In February 2011, Google released their Panda algorithm, affecting a whopping 12.5% of all searches, making it one of the biggest changes ever made to their algorithm. Originally called the Farmer update, Panda was designed to go after content farms. Despite not being the target of Panda, many merchants have found themselves on the wrong side of a Panda update as well. Whether you've been negatively affected already, or whether you are looking to stay on the right side of Panda in the future, here is your guide to Panda-proofing your Magento store.

What is Panda?

Panda is a change to Google's algorithm that targeted "content farms", or sites that had thousands or hundreds of thousands of "thin" or "low quality" pages, usually blanketed in ads. To get an idea of what kinds of sites were targeted, check out this list of the top 20 websites most negatively impacted by Panda when it first rolled out. Google has provided this list of 23 questions to help webmasters understand what type of sites are targeted.

How Do I Know If My Site Was Affected?

A site that gets hit by Panda typically loses 30% to 50% of its organic traffic across all or most of its keywords, particularly in the long tail. When it was first released, there were specific "Panda" days where the data set the algorithm uses was updated, which made it fairly simple to determine if a site was hit by Panda, or had recovered. Now, however, Panda has been added in to the real time algorithm.

Why It Effects E-commerce Sites

So what does Panda have to do with your Magento store, if it was targeting ad-heavy content farms? Unfortunately, many e-commerce stores have a lot in common with the thin content sites that Panda targets: thousands of "thin" product pages and lots of duplicate content created by their e-commerce platform. Because of this, many e-commerce sites were also negatively impacted by Panda. Even if your site hasn't been hit yet, merchants need to be proactive in protecting themselves.

Panda Proofing Your Store

Luckily, much of the risk inherent in a default Magento installation can be removed with a few fairly simple changes. Remember, the goal of all of these changes is to reduce overall page count and eliminate duplicate content. Here's what you need to do:

Enable Canonical Tags on Product and Category Pages

In Magento, products and categories are available from many different URL's. For example, by default a product is available at each of the following:

yoursite.com/product.html
yoursite.com/category/product.html
yoursite.com/catalog/product/view/id/1/
youriste.com/catalog/product/view/id/1/category/1/

Each of these is the same identical page, but to Google it appears as four different pages. With layered navigation, you get hundreds of different URL paths for the same category page, for example:

yoursite.com/category/cat1.html
yoursite.com/category/cat1.html?&filter1=123
yoursite.com/category/cat1.html?&filter1=123&filter2=456

The same thing happens with pagination:

yoursite.com/category/cat1.html?&p=2
yoursite.com/category/cat1.html?&p=3

When combined, this is creating hundreds if not thousands of pages for Google to index, all of which have very similar or duplicate content. Google has provided a way to tell them when a given URL is the same as another URL, the "canonical" tag. Magento has an option to enable canonical tags. These tags will tell Google that every layered navigation and paginated page is the same as the first page of the category with no filters, and it will also tell Google that all of the different product pages are really the same page. To enable canonical tags, in Admin navigate to Configuration -> Catalog -> Search Engine Optimizations. There, change Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories and Use Link Meta Tag For Products both to "Yes". Also, while there, change Use Categories Path for Product URL's to "No" - this will prevent Magento from creating even more duplicate product pages. Don't forget to click Save Config.

Block Search and Tag Pages With Robots.txt

To further reduce your site's page count, you will want to block Google from indexing certain pages. The first set of pages to block are the search and tag pages. There are two ways to block Google from indexing a page, using either robots.txt or the meta robots tag. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. In the case of search results and tag pages, you probably want to use robots.txt. Robots.txt prevents Google from crawling the pages at all. By blocking these pages via robots.txt, you reduce the number of pages Goolgebot needs to crawl. Place the following in a plain text file named "robots.txt" in the root of your Magento install to block these two sets of pages:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /tag/

Note you only need to disable tag pages if you have them enabled in Admin. Also, depending on your site's implementation of tag pages, you may not want to block them. While in there, you may as well block these other non-essential Magento directories:

Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /errors/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /shell/
Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /var/

Block Non-Essential Pages From Being Indexed

You also should block pages that do not need to be indexed, such as the customer account, wishlist, compare, checkout and cart pages. Unlike with the search and tag pages, however, it is better to use meta robots to block these. The reason or this is we still want Google to crawl the links on those pages to find additional pages in the site, and we want to maintain link equity flowing through the site according to the internal navigation. To block these pages, insert the following tag into each page's template: This tells Googlebot not to index the page, but to continue crawling the links on the page.

Block Any Development Environments

If you have any development environments that are publically accessable, chances are Googlebot is going to find them. If you do not block these sites from being indexed, that creates a duplicate copy of the entire site. You can block any dev environment by going to General -> Design - > HTML Head and changing Default Robots to Noindex,Follow. Remember to change this setting back to inex,follow before migrating to a live production enviroment, otherwise Google may deindex your entire site!

