Younify is writing about Magento, conversion rates and other webshop stuff.

Today I learned something interesting from one of our clients (poaa.com). We have developed a multi-shop Magento environment for them. They sell design furniture.

For their christmas specials they made a new category in their Magento shop. They used simple HTML coding to change the font color of that menu item. This ensures this particular category is receiving more attention than the others.

How to accomplish this? Well, it is actually very simple, but hey, i didn’t know it, so maybe this helps you too:

1) Just include the HTML formatting tag, for example <font color=”red”>your category name</font> in the namefield of your category (in the Magento backend);
2) Saving the category will create an ‘ugly’ URL key for the category (since it will include the HTML code you added). Fix that by entering manually the correct category URL.

And you are done!

If you need any help on this post, or are looking for an experienced Magento partner, feel free to contact us!

So the first time Magento was released we were all pretty impressed by the ‘zoom’ function…..well time has passed and it is time to spice up our product zoom functionality. More detailed image views = more sales right?

Check-out our selection of the best-cool-looking-sales-driving zoom utilities!

1.Magento jqZoom
The extension should allow the mouse over application on the image product. It will open a new box to the right with the zoom of the product image.

2. Product image zoom – Hover to magnify
Hover over your smaller image to reveal a highly detailed image on top.

3. Magento ProZoom Extension
This extension will help to easily replace standard magento zoom with flexible javacript zoomer.

4. Product Image Zoom: Magento Extension
The Product Image Zoom Magento extension adds the possibility to directly display a magnified image of a product without leaving the catalog grid/list in your Magento Store. Moving the cursor over a product image causes the appearence of a larger picture next to the thumbnail.

5. Magic Thumb
Display your product images better by enlarging them to full-screen.
Upon clicking, your images will enlarge, revealing details in your product photos.

6. Magic Zoom
Zoom your product images to show enhance details in your products.
Hover over a product and a highly detailed image is revealed to the side.

7. Magic Magnify
An efficient way to show close-up details in your product images.
Just move your mouse over the image and a magnifying glass shows impressive detail in the image.

8. Magic Touch
Zoom in to inspect images in details. Click or move your mouse on image.

9. Magic Magnify Plus
A 2 in 1 function, hover to magnify or click to enlarge. We’ve combined two of our most popular tools using Flash and JavaScript.

10. Magic Zoom Plus™
Magic Zoom Plus™ has 2 ways of zooming images. Hover over the image for a zoomed area or click the image to enlarge it to full-screen.

If you need any help on this post, or are looking for an experienced Magento partner, feel free to contact us!

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So you are looking to add some cool productslider on your Magento store. Check this list of 10 productsliders we like!

1.Featured Products with Slideshow
This module allows you to add ‘featured products’ on any page of your Magento store.

2.Product slider
Horizontal product slider for Magento!

3. Productslider Extension
Display featured products in this high configurable flash-based slider

4. Slider/Carousel showing New Products
Using this module you will have a Slider or carousel showing your new products.

5. Showroom
Using YBM Showroom you will be able to present your featured products on the FrontPage of your store.

6. NewProducts module
NewProducts module allows you to display list of new products on the home page (or any other page). If the number of new products exceeds the number of products displayed on the main page, products will rotate randomly.

7. Flash Gallery ‘Flip’ and more
Flash Flip gallery, simple integration.

8. Highslide Plugin
Highslide is hands down the best JavaScript media and gallery viewer available, and now you can use Highslide on your Magento store!

9. Superstage Extension – Full screen gallery
Flash based full screen gallery for your product images

10. Gallery Widget
Great widget to show for example featured products as images with extra text when clicking on the images.

If you need any help on this post, or are looking for an experienced Magento partner, feel free to contact us!

Magento Orders – with Magento orders your customers are able to make online orders via the webshop or to create orders into admin control panel.
Once a customer make an order, an e-mail will be sent to the customer with the sales order made at your store.

You can review the Orders from you store in the admin control panel
Sales > Orders

At this stage the order is just a temporary record, once created you are available to Cancel, Hold, Unhold and Print Invoices etc.
Sales => Orders => Select an order => Action => Submit

• Cancel – This option will cancel the selected Orders when you press Submit.
• Hold – This option will set the Order status of all selected Orders to On Hold.
• Unhold – This option will set the Order status of all selected Orders back to the status they held prior to being put On Hold.
• Print Invoices – This option will open a .pdf file containing all the Invoice information for all Invoices associated to all selected Orders.
• Print Packing Slips – This option will open a .pdf file containing all the Shipment information for all Shipments associated to all selected Orders.
• Print Credit Memos – This option will open a .pdf file containing all the Credit Memo information for all Credit Memos associated to all selected Orders.
• Print All – This option will open a .pdf file containing all the Invoice, Shipment, and Credit Memo information for all Invoices, Shipments, and Credit Memos associated to all selected Orders.

