Joel Hatmaker
Dealing with large product catalogs can be a pain. Creating products, categories, and attributes manually is often not an option. For most of our large-catalog stores, it would take years to enter manually. Bulk updates of existing products can also take huge amounts of time and effort. For reliable and efficient product data import, it’s essential to use an smooth and accurate tool capable of automating Magento data import.
If you own or operate a Magento 2 eCommerce site, you almost certainly have spent time trying to improve performance and load speed. Magento 2 is a powerful eCommerce solution, but it is also complex and resource intensive, even on a “vanilla” installation. You can get a powerhouse web host, enable multiple levels of front-end and back-end caching, and integrate powerful search tools to try to improve performance. Those efforts will get you much of the way there, but not all the way.
Online subscriptions are a very broad part of the eCommerce landscape. These types of businesses are often used for virtual media (like movies, news, music albums, etc), but they are more and more commonly also being deployed for non-virtual products. Subscription service sites (like Dollar Shave Club, Harrys.com, etc) are extremely popular online services, sending thousands of products directly to customer doorsteps.
If you are a Magento merchant with product catalogs common for this type of subscription service (beauty products, household goods, perishables) then it would be a no-brainer that a subscription service could bring added value to your site.
Magento 2.3 released with a number of additions and improvements. One of the biggest updates was the long-awaited Magento Inventory Management (also known as MIM, and previously known as MSI, or Multi-Source Inventory). This feature was designed to manage inventory in multiple locations so that merchants have more accurate reflections of their inventory without relying on 3rd party extensions.
Magento Commerce (formerly known as Magento EE / Magento Enterprise Edition) includes some powerful features that Magento Open Source (formerly known as Magento CE / Magento Community Edition) lacks. The feature list includes multiple wishlists, gift cards, advanced 3rd party integrations, content scheduling, custom customer attributes, reward points and store credits systems, RMA support, and some other useful tools for B2B and marketing tasks.
ADA compliance is an often overlooked aspect of web design and development. An ADA compliant website focuses on ensuring content and markup are accessible for users with disabilities. These site users will use screen readers or other assitive technology to guide them through using a website.
We have developed Magento sites for many years, and have watched the platform evolve from the early days of Magento 1.x up to the state-of-the-art sophistication of the Magento 2.3.x environment. The Magento ecosystem is always being improved over time, and because it powers tens of thousands of ecommerce sites, it is a common target for hackers.
Magento 2 is a powerful eCommerce tool, but sometimes it isn’t clear which version you should use or where to host it. Magento Open Source solution is fairly robust for an eCommerce system, but the Enterprise version (Magento Commerce and Magento Commerce Cloud) provides a number of enhancements including the ElasticSearch search engine, B2B catalog implementations like quoting and credit lines, related product automation, rewards programs, gift cards, and much more. For many companies that need these advanced solutions, the choice is clear.
APIs are everywhere. Their growth since their inception in software development decades ago has now become exponential. They are an essential tool for modern web developers to build powerful web applications. They are so prevalent that now usage has bled into other non-development business scenarios like marketing and data analytics. A popular aggregator for API services is Programmable Web, where currently there are over 20,000 unique API tools, and that number is growing faster and faster every day.
We’ve explored platform choice for Magento and other e-commerce sites before. There is a plethora of choices and we will examine the most popular and feature rich e-commerce platforms and other options. Watermelon Web Works does a lot of work with Magento and Magento 2, but occasionally we do get questions related to another big name … Read more