Set A Default Root URL For The Site And Implement A 301 Redirect

Magento by default will serve the homepage from several different URL's. This is not optimal, as Google will see multiple versions of the homepage that are identical (duplicate content) and will also split the link equity flowing to your homepage between the versions based on how it is linked, diluting the equity that flows to the rest of the site. To check if this is an issue for your store, visit the following and see if the URL in your browser's address bar changes:

yoursite.com
www.yoursite.com
www.yoursite.com/index.php/

A properly configured store will 301 redirect each of those to one version only. This is telling Google which version you prefer to use as your homepage. Go to General -> Web -> Url Options and set Auto-redirect to Base URL to "Yes (301 Moved Permanently)".

You also want to make sure that whatever version you choose (www vs non-www) is set as your Base URL in Admin, under General -> Web -> Unsecure and General -> Web - Secure:

Other Things To Consider

The above changes will do a lot to prevent the default behavior of Magento from creating duplicate content and indexing non-content pages. However, that often is not sufficient to avoid Panda. You should also consider the following:

Consolidate Products As Much As Possible

When designing your catalog structure, try to consolidate product variations into as few products as possible. For example, if you sold gym equipment, instead of listing each dumbbell weight as a separate simple product, you might list one dumbbell product and use custom options to have the user select the weight they want, or use configurable products to combine them all into one page.

Create Unique Product Page Content

When looking at your product pages, consider how much of the content is the same on every product page versus how much is unique for that page. Don't forget to include the navigation, the header and footer, and any other common elements. You want to thicken out these pages as much as possible. You can create unique product copy (never use manufacturer's descriptions, as that will create duplicate content issues between your site and other sites that use the same descriptions), add guides and how to info, or include video content with a transcription. Another great way to increase unique product page content is by collecting customer reviews (besides helping with conversion, these will help with getting long tail searches and avoiding Panda). Have a program in place to actively solicit reviews once your customer has received their product. Also, make sure that if you're using any third party reviews plug ins like Power Reviews that they are indexable on the product page - do not use reviews plug ins that load in an iframe or similar.

Engagement

As Google includes more engagement metrics into their algorithm, it's becoming increasingly important to pay attention to these metrics on a page and site wide basis. Think of ways to make your site "sticky" and get users to engage beyond making a purchase: encourage sharing via Twitter or Facebook, include reviews, instructional manuals, other content that is interesting to your customer base. Periodically review your pages based on bounce rate and time on page; consider trimming products that are not viewed and content that is not read. While the above will not completely protect you, and like with all things involving Google's algorithm it's highly situation specific, it will get your site a long ways toward staying on the right side of Panda.

Have you seen a site wide traffic drop? Would you like us to see if your store is at risk for being hit by Panda, Penguin, or other Google penalties? Get a hold of us and ask about our e-commerce SEO audits.

We're super excited about all the performance improvements in Magento EE 1.13, released last week during the Magento Imagine Conference. Developers and merchants have been asking for these degree of performance optimization for some time now, its great to see Ebay Inc has listened and applied their resources to get this done.

Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13 was released last week during Magento's annual Imagine eCommerce Conference. A number of major performance improvements were announced at the general conference session. We expect many of these performance improvements will also carry over to Community Edition 1.8, which is promised within the next two weeks.

(Re)Indexing Performance

A major effort was undertaken to improve the performance of Magento's indexing system for general catalog maintenance operations. I know this has been a major sticking point for some of our clients who have large catalogs, even to the point that it prevents some inventory from making it to the website. It should go without saying that this has not been ideal. That's why its so exciting to see a 53% overall improvement in complete re-indexing. But the news gets much better than that, Magento now has "incremental re-indexing", which means that doing something like changing the product description for 1 product in a large catalog can be as much as 1000% faster (4 seconds instead of 84 minutes). Sweet!

Page Load Times and Checkout Performance

Page load times were improved in general and the checkout process got a lot of specific attention. Magento are claiming a 65% overall improvement in page load times. They are also claiming a 35% improvement in "Place Order" performance. This is good news!

Read the EE 1.13 Performance Whitepaper

The Bottom Line

Magento Enterprise 1.13 is a vast improvement for sites with large catalogs. In addition page load times, full page cache and transaction performance have all been improved, meaning more page views and more transactions can be support on the same hardware and configuration for everyone!

Several of us from Store Front Consulting were in Vegas for Magento Imagine last week. We took a few steps back from the usual rat race to attend the conference and get the most out of it. This was not just an ordinary event with meetings and mingling, but several days of full engagement. We exercised our bodies along with our networking skills, and enjoyed some first-rate entertainment to boot. 

Bright and early Sunday morning, Garth and I participated in an endurance event we had not found the spare time to properly train for. It was a race that would leave our tendons tight and muscles sore for the remainder of the week. Brent Peterson of WagentoCreative put on the Second Annual Magento Half Marathon and 5k. Being the gluttons for punishment that we are, we signed up for the Half. We looked at the event as an opportunity to get to know our peers outside of our walking desks, headsets, and yet another external monitor. The race started by the Railroad Pass Casino in Boulder City and meandered through the valley, offering beautiful views of Lake Mead and its surrounding mountains. So, how did we do? Well we finished... I somehow managed to place first in my age group, which is especially interesting due to the fact that I was on the phone with my wife and toddler for at least ten minutes of the run. I also stopped for a couple drinks along the way (water that is, I’m not that good). Was this thing rigged??? Have the geeks invented time travel?

