Servage Magazine

In this post, I’ll address how Magento is lagging behind its competitors, such as X-Cart 5 and WooCommerce (a free eCommerce toolkit for WordPress), with its latest release of version 1.8. Magento’s current owner, eBay, did move the e-commerce web application from version 1.7 to 1.8, but only with the release of some bug fixes. Magento’s rivals are currently surpassing its development with core functionality, which must be addressed if Magento is to stay relevant. At the time of this writing, there are rumors suggesting eBay is developing a Magento 2.0 release, as a significant upgrade. This would have the potential to place Magento back on top in the ...

In the financial year 2013, Jumio ran an important study on mobile e-commerce. The results of their analysis indicate that payment friction accounted for a huge loss in revenue. In fact, about $16 Billion is the amount online retailers lost, according to the Jumio study, in just the past holiday season alone. This being attributed to poor user experiences with payment gateways, leading to abandoned shopping carts during checkout. Reading this news compels me, a web developer, to write on the topic of abandoned shopping cart rates by mobile e-commerce shoppers. According to major surveys, 66% of mobile shoppers experience a problem with such transactions, which I find unacceptable. These ...

Welcome to the modern computing period, otherwise known as the mobile era. Market surveys support this designation, by reporting $70 billion in global sales revenue for smartphones and $134 billion for tablets. Each is estimated to more than double within the next 5 years with figures of $173 billion and a walloping $453 billion respectively. With this growth in mind, many businesses look to establish a mobile presence with their own online applications. Yet, native apps are expensive to develop and keep up to date with ever-changing technologies. Therefore, small to mid-sized businesses are continually looking to responsive designing. Not only is responsive designing cost effective over the long term, ...

When talking about our e-commerce website, we web designers think about it in a bit different way, by seeing code everywhere with complexities to accomplish various tasks. Yet, in layman terms, an e-commerce website is a shop where products or services are sold. If we think of the home page as the shop’s main entrance, then our landing pages are the department fronts where you find a certain category of products. Additionally, the product page is where we utilize multimedia formats to simulate the merchandise through images, animations, videos, etc. And finally, there is content, which is our salesperson talking about the various benefits and features of our products. Presentation If we ...

The term, “conversion funnel” may be less familiar to visual designers of websites, but most programmers, accustomed to SEO, know the idiom very well. It’s true that each change in our design of the website or web application may affect the conversion rate. So let’s understand this conversion funnel and its design techniques. Conversion  As stated above, we target conversion, which means transforming visitors of our website into our customers.This meets our primary goal of the website in the form of purchases of products or services, or perhaps in filling out a form or other site objectives. Conversion funnel deals with the steps involved in the process of reaching the final goal ...

Our customers are doing their business or creating a website to earn money. Even charity websites have intentions to collect necessary funds. Therefore, accepting payment is a vital function on many websites or web applications. Let’s see how payment is done and what practices are accepted on the web, so that we can do it appropriately. Moreover, so we can provide secure experiences to the users of these websites. Unlike brick and mortar stores, we can’t expect payments in cash or by check since we are not dealing face to face with customers. Furthermore, depending on the nature of your business, clients can often come from every corner of the world. ...

Customer behavior is a concern in an e-commerce store, just like in a brick-and-mortar store. When we manage a physical store, we expect our sales persons to learn some behavioral science at first and to know the behavior of the store visitors and then customers. On e-commerce, we don’t have opportunities to get visual clues so we mostly rely on the various analytical tools and some experiences acquired before. We can classify our site visitors based on their behaviors and by the comparison with physical store experiences. The particular set of their behaviors can place them in some definition of the particular personalities so let’s see these personalities closely. Like physical shopping ...

Today Magento is an unbeatable e-commerce solution to meet the requirements of the modern age. Therefore, avoiding Magento is a sin for PHP web developer, for newbie in particular. In due course, I have initiated this post to get accustomed with Magento and its common issues for both, Magento developer and admin. For New Domain If you have, old store and running with constantly updated products there are more chances that you think about some new and cloying domain name. Once you obtain your desired one, it is likely you will consult your e-commerce web developer and expect to migrate from old to new. Now, what your web programmer will do. She will ...