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A Holiday eCommerce Winning Combination

Site Performance and Optimization: A Holiday eCommerce Winning Combination Increasing eCommmerce conversion rate is important any time of the year, but especially during the two months of the traditional holiday online shopping season, when competition is fierce and many companies are willing to undercut margins to win customers. With holiday promotions starting earlier and earlier each year, running deep discounts for close to 25 percent of the year can seriously affect your profit, loss and margins; not to mention constant percent off promotions can exhaust customers already inundated with marketing offers.

Magento Business Intelligence research found that merchants can acquire up to 59 percent more new customers during the holidays, compared to post-holiday and the rest of the year, but a site that is not performing at its peak will never attain these impressive numbers.

So, what can you do? Here’s holiday health tips from the eCommerce team at Web Solutions NYC to get your online store in top-tier shape and make the customer journey as seamless as possible, potentially conversion and driving additional sales.

Data-driven Decisions

It’s hard to pinpoint a perfect conversion rate across-the-board for online merchants. For example, you’d expect a B2B medical supply site to have a lower conversion rate than a fast-fashion site. Checking your conversion trends year-over-year (YoY) can help you pinpoint the lift you want to see in sales, conversion and average order volume. While digging through your goldmine of data, be sure to be on the lookout for Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are decreasing or any blips on the radar. Decreasing performance or conversion could signal potential bottlenecks or issues in your site that have gone undetected. Some of the KPIs to check for anomalies are:

Bounce Rate: The number of visitors that exit your site after visiting only one page. An increase in site bounces could signal that your site is running slower than the norm, causing customers that are used to lightning-fast websites to migrate off the site before it loads. An optimal site load time is 1-3 seconds, anything above that could be causing a loss in potential customers.

It could also signal a user experience that could use some work. If a customer is confused by the homepage set-up, they will more often than not exit the site before spending time to figure out your UX.

Customer Source and Conversion: Looking at where your customers are coming from: tablet, desktop or mobile, can deliver key insights on whether there is room for optimization across your selling channels. If there is significantly less customer conversion on one selling channel versus another, self-check for speed, design, broken pages and other issues that could be causing customers to not complete a transaction. You can expect a bit less conversion on smartphones versus desktop traditionally, but if the gap increasing YoY, you may need to evaluate your omnichannel design or strategy.

Don’t Set a Goal without a Plan

Anticipating the spike in traffic pre-holiday can ensure that there is no need to deploy a site-fail emergency plan, or lose profits because of a lagging site that cannot handle the traffic and capacity of many customers buying from your site at once.

As a merchant selling during holiday, your web store is your lifeblood. Operationally, your server and eCommerce platform should be able to scale and accommodate load spikes on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and “Green Monday;” these are key times your site should be running at the same performance levels as the rest of the year. A non-functional site is a customer service nightmare and can cause lost revenue, and the loss of loyal customers post-holiday. Here are a few items to self-audit now, or work with a partner to audit, to eliminate operational roadblocks during holiday:

  • Review of all added Modules, Widgets and Extensions
  • Review of Server Performance and Function
  • Review of Security Patches and Upgrades
  • Review of Customizations
  • Review of Server architecture and Logs
  • Review of Front-end Work
  • Review of Site Speed
  • Clean-up of Old and Outdated Pages and Promotional Codes
  • Start Sooner

A scalable and agile approach is crucial to optimizing your holiday performance plan, being well informed of analytics and identifying potential issues well before holiday is on any consumer’s mind should begin in summer and early fall. Schedule a site audit with Magento Enterprise Solutions Partner Web Solutions NYC or a server test with Hostdedi to help identify potential issues and eschew the holiday hang-ups that can kill eCommerce revenue.

Guest Author: Karah Finan is the Marketing Manager for Web Solutions NYC, a Magento Commerce Solutions Partner and Magento 2-trained solutions provider. Karah has over five years in eCommerce, and a decades-long interest in technology, and she’s passionate about disruption and innovation in the online landscape.

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eCommerce, Webmaster

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Preparing Your WooCommerce Store For The Holiday Season

Holiday SeasonThe holiday season is the biggest money-spinner of the year for many online retailers, but it can be a fraught and stressful period for retailers whose stores can’t accommodate the increased load. If “too many customers” sounds like a problem most retailers would be happy to have, you’re right, but if a WooCommerce store and its hosting platform can’t keep pace with demand, customers are likely to go elsewhere.

Performance issues are a major cause of high bounce rates and abandoned carts. A store that performs perfectly well under moderate load can grind to a halt during the peak hours of Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season. Retailers who take the time to prepare their store in advance are well positioned to make the most of the seasonal rush.

Evaluating Your WooCommerce Store’s Performance

Before making any changes to a WooCommerce store, retailers need to understand how well it performs under average load and under stress. To find out how much time is spent loading the various components of a page, I recommend running several pages through at least one of the following tools:

These tools provide a clear picture how quickly pages load and, if there’s a problem, the likely culprit. Google PageSpeed Insights is particularly useful because it provides concrete advice about the changes that can be made to improve performance. If you follow the links on the Google PageSpeed Insights’ report, you’ll learn what you need to do to get things running smoothly.