Come Monday, it was time to get to work. We attended the conference to celebrate the release of our newest integration extension, and to spread the word about our latest line of payment extensions built to work with the popular gateway Authorize.Net. Rather than walking the floor, SFC shared a booth in the marketplace with the guys from DropShip Commerce. We recently completed building the integration extension which allows product and order data to flow easily between Magento and the DropShip Commerce platform. It was exciting to see the interest that was coming from the attendees as well as the competition, as drop shipping is certainly all the buzz amongst online merchants. The ease of use and stability of the platform make it a great choice for the merchant looking to reign in their suppliers and stop hiding under spreadsheets and manual order processing systems.

While on the floor meeting with various solutions providers, our Creative Director Aaron Boswell discovered the laser etching booth, where geeks and execs waited in line to have everything from images of their kids to company logos engraved on their device of choice. After patiently standing in line for at least twenty minutes, I was cut in front of by none other than the CEO of eBay Inc., John Donahoe and three other higher ups at Magento. I guess I should not expect the CEO to wait in line like everyone else? John smoothed this over by making a joke about the ZeroLag dart that I had earlier taken to the heart. While long, the wait was worth it, and the SFC logo I had etched turned out pretty sweet.

This event was for the cool kids. I have been to many business conferences, but none like this. Apparently Magento knows how to throw a party! Even the stage designer was impressed by the choice the ups at Magento made to have a 3D projection layout on the stage. He said, "I usually do stages for DJs and artists--pretty wild of them to go with this type of layout.” The performing artist was Bobby McFerrin's son, Taylor McFerrin. The room thundered with applause at the completion of an amazing beatbox performance by Taylor. No one worried and everyone was happy!

Finally the rubber met the road, and Magento announced the release of Magento Enterprise 1.13. While there are other improvements in the latest release by far, the one of most interest to the development community is the increased performance of the indexing process. They talked about test cases where reindexing was going from thirty hours to four hours. In addition, they have modified the indexing procedure to process deltas instead of rebuilding the entire index. This is a much needed improvement, as Magento attracts larger and larger merchants with hundreds of thousands of skus.

All in all, we feel it was a successful event. We are excited about what the future holds as Magento and the community continue to grow.

http://www.imagineecommerce.com/

StoreFront will also be attending IRCE 2013 (Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition) in Chicago in June this year.  IRCE is big, really big.  As they say: "Larger than America’s other two major e-retailing events combined, IRCE 2013 expects to draw 9,500 e-retailing executives from more than 40 countries."  It is always nice to be surrounded by many folks connected to online retail in so many different ways...  Always a great opportunity to learn.  Again, let us know if you will be attending and would like to get together.

http://irce.internetretailer.com/2013/

Yesterday Magento announced a security patch to cover a vulnerability in the Zend Framework used by Magento.

The patch resolves a security issue in the Zend Framework that is affecting many versions of Magento. The vulnerability potentially allows an attacker access to any file on a web server running the affected Magento versions unpatched. Because of the seriousness of the vulnerability, we wanted to make sure you were aware of it and are taking the appropriate steps to install the patch on your platform.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOU ARE AFFECTED?

The following versions of Magento are affected by this vulnerability:

• Magento Community Edition - 1.4.0.0 through 1.7.0.1
• Magento Enterprise Edition - 1.8.0.0 through 1.12.0.1
• Magento Professional Edition - 1.8.0.0 through 1.12.0.0

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO ABOUT IT?

Magento's patch should be installed to address the security flaw. This is something you can do yourself or engage StoreFront to do. If you decide to apply the patch yourself, Magento provides detailed instructions on their blog. If you would like assistance from us, please contact your project manager immediately.

MORE INFO

For more information on the vulnerabilty and Magento's patches, please see the Magento Commerce site:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/important-security-update-zend-platform-vulnerability/

You hear a lot of buzz about social media. Tales of its growing influence, importance of online communities, and increase of sales by engaging in social media. All this is true and there is research to back those claims. Still we can’t forget about good old fashioned email and its influence in our work, personal lives, and shopping habits.

Ipsos, a private research firm, polled thousands of people and found that 85% of those people use the internet for email. That’s not to say some of those people don’t also use social media, actually 6 in 10 use the internet for social media, but email continues to be king.

Newsletter Campaigns - Magento Integration

The easiest way to use email to your advantage and drive people to your store is by having a newsletter. Magento has a built in newsletter function. There are also robust integrations out there such as Mailchimp or iContact that can easily be added to your store as well. It all depends on what you are looking for.

Relevant Content and Community Building

In my experience the most effective newsletter campaigns are the ones that don’t try to hard sell something. They have valuable content while also giving me a call to action to purchase something if it suits me.

