Daily ArchivesSeptember 11, 2021

The eCommerce industry surpassed a trillion-dollars in sales worldwide for 2012, and continues to demonstrate substantial growth. eMarketer reported for the 2012 selling year, B2C eCommerce sales grew by 21.1 percent worldwide,and predicted that sales will increase another 12.3 percent to nearly $1.3 trillion dollars for 2013. [1]

Last year, North America lead the way with a total share of 30.5 percent at 364.66 billion in total sales.[2] eCommerce sales will continue to increase in North America and grow to even greater levels across the global market according to projections made by eMarketer. In the coming years, projections indicate North America will lose it’s top position as the leader in eCommerce sales to Asia-Pacifc. Last year (2012) Asia-Pacific’s share of spending was 30.5 percent, while this year Asia-Pacific is projected to attain 33.4 percent of the total sales made online, to surpass North America at 31.5 percent. Despite the changing eCommerce landscape, the single largest country will remain the United States with China being a close second. This may indicate global market trends will increase with the United States leading the direction for new online shopping innovations.
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Southfield, MI, February 25, 2013 – Hostdedi, the industry’s leading provider of Magento hosting solutions and a Magento Platinum Hosting Partner, is proud to announce their Diamond-level sponsorship of the 2013 Magento Imagine eCommerce conference.
The Magento Imagine eCommerce conference is one of the online retail sector’s most important opportunities to engage with leading international experts in the field. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to network with peers in the industry, share ideas, collaborate, and make new contacts. More than 1,500 merchants, developers, and Magento enthusiasts from all over the world will be attending.
This year’s conference will take place at the M Resort in Las Vegas, from April 8th through 10th, and will feature an awesome combination of keynote speakers, industry players, and the great entertainment for which Las Vegas is famous.
Hostdedi is known for its industry-leading Magento eCommerce hosting solutions, a reputation gained through a commitment to building an infrastructure that is designed to get the best from Magento. Read More »

Southfield, MI, March 4, 2013 – Hostdedi, a US-based provider of Magento, WordPress, and ExpressionEngine hosting, will be expanding to offer services in Brisbane, Australia effective this month.

Hostdedi provides services that range from shared (standard) web hosting to enterprise-grade server clusters for high-demand enterprise applications. Founded over a decade ago, Hostdedi has grown rapidly, acquiring two wholly owned data centres in the US and a considerable UK-based web hosting operation. Hostdedi’ expertise in eCommerce hosting, dedication to customer support, and close partnerships with Magento and EllisLab (creators of ExpressionEngine), has helped position Hostdedi as a leader in the hosting industry, no doubt contributing to the company’s inclusion in the Inc. 5000 list of fast growing businesses for three consecutive years.

“This is a huge expansion for us,” commented Chris Wells, President and CEO of Hostdedi, “We decided to base ourselves in Australia because it’s a booming market full of innovation, and there is huge potential to bring more purpose built hosting solutions to the region at lower latencies.”

Hostdedi’ expansion into the Australian market will bring with it the company’s full range of managed hosting options along for the ride. This includes industry-leading expertise in Magento, ExpressionEngine and WordPress hosting that’s performance-optimized, reliable, and secure.

All services delivered from the new Brisbane data center come with diverse fiber connectivity to other major Australian cities, New Zealand, and the growing tech economies of Southeast Asia. Cooling and power systems at Hostdedi Brisbane are fully meshed and N+1 redundant for maximum uptime, with modern UPS and more than 1,000 liters of diesel fuel kept on-site for generator power in the unlikely event of a major power crisis.

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About Hostdedi
Hostdedi is a Southfield, Michigan-based managed hosting company founded in 2000, with wholly-owned data centres located in Dearborn, Michigan and Southfield, Michigan, and additional satellite operations in the U.K. and Australia. Hostdedi offers a variety of hosting services ranging from entry-level packages to custom clustered/complex hosting configurations, with an emphasis on mission-critical hosting for high-profile eCommerce web sites. For more information, visit http://www.nexcess.net.

Hostdedi, a leading provider of Magento hosting and Magento Platinum Hosting Partner, has added several new features and enhancements to its popular open source Turpentine extension for Magento. Turpentine provides improved Magento compatibility with Varnish, a very fast caching reverse proxy that can significantly increase response times and reduce latency for eCommerce stores built on the Magento platform.

Maximizing site responsiveness is a crucial part of eCommerce conversion rate optimization. Studies show that latencies measured in milliseconds can have a significant impact on conversions, reducing both sales and general customer satisfaction.