Performance problems can be broadly divided into two main groups: frontend issues and backend issues. If the above sites tell you that your pages spend multiple seconds downloading large JavaScript files or images, you have a frontend problem. If they indicate that server response times are slow, it’s the backend causing trouble.

In addition to testing the latency and load-times of your store under normal load, you might want to consider stress testing it under heavy load. Chris Lema has written an excellent article about load testing WooCommerce sites, and it’s well worth taking a look at if you want to put a store through its paces.

No amount of front-end optimization will significantly improve performance if the WooCommerce store itself is slow, so I’m going to focus on three things you can do to optimize performance on the server.

Upgrade Your Hosting

The resources available on your WooCommerce store’s hosting account are a hard-limit for performance. Some hosting providers don’t take the time to optimize their servers properly or put too many hosting accounts on the same server. If you suspect hosting is causing the problem, you have a couple of options:

  • Stay with the same hosting provider and migrate to a more generous WooCommerce hosting plan.
  • Migrate to a hosting provider that offers performance-optimized WooCommerce hosting and can accommodate the needs of your store.

Which option is best for your store depends on a number of different factors, but moving to a different hosting provider isn’t as complex or expensive as you might think (in fact, Hostdedi offers free migrations).

Use A Caching Plugin

Caching plugins can significantly decrease latencies and reduce the load on your store. Without caching, WordPress generates pages dynamically, but often that’s not necessary. Some pages and parts of pages don’t change between users, and it’s much quicker to send a pre-generated version than building it fresh with every request. That’s what a good caching plugin will do for you.

There are several caching options for you to choose from, but I’ve had the best results with these:

  • WP Rocket is a premium WooCommerce-compatible plugin that provides a friendly low-friction experience without bamboozling users with a million different options.
  • W3 Total Cache is free and offers much the same functionality, but if you like lots of options to tinker with, this is the caching plugin for you.

Before installing any caching plugins, check out the WooCommerce docs for advice about how to use them effectively on your eCommerce store.

Consider A Content Distribution Network

A content distribution network distributes your site’s static assets to edge nodes around the globe. Any requests for those assets are redirected to the edge nodes and not to your servers. CDNs provide the double benefit of reducing the load on your servers and ensuring that static assets are loaded as quickly as possible.

Many of Hostdedi’ WooCommerce Shared Hosting and WooCommerce Dedicated Server plans include a generous data allocation for our global content distribution network.

A combination of a great WooCommerce host, caching, and a content distribution network will help you provide your customers with the best possible shopping experience in the coming holiday season.

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How (and Why) to Launch a Magento Mobile App in One Week

Magento Mobile AppImagine going for a long hike and wandering into a mysterious cave.

You turn on your flashlight, look around and discover that the cave walls are littered with what appear to be gold nuggets.

You pluck one of the smaller pieces and bring it back to town. A jeweller informs you that the metal is, in fact, gold …

And that the particular piece you brought back is worth thousands of dollars.

How do you feel at this point?

If you’re like most people, the answer is simple:

Jubilant. Ecstatic. Over the moon.

After all, you stand to make millions, maybe even tens of millions, once you start working the mine.

All you need to do is discover the gold, mine it, perform drill tests, process the metal and refine it at a separate location while paying legal fees, workers’ wages and equipment costs.

Which begs the simple question of, “what happens if I don’t have the know-how or the money to do all that?”

Well, then you’d better hope that nobody else finds that mine before you figure things out …

Because if they do, you’re going to lose a fortune that was as good as yours.
At this point, you may be wondering:

This is a fun scenario, but what’s it got to do with eCommerce and my business?

It’s pretty simple, really.

What Mobile eCommerce and Gold Mines Have in Common

Mobile eCommerce

eCommerce – and mobile eCommerce in particular – is the metaphorical gold mine of modern retail.

Case in point: consider that …

Looking at these figures, it’s clear that consumers are spending an ever-growing amount of time (and money) on the mobile internet. This means mobile ecommerce apps are a high-growth, high-demand asset; much like gold was (and still is).

There’s just one caveat.

Like mining gold, doing business online requires a certain level of know-how. It also requires time and money that you may not have at the moment.

This is unfortunate, because as with gold, doing nothing means giving the competition a chance to take over your opportunity (and money).

Fortunately for you, there’s one major difference between mining gold and getting a mobile app.

You can get everything you need quickly, and at a low price, because digital assets are easy to duplicate and deploy.

Specifically, JMango – winner of the Magento Award for Innovation – helps businesses like yours get their very own branded Magento mobile apps in minutes or hours. This means that no matter how busy and overwhelmed you feel, you can get your Magento mobile app out there in under one week.

Here’s how you do it – and how you can get a personalized Mobile Shopping app for iOS and Android in the next 1-7 days.