I read a lot of blogs, there are millions out there, but the one that I’m most loyal to is the one that sends me a monthly email with an interesting article. The blog does sell some products but I never feel like the communication is a hard sell (come to my site! buy this!). They just send me interesting information in a not too frequent manner - so I read it. Could I just go to the blog and read the new content there? Sure! But I’m lazy, so getting a newsletter from them keeps me a loyal reader. Which has translated into purchasing the occasional product that is advertised in the newsletter. Bottom line is that their campaigns work because it’s targeted, infrequent, and valuable to me.

Rules of Thumb

There a couple of fluid rules when it comes to email marketing:

• • Avoid Spam - Be careful and measured in your communication with clients. People don’t want to get spammed. They want to receive timely and interesting information about products they have bought before or might be interested in buying.
• • Short and Sweet - Be as brief and as concise as possible.
• • Easy Opt Out - Let people unsubscribe from your newsletter campaigns easily.
• • Coupons - When possible, offer worthwhile coupons that can only be accessed via newsletters. Give people an incentive to sign up.

Interested in Adding a Newsletter Box to Your Store?

Let us know, we can help you out. It’s a pretty simple addition and will set you up to start the email marketing campaign that will boost sales on your site.

Good content is fundamental for SEO. One of the simplest ways to create content is to use a blog. Here are some brief ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’ to keep in mind.

The end goal of SEO is to get your pages on top of the SERP (search engine results page) rankings on Google and other search engines. There are innumerable things you can do to make this happen; there are as many approaches and SEO techniques out there as there are pages on the internet, but they all come down to creating and optimizing content and building links.

We’ll save building links for another discussion and cover content creation. One of the simplest and least technical ways to create lots of high quality content is to use a blog. In the eCommerce world, your blog should complement your store. Here are our dos and don'ts for you to keep in mind when you’re setting up a blog for your eCommerce site.

DOS AND DON’TS

WANT SEO ADVICE FOR YOUR STORE?

Want specific Magento eCommerce SEO consulting? StoreFront is now offering Magento specific SEO consulting. Send us an email to learn more about our services and discuss your SEO project.

Pinterest is now the 3rd most popular social networking site, according to Experian. That is a huge leap in a short amount of time. To put it in perspective, Pinterest now gets more traffic than Google+ and LinkedIn. That’s huge for a site that’s been in existence for only 2 years.

What is it?

For those of you not familiar with Pinterest let’s talk about what it is. Remember back in the day when you would cut out interesting things (quotes, pictures, products) from magazines and pin them on a bulletin board? Pinterest is the same concept but now online. A user can setup as many boards as they like. For example, you can have a ‘dream house’ board where you post pictures of all the things you’d want in your ideal house like a medieval library or a waterfall shower. You could have an ‘inspiration’ board where you pin pictures of uplifting quotes and images of fluffy bunnies. You could have a ‘things I want to buy for my dog’ board where you pin pictures of dog collars and puppy beds. The appeal of Pinterest is that you can share your boards with your family and friends. It can be linked via Facebook and Twitter.

Pinterest and eCommerce

A surprising fact that has surfaced recently is that Pinterest is generating more referrals than Twitter! There are many reasons for this, chief among them is Pinterest is primarily a visual site - pictures only. It’s been a great medium to get a wide variety of products right in front of the potential consumer’s eyes. Simple ways to incorporate Pinterest into your store are adding a ‘pin it’ link to product pages and creating branded pinboards.

Once your store's Pinterest account is set up, you can take it to the next level. This article lists out 9 companies that have created very appealing brand boards - among them Nordstrom, The Today Show, and Michaels Craft Stores.

Our client recently added a ‘pin it’ button to their product pages. It was the perfect addition because they have really beautiful products - in their case a picture is worth a thousand words. The implementation was very straightforward. The steps were simple: our client created a Pinterest account, StoreFront Consulting added the ‘pin it’ logo to their product pages, and we linked to their account. Easy!

If you are interested in adding Pinterest to your Magento store, let us know!

The conference has some powerhouse speakers lined up. Among them Alexis Maybank (Founder of Gilt Group), Joel Anderson (CEO of Walmart), and Fareed Zakaria (author and host at CNN).

We’ll be attending a variety of workshops, including one focusing on redesign of mobile stores. We are very interested to see how that translates into mobile sites based on the Magento platform.

The conference is a great opportunity to have a variety of businesses in the ecommerce world. From retailers who use their online stores to supplement their brick and mortar operations (such as WalMart) to sites such as Gilt.com whose business is 100% internet based. Everyone gets together to discuss new trends, ideas for the future, etc.

If you are going to be at IRCE let us know! We’d love to schedule a meeting.

Tax Rate Map - The Sales Tax Clearinghouse

We just passed the April 17 filing deadline for tax returns in the U.S. The deadline got us thinking about taxes, and being retail minded, that got us thinking about sales taxes and the pain that many eCommerce merchants go through trying to figure out the logistics. Every order that comes into your store needs to fall under a specific tax rate.

Not only does a store have to keep track of tax rates per state, per city, and per county but they are also expected to comply with any tax changes implemented during the year. To top it off there are international sales to factor in as well. The silver lining is that if you are feeling overwhelmed by the sales tax issue you are probably selling a lot of products (good!) but you are spending hours and hours trying to figure out how to manage all the different rates (not so good).