New features that improve Magento’s integration with Varnish include hole-punching via Varnish ESI and AJAX, Magento compiler compatibility, multi-site and multi-store support, and support for Magento’s built-in advanced session validation, which helps prevent session hijacking. The new features in Turpentine make using Varnish easier than ever before for a Magento webmaster; providing security, speed, and versatility. Read More »

Using a live chat widget to establish a direct method of connection between a site’s visitors and its owners or customer relations and sales staff is a great way to increase user engagement, deal immediately with queries from potential customers, and gather useful data.
Often, potential customers are ready to convert except for a simple blocker, like a query about price, support, or features. Most websites have contact pages that let allow users to send messages by email, but asynchronous communications — those without immediate two-way communication — run the risk of the visitor finding a solution to their query on a competitor’s site while they await a response. Live chat puts the user immediately in contact with a representative of the site, who can satisfy any questions and lead the user towards a conversion.
We’re going to have a look at services and extensions that allow live chat to be implemented on three of the most popular content management systems available: WordPress, the Magento eCommerce platform, and ExpressionEngine. Read More »

Every few months the good folks over at WordPress drop a new collection of features and fixes on their eagerly waiting users. Next month will the see the –– slightly delayed –– release of WordPress 3.6. You’ll be happy to hear that this release concentrates on improving various aspects of the content editing process, which, although it’s seen various improvements over the past couple of years, still isn’t the ideal environment for those who spend a lot of time creating and editing content.

So, here’s our pick of the most interesting new features updates can expect to see next month.

Autosave

This has been one of the major incentives for content creators to turn to third-party software for their writing. Regular saves are an essential feature of any serious writing tool, and that goes doubly for one that’s accessed over the Internet. Edits will be stored locally and then synced to the server when there’s a connection, which means that a dodgy wireless connection won’t conspire with a accidentally closed tab to consign a day’s writing to the bit bucket in the sky. Read More »

As anyone involved in eCommerce knows, fulfillment is one of the most difficult aspects to manage properly. Many new online retailers don’t realize the amount of work involved in preparing products for shipping and handing them off to delivery services.

Getting fulfillment right is crucial for a store’s reputation and for retaining customers. If a customer buys a product from a store, and is disappointed by the length of time it takes to arrive or the condition it arrives in, they are unlikely to trust the retailer with another purchase or recommend that someone else makes a purchase. A significant proportion of damaging complaints that are made about eCommerce retailers on social media are from disappointed customers who didn’t get their product in the time-frame they expected.

Consumers have been conditioned by Amazon and other retail giants to expect prompt delivery and accurate delivery estimates. Read More »

Southfield, MI, April 8, 2013 – Hostdedi, a provider of optimized Magento hosting and Magento Platinum Hosting Partner, has published “Magento Hosting: Best Practices for Optimum Performance”, a free white paper that contains guidance and analysis regarding the best configuration of Magento Enterprise Edition and the applications it relies on.

Based on extensive testing, the white paper makes a number of suggestions for configuring Magento for optimum performance. Hostdedi found that Apache and Nginx, when configured properly, produce roughly equivalent performance, that full page caching with a Redis backend produces significant performance enhancements, and that using Varnish in front of the HTTP server with the Hostdedi-developed Turpentine plugin can increase transaction per second throughput by as much as 1,000%.

“Magento is very capable and relatively quick out of the box, but eCommerce requires the best possible performance; reduced performance leads directly to lost sales,” commented Chris Wells, President and CEO of Hostdedi, “This white paper, based on our long experience with Magento and careful empirical testing, sets the standard for highly performant Magento deployments.” Read More »

WordPress sites across the Internet are currently under attack from a botnet that is carrying out a brute force dictionary attack against the WordPress login page in the hope of finding correct username/password combinations.

This attack is unusually large, with over 80,000 bot clients participating. Although the attack is large, it isn’t particularly sophisticated. The attackers aren’t exploiting a known weakness in WordPress or the software stack it runs on, but are attempting to find WordPress installations with weak authentication configurations. Dictionary attacks essentially throw a lot of guesses at the the WordPress login page until they find the right combination. Read More »

This is a guest post by Steve Shaw. Steve is Head of Digital at leading SEO & Digital agency http://www.branded3.com/.

Since starting to use Magento for our clients from version 1.2, there are a number features that we all wish were inbuilt to the platform. With each new release of Magento we get to see some of these features realised which means we no longer need to write custom code or look to third party plugins to provide.

Here we take a look at some of the more recent features that can offer efficiencies along with cost savings from plugins and scalability for customer groups and personalised catalogue pricing.

1. Customer Group based pricing

The latest release offers the ability to specify a base catalogue price per customer group, this means that you can offer different prices for groups such as Trade, Professionals or Premium customers. This can be a great way to build customer loyalty and an easy implementation.

Catalog -> Manage Products -> Edit Product -> Prices Read More »