You can edit if any orders that is not correct, just click Sales => Orders => Select the order you want to edit

Magento Invoices – An invoice is a record of itemized statement of money owed for goods shipped or services rendered within your store functionality, if you accept any online payment such as (Paypal, Wire transfer etc) the invoice will be created concurrently and there is no need for any confirmation from your side.

Sales => Invoices
You are able to save the invoices as pdf file in your computer.

Sales => Invoices => Select an invoice => Action => Submit

Magento Shipment/ Deliveries - You are able to create a shipment once an order has been made and paid. The shipment record represent the order has been shipped to customer.
Sales => Shipment/ Deliveries

Credit Memo – You are able to create a credit memo, in the case of any refunds to customers. You can refund to any customer who had successfully ordered and was invoiced.
Sales => Credit Memos

All records such as Orders, Invoices, Shipments and Credit Memos have an e-mail template which will be sent to customers as notices.

You can edit this template or custom with your own design theme.
To make any editing to this e-mail template, sign in to admin control panel.
System => Transactional E-mails

If you have any trouble with the Transactional e-mails please review our article regarding How to create and edit transactional e-mails in Magento Commerce.

Good luck! Source

If you need any help on this post, or are looking for an experienced Magento partner, feel free to contact us!

We develop Magento websites. For each design we try to make unique designs. Sometimes it is all about the details…

One of the items to make an unique magento design is the animated gif on the checkout page. Standard it looks like this:

But it could also look like this:

or like this:

In order to change the loader on your site, replace opc-ajax-loader.gif in your theme’s skin/images folder with your own gif animation. If you do not know how to make an animated gif, check this video. Not very exciting, but certainly usefull!

Hope this helps!

If you need any help on this post, or are looking for an experienced Magento partner, feel free to contact us!

When you get the error: Call to undefined method PEAR_Error::set(), while accessing the Magento Connect manager, try to solve this by removing this file via ftp: downloader/pearlib/pear.ini

If you need any help on this post, or are looking for an experienced Magento partner, feel free to contact us!

Today Magento released a security update. This article quickly describes how you can upgrade your installation.

Some notes before you upgrade:
-Make sure to make a database back-up;
-Make sure you have a file back-up of all your files;
-It is not recommended to make any upgrades directly on your live shop….but I know, not everybody has the possibility to run a development environment.
-Perform the upgrade when it is ’slow’. When you have little sales and enough time to overcome any problems you may encounter. Just don’t do it just before dinner is ready

These are the steps to upgrade to version 1.3.2.4 using the Magento Connect Manager:
(1) Go to System – Magento Connect – Connect Manager
(2) Click ‘Check for Upgrades’

(3) After the check is complete, look for Mage_Core_Modules and select the available upgrade. See image:

(4) Click ‘Commit’
(5) After that you will see the black screen with green fonts and somewhere it should say ‘ok’, see image.

After that you are done. Check the footer of your admin panel and it should say v1.3.2.4. Now do a full check of your site. Is everything still working? Did your webdesigner do any custom coding? Is that still working too? Take the time to test well and monitor your site statistics/performance closely.

Hope this helps!

If you need any help on this post, or are looking for an experienced Magento partner, feel free to contact us!

The Magento standard contacts form only contains the send name, e-mail address and the message box. A lot of our customers want to add more contact data on this pages, such as address, route descriptions etc. Providing more contact info will also increase trust and thus webshop sales conversion.

Below a short tutorial on how to add more information on the contacts page. The method we normally use, is to create a static block, which contains the additional information you want to display.

• In your ‘theme’ find: template/contacts/form.phtml. If it does not exist yet, copy it from the ‘default’ theme and add the directory and file to your theme.
  
• Make a backup of this file
• Find: <div>
  <h3><?php echo Mage::helper(‘contacts’)->__(‘Contact Us’) ?></h3>
  </div>. This is the header of the page. So you typically want to add the additional information after it:
  
• And add after: <?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock(‘cms/block’)->setBlockId(‘block-name’)->toHtml(); ?>
• Replace ‘block-name’ with the name of your static block, and you are done!

and again….hope this helps! Please feel free to contact me in case you need more info. Source

If you need any help on this post, or are looking for an experienced Magento partner, feel free to contact us!

Magento webshops come with a lot of great functionality, but sometimes it is just a little too much and you want to get rid of some of the functions. Most of them can be turned off via the admin panel, but sometimes you have to do get into the code.

Many of our customers do not want to have the ‘Discount codes’ and/or ‘Estimate shipping’ boxes on the shopping cart page. Unfortunately there is no control in the admin. But this is how you can remove them.

Make a backup of this file, in case you screw-up

Upload your new file, and refresh the page (sometimes you have to empty cache too to see the change!)

Hope this helps!

If you need any help on this post, or are looking for an experienced Magento partner, feel free to contact us!