Compliance Challenges

Montee Fiely, Director of Sales at Storefront, owned and later sold a successful printer ink Magento store (www.PrinterExperts.com). We spoke with him about his experiences with sales tax compliance. “I used to file taxes every quarter and it literally took me hours and hours to get everything squared away and ready to submit”, he told us, “Most of my clients were in Ohio so you would think that the tax requirements would be easy to handle, right? No way! I quickly learned there are vast rate differences across counties and cities in the same state.”

Growing Your Business With Automation

Feeling limited by sales tax concerns and compliance issues often constricts the ability of your business to grow. According to a 2010 Aberdeen Group report, “In a dynamic regulatory environment, where tax rate changes are numerous and frequent, it becomes apparent that human capabilities are at a disadvantage over software automation.” In addition to removing a burden and increasing the amount of time staff can productively work on business development activities, applying the right automation tools can greatly improve your odds of successfully handling a sales and use tax audit—particularly in e-commerce. The Aberdeen Group report, in support of automation, went on to clarify that Internet businesses should seek sales tax solutions that easily integrate and interoperate with their existing e-commerce platforms. This type of automation in a cloud-based solution provides real-time calculations with up-to-date, applicable rates, facilitating the consumer buying process.

Magento Sales Tax Calculation

The Magento platform has built in functionality for sales tax calculation. Magento even includes rudimentary reporting functionality, which can be used to generate the reports you will need to file sales tax returns with states. Magento will let you input sales tax rates by city and state or by zip code and will even let you import rates from a spreadsheet. This functionality all works great in really simple cases, where the state’s you sell in have a unified sales tax rate that doesn’t change, where the filing process is easy, where rates don’t change mid-year. As soon as it gets more complicated though, you’re in for a lot more manual work and more hassle.

Avalara and Magento

To automate sales tax compliance, StoreFront recommends Avalara (www.Avalara.com), specifically their AvaTax product, integrated directly with Magento. We recently implemented this solution for our client, Original Works (www.originalworks.com), drastically reducing their effort to handle sales tax on their web store.

www.OriginalWorks.com

"We are very happy with our Avalara / Magento integration. Avalara allows us to keep track of 12 different state's sales tax with innumerable jurisdictions. Before, when tax rates would change, we would need to manually update them to match. This could happen as little as every quarter, but can also happen any time costing hundreds of man-hours. Now, they are automatically updated. Avalara also will cover the cost of any error they make in tax rates so it's a win/win from our perspective."

Brian McQuade
Finance Administrator
originalworks.com

Not only can Avalara provide rate calculations in real time for your Magento store, but they also provide an interface which tracks your tax collections, and they can even file all your sales tax returns for you automatically, the whole time providing a money back guarantee that their numbers are correct. For any merchant who has more than one simple state in which to cover sales tax, it’s almost a no brainer to use a service provider like Avalara.

Choose What is Right for You

eCommerce merchants understand the importance of having a sales tax compliance plan that works for them. Avalara is a great option because it seamlessly integrates with Magento. There are also other Magento integrated solutions out there, and other service providers to work with. At the end of the day, integration, and automation are the key.

We ran across a great article, What’s the Magic Word for eCommerce?, over at the Neuromarketing blog. It highlighted interesting statistics of what key words grab customers attention and prompts them to purchase. The study, by Kantar Media, surveyed 2500 plus online shoppers and asked what words would motivate them to place an order. Not surprisingly, the word that shoppers most like to see is ‘FREE’ - free shipping, free returns, buy one get one free, etc. The article says “More than three out of four shoppers cited “free shipping” as the factor that would get them to purchase, and the second most common was “free returns.”

WHEN IN DOUBT, TEST

While the studies show that offering online consumers something free can boost sales, always test an offer like this with your customers and your products:

• Offering monthly promotions where you buy one get one free
• Testing out the wording on your product pages
• Redesigning your homepage to highlight free shipping

The easiest (and free) way to setup a test it to use Google Website Optimizer. The tool allows you to test a wide range of scenarios, including the ones listed above. You could set up A/B testing to track conversion rates as they relate to new page designs or featured products. Website Optimizer also allows multivariate testing, testing more than one change at a time.

At StoreFront Consulting, we specialize in helping our clients set up these types of tests with Magento. If you are interested in discussing a test, reach out to us. We’d be happy to walk you through the process.

"Private research firm Ipsos polled 19,216 adults in 24 countries last month and found 85% of them used the Internet for email while 62% used it for social networking."

http://mashable.com/2012/03/27/email-more-popular-social-media/

What does this mean for eRetailers?

Should eCommerce retailers be marketing through email, social media or both? Our assessment is this: It depends. Email and social media are totally different. In fact Facebook is different from Twitter, which is different from LinkedIn, etc.

Email is close to the ideal medium for targeting specific individuals who you have already identified. Customers and visitors who have opted in to mailing lists to receive promotions and offers, this audience is rip for individual targeting. If you can address customers as individuals, connect with them, email is the ideal medium for this.

