQL setups and Magento configurations. To that end Flint offers a full tune up service to its customers, both as a standalone package, and as part of a management/support agreement.
To find out more get in touch or call +44 (0) 20 7060 6512.