Making Your Magento Mobile App

Making Your App

Magento was part of eBay for over 13 years. It became independent in 2015, and has since maintained its dominant position in desktop and mobile-based eCommerce.

In the 4 steps below, we’ll explain how you can use JMango (free of charge) to import and start editing your very own Magento-based Mobile app in just minutes.

The first step is …

1. Connect Your Existing Store

Creating your own Mobile App doesn’t mean migrating your entire stock into an app. With our Magento App Builder, things are as simple as signing up to JMango and filling out your store details.

Once you do that, our app gets to importing all your products, prices and content into your brand-new app, where you can easily review and edit them.

The best part?

Our service is free to register with, meaning you can import and edit your store without committing to anything or paying a red cent.

Cool, right?

But wait, it gets better. In addition to editing your data, you can also edit the look of your app on-the-fly. Here’s how.

2. Designing your Mobile App

Designing your App

When it comes to app design, 2 things are important:

  1. Standing out from other apps built using the same platform.
  2. Matching your app’s design to your eCommerce website.

JMango makes it easy to do both. For starters, you can customize the app using a drag-and-drop tool to change your logo, banner, background colors and other design elements.

This allows you to completely overhaul the default look of your app in minutes – even if you know nothing about design or coding.

Once you’re happy with your design, and all the products and content are to your liking, it’s time to …

3. Test and publish your App

JMango makes it easy to test your app on your smartphone. All you have to do is download it to your device; the app will be instantly usable.

At this point, the JMango team will be there for you to help deal with anything you’re unclear about. We’re also open to customer suggestions and requests. If there’s a function or feature that you’d like to see but we don’t offer, we’ll definitely consider adding it.

We’re also happy to help you market your app by choosing keywords, names and images that maximize your marketing results.

Speaking of that – the next (and final) stage of launching your magento mobile app is …

4. Promoting Your App

Promoting Your App

An eCommerce app with no users is like a gold mine with no miners. It’s valuable in theory – but unless you can manage to get some enthusiastic folks in there, you won’t get far.

That’s why it’s so important to promote your app as you launch it.

As mentioned above, we do our bit to help you here, by suggesting visuals and copy that maximize conversions (and in-app purchases).

You can also help yourself by reading our post on app marketing tips, where we share what we’ve learned launching hundreds of Magento store apps with our clients.

At this point, you’ve made (and launched) your magento app. Well done for making it through this post – and before you go, let’s just recap what we’ve learned today.

Here’s why you want to launch a Magento app A.S.A.P.:

  • There’s a massive demand for eCommerce
  • Magento is the leading eStore app platform
  • Every single day of not having an app results in lost opportunities and money

Here’s how you can launch a Magento app in under 7 days with JMango:

  1. Connect your existing store
  2. Design your app
  3. Test and publish
  4. Promote

Now that you have this knowledge, you don’t have to save money or wait for the right time to work your gold mine.

Instead, you can click your fingers and get everything you need: the know-how, the equipment, even a squad of well-heeled helpers (i.e. the JMango support team).

All you need to do is sign up with our platform for free, and start editing and designing your app today.

There are literally no strings attached, so if you want more mobile business, stop losing opportunities and start making money by creating your own app for free today.


Author: Lisanne Barnaart

About Author

Lisanne Barnaart is Content Manager at JMango360, the award-winning platform to create and manage mobile commerce apps. Lisanne is responsible for creating and distributing relevant content for merchants that want to build a competitive mobile commerce strategy and improve mobile app results.

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The Magento Marketplace Helps eCommerce Merchants Find Best-In-Class Magento Themes And Extensions

Magento MarketplaceThe Magento ecosystem includes a rich collection of extensions and themes that empower eCommerce merchants to shape the retail and shopper experience. Thousands of developers contribute to that ecosystem, but it can be difficult for retailers to figure out which extensions are right for them, which are coded to a high standard, and which may introduce performance or security problems.

The Magento Marketplace, which recently received a number of updates, helps eCommerce merchants find the best themes and extensions. The Magento Marketplace offers a carefully curated set of best-in-class free and premium extensions and themes from which eCommerce merchants can choose in the confidence that they’ve been vetted and approved by Magento experts.

That’s not to say there are no good themes and extensions outside of the Magento Marketplace — there are many — but for eCommerce merchants who don’t have the time and technical ability to assess the code quality of software before they integrate it with their store, Magento Marketplace can be a huge timesaver.

Each extension or theme included on the Marketplace undergoes a thorough vetting process to make sure it provides genuine utility and solves a real problem, adheres to basic coding and packaging standards, isn’t plagiarized and doesn’t contain malware, and provides all the information retailers need to make an informed decision. There’s also an enhanced vetting tier that includes a complete technical analysis by a Magento engineer.

Good For eCommerce Merchants

eCommerce merchants often have a hard time distinguishing the great from the mediocre where Magento extensions are concerned. Anyone