Social media of course has its own advantages when it comes to marketing for eCommerce. Social media offers the opportunity for an offer to go viral. Using social media for marketing is all about targeting a demographic, crowd or social group. Different messages will work with social media than with email. For instance, if you are reaching out to your customers individually on their Facebook pages, saying "Buy our product.", well that is just creepy, but individual targeting is just what's needed to make your email offer stand out to a customer.

February eCommerce Survey Results, by Tom Robertshaw

Since November 2010, UK Magento developer Tom Robertshaw has been counting the number of eCommerce sites using popular platforms in the Alexa top 1 million sites. His scripts go through the top 1 million sites and look for signatures of popular eCommerce platforms on the site home page. Though he offers the complete list of sites for sale on his website, Robertshaw has never published the names of top sites, only the platform results, until this week!

Robertshaw's most recent survey was done in February 2012 and this is the one he pulled the top 10 results from. He has been doing the surveys since November 2010, with one in February 2011, one in October 2011 and this most recent survey.

Top 10 Most Popular Magento Sites Results (and Other eCommerce Platforms)

The top 10 sites for each platform have been published (Magento, Zen Cart, Volusion, Interspire, X Cart, etc). The Magento results are the most interesting to us. Zulily, Harbor Freight and Toms are all included in the top 10. These are all well known US based sites which are often touted in the Magento community. It's interesting though that 2 of the top 10 sites involve nicotine and marijuana related products, goes to show what products sell well on the internet here in the US.

It's also interesting that 2 German sites and 1 Japanese site made it to the top 10. It is interesting to see which parts of the world have the most traffic eCommerce traffic.

http://tomrobertshaw.net/2011/03/top-10-busiest-sites-for-popular-ecommerce-software/

http://www.imagineecommerce.com/

The 2012 Imagine Conference, happening in Las Vegas, Nevada, is only a couple of weeks away (April 23-25, 2012). We are very excited to once again attend what is being called the "superbowl of eCommerce". The great thing about the Imagine Conference is that you get to meet a lot of people who are all doing different things with Magento - consultants (like us), store owners, developers, service providers, hosting companies, etc. The conference is already sold out which means it will be jam packed.

Techie Talks

The keynotes will be interesting to a point, we are looking forward to hearing what's new and in the Magento pipeline from the Magento leadership team - Roy Rubin (CEO), Yoav Kutner (CTO), and Bob Schwartz (President).

Company Culture

The talk we are particularly excited about is “Culture as a Competitive Advantage” by Jim FitzGibbon. He’ll talk about how the Four Seasons Hotel became the epitome of hotel luxury by focusing on employee selection, common values, loyal customer base, etc. Whenever you hear "Four Seasons", in whatever country you are in, you know to expect a high level hotel experience.

Company culture is important for us at StoreFront Consulting. Our team is distributed all over the United States, working remotely from each other. You’d think it would be difficult to build a company culture remotely, but that’s not the case. We use technology to get our work done and also to connect on a personal and social level. For instance, we use company chat rooms to discuss work and and socialize around the “water cooler” - knowledge sharing to the max!

Vegas Here We Come

We plan to get the most out of the Imagine conference and share what we learn with you. We’re looking forward to 3 jam packed days of connecting with the Magento community and learning the latest. If you will be at the Imagine Conference and would like to connect, please let us know, it would be great to meet up with you. Contact Montee Fiely, Director Business Development, to setup a meeting. (Email montee at storefrontconsulting dot com)

The Need

Magento development can be hard. Anyone experienced with the platform will tell you this. The platform offers great power out of the box, and a rock solid platform on which to build custom functionality, but customizing Magento well requires skilled hands. At StoreFront we are frequently called on to rescue projects which have been started by developers without the required expertise in the Magento platform. Magento understands this as well and thus they have introduced the developer certification program. It is our hope that the market will embrace the program.

The Program

We are very pleased that Magento now offers a developer certification program.  There is no doubt that Magento is very technically complex and requires expert hands.  We see the developer certification program as a way for individual developers and service providers to demonstrate their expertise with the platform.  Once the exam is officially released, all StoreFront developers will now be required to pursue certification.  I know we are all eagerly awaiting the challenge.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/certification/

StoreFront

In the fall, StoreFront sent two of our developers to the Ebay / Magento Innovate conference to participate in the beta test of the Magento Developer certification program.  At the end of December the official results of the beta certification tests were announced, and I’m pleased to say that StoreFront now has two officially certified Magento developers.

Congratulations to Dennis Rogers and Garth Brantley for passing the beta exam and receiving Magento developer certification!

StoreFront Consulting is excited to be attending the upcoming X.commerce Innovate conference in San Francisco. We're looking forward to Blake Mycoskie of TOMS Shoes, The Shins and of course, finding out what crazy plans Magento and eBay have for the future. Contact us if you would like to setup a meeting while we're in the bay area.

http://innovate-conference.com/

Brian Walker Says:

"As consumers are increasingly connected through a wide array of Internet-connected devices, the traditional multichannel commerce experience is becoming obsolete. Customers no longer interact with companies from a “channel” perspective; instead, they interact through touchpoints. These touchpoints include channels such as stores, branches, call centers, and websites, but also emerging interactions such as apps, social media, mobile sites, SMS messages, and interactive advertising -- across a wide range of devices such as smartphones, tablets, Internet TVs, cars, and even appliances."

I have to admit I agree with this. For many consumers now, social media, the web, the mobile web excursions to their local retailer are all part of one continuous shopping experience. Does it really make sense to treat customers differently when they show in the store, versus when they show up on the web site?

Checkout The Blog Post:

http://blogs.forrester.com/brian_walker/11-03-11-welcome_to_the_era_of_agile_commerce

http://www.magentocommerce.com/imagine

Garth and I turned our road bikes into stationery attention getters and spun for 14 hours at the Fells Point Fun Festival in Baltimore, Maryland this past weekend.  We raised over $1600 for cancer research and education.  We gave out lots of LIVESTRONG bracelets, CDs with uplifting music, and a few t-shirts.  Our efforts were inspired and supported by GIVETOLIVE (http://www.givetolive.ca), an all-volunteer non-profit that organizes an annual bike ride (this year from Vancouver, British Columbia to Austin, Texas) to participate in the LIVESTRONG Challenge.  One hundred percent of the donations we collected were given to LIVESTRONG Foundation.  LIVESTRONG has one of the highest rates of funds that actually go to research, and to helping those who struggle with the disease.  

Many people know that LIVESTRONG (http://www.livestrong.org) was founded by Lance Armstrong; however it's also interesting to note that LIVESTRONG's President and CEO is Maryland's own Doug Ulman.  Doug is a three time cancer survivor, and the founder of "The Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults" which was organized to support, educate, connect and empower young adult cancer survivors http://www.ulmanfund.org/.

We were touched by the number of people that stopped by to share how their life had been affected by cancer.  While we were tired and sore, the effort was worth it.

What is PCI Compliance?

As an eCommerce service provider, we find the most common misunderstanding our clients have is thinking that they can purchase PCI compliance from someone like us.  Unfortunately, the PCI standard covers not only the technology which runs a website or shopping cart, but also the organization’s entire IT infrastructure and all policies and procedures which related to payments and the storage of cardholder data.  It’s worth reiterating this point:

PCI compliance requirements apply to an entire organization, not just to the technology behind a website.

PCI Enforcement

From http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/pcifaqs.php:

Q: What if a merchant refuses to cooperate?

A: PCI is not, in itself, a law. The standard was created by the major card brands such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover, AMEX, and JCB. At their acquirers/service providers discretion, merchants that do not comply with PCI DSS may be subject to fines, card replacement costs, costly forensic audits, brand damage, etc., should a breach event occur.

For a little upfront effort and cost to comply with PCI, you greatly help reduce your risk from facing these extremely unpleasant and costly consequences.

Levels and Types, Oh My

A Self Assessement Questionnaire (SAQ) is required at all merchant levels and validation types, though the content varies.  The minimum you will be required to provide otherwise are the results of a network vulnerability scan (for example from the McAfee Secure service).

It is important to understand which Merchant Level and which SAQ Validation Type your organization will fall under.  The following tables outline the basics and give you an idea of what your merchant account provider will be requiring of you.

Where does this leave us?

Most StoreFront Consulting clients fall into SAQ Validation Type 1 and Merchant Levels 3 or 4.  This means that generally the compliance requirements you will see all close to the minimum outlined above (Fill out an SAQ-A and complete a vulnerability scan once per quarter).

Due to some changes in the public Google Base / Google Merchant Center attributes feeds, an issue with Magento’s Google Base functionality has popped up. As far as I can tell, this issue will affect all versions of Magento. I have personally verified that the issue affects 1.4.0.1 and 1.3.2.4 and made the fix for several clients. I have put together this post with detailed instructions about fixing the error in the hopes that it will save some others time in dealing with the issue.

If you are receiving the following error message, then this fix is for you. The error occurs when trying to edit Google Base attributes in the Magento backend. It can be duplicated by navigating to the Catalog > Google Base > Manage Attributes screen in the Magento backend and clicking the Add Attribute Mapping button.

Notice: Undefined offset: 1 in app/code/core/Mage/GoogleBase/Model/Service/Feed.php on line 120

How to Fix Magneto Google Base Error (Short Version)

1. Connect to your server via FTP, SFTP, SSH, your web control panel or some means which will allow you to replace PHP code files.
2. Navigate to your Magento base folder. This is typically something like ‘/var/www/magento’ or ‘/home/mageuser/public_html/magento’.
3. Find the correct Google Base core module code file. You will looking for ‘app/code/core/Mage/GoogleBase/Model/Service/Feed.php’.
4. Replace the Feed.php file with this download. We are making this download available to make it possible for non-technical users to patch their Magento systems. Presumably this patch or equivalent will be included in the next releases of Magento. Download the patched Feed.php file from here, enclosed in a .zip file.
5. Logout and login to the Magento Admin GUI and navigate to the Catalog > Google Base > Manage Attributes screen in the Magento backend and click the Add Attribute Mapping button to verify that the fix has worked.

How to Fix Magneto Google Base Error (Full Details)

1. Connect to your server via FTP, SFTP, SSH, your web control panel or some means which will allow you to edit PHP code files.
2. Navigate to your Magento base folder. This is typically something like ‘/var/www/magento’ or ‘/home/mageuser/public_html/magento’.
3. Find the correct Google Base core module code file. You will looking for ‘app/code/core/Mage/GoogleBase/Model/Service/Feed.php’. Open this file with a text editor. You can download the file locally, edit it and re-upload to the server or you can use an editor which runs directly on the server through SSH or your web control panel.
4. Find lines 120 to 132 in the original version of Feed.php. They should look like this:
   117. $item->setLocation($entry->id->text);
   118. $itemTypes[$type] = $item;
   120. $typeAttributes = $entry->extensionElements[1]->extensionElements;
   121. $attributes = array();
   122. if (is_array($typeAttributes)) {
   123.     foreach($typeAttributes as $attr) {
   124.         $name = $attr->extensionAttributes['name']['value'];
   125.         $type = $attr->extensionAttributes['type']['value'];
   126.         $attribute = new Varien_Object();
   127.         $attribute->setId($name);
   128.         $attribute->setName($name);
   129.         $attribute->setType($type);
   130.         $attributes[$name] = $attribute;
   131.     }
   132. }
   133. ksort($attributes);
   134. $item->setAttributes($attributes);
5. Replace the old lines 120 to 132 in Feed.php with the lines 120 to 138 from the below code example. The result should look like this:
   117. $item->setLocation($entry->id->text);
   118. $itemTypes[$type] = $item;
   120. // GOOGLE BASE FIX
   121. $attributes = array();
   122. // Error: Notice: Undefined offset: 1 in ...
   123. // Add extra test to make sure this
   124. // extensionElements array element exists
   125. if(count($entry->extensionElements) >= 2) {
   126.     $typeAttributes = $entry->extensionElements[1]->extensionElements;
   127.     if (is_array($typeAttributes)) {
   128.         foreach($typeAttributes as $attr) {
   129.             $name = $attr->extensionAttributes['name']['value'];
   130.             $type = $attr->extensionAttributes['type']['value'];
   131.             $attribute = new Varien_Object();
   132.             $attribute->setId($name);
   133.             $attribute->setName($name);
   134.             $attribute->setType($type);
   135.             $attributes[$name] = $attribute;
   136.         }
   137.     }
   138. }
   139. // END GOOGLE BASE FIX
   140. ksort($attributes);
   141. $item->setAttributes($attributes);
6. Save the resulting Feed.php file.
7. Logout and login to the Magento Admin GUI and navigate to the Catalog > Google Base > Manage Attributes screen in the Magento backend and click the Add Attribute Mapping button to verify that the fix has worked.

I found myself getting into the PHP game rather late and needed a book to go to for the basics. I have been programming in languages derived from C syntax for over a decade and a half now (C/C++, Java, C#), so I figured I could come up to speed with PHP rather quickly. My assumption turned out to be correct and PHP In a Nutshell turned out to be my guide book and go to reference for basic syntax.

Last summer I began customizing some eCommerce sites built on the Magento open source eCommerce platform. Magento is implemented in PHP and makes heavy use of the Zend Framework. I purchased Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP to learn about the Zend Framework and integrating PHP with spiffy Ajax enabled interfaces. After reading this, tinkering with some code and a bit of googling I found I was able to read and modify your basic PHP code. PHP does borrow most of its syntax from C/C++, so this wasn’t too much of a challenge.

So PHP is not hard to read / write if you are already familiar with HTML and some C-derived language. That said, there are quite a few bits of syntax which are new and unique in PHP. New operators, variable variables, etc. Plus PHP is a dynamic language (see Wikipedia’s entry for Dynamic programming language for more information), so the semantics don’t work quite like C/C++ either. What I needed was a quick reference to all of these little details. Of course I tried the official PHP docs first. These definitively cover the material I was after and the User Contributed Notes are great to get some tips about real world applications or read some in depth posts about fine details about some particular language feature. But I didn’t find the online docs easy to skim quickly and they weren’t clear and concise enough for my needs and my taste.

Essentially I wanted to spend a few hours one afternoon skimming some resource and dump 90% of the PHP language into my brain. The resource I ultimately settled on was PHP In a Nutshell and I was quite pleased with the result. To say this book is clear and concise hits the nail on the head. I was in and out in a few hours and was well on my way to being a PHP expert.

All of this is not to say that the book is perfect, however. I usually have no problem finding fault, even in things I love, and I had no problem doing so here. The chapter devoted to object oriented programming (OOP) in PHP tried to be all things to all people. That is, it tried to introduce OOP from scratch, show the differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5 and also to provide a reference to the object oriented features of PHP. All three of these goals were comprised, and I believe the end result is not of much use for any of the three purposes. Given the overall scope of the book, I believe it would have been best to assume anyone reading the chapter was already familiar with OOP and to provide a reference for these folks. Those seeking to learn OOP in general will be much better served by other books.

Overall rating: 8 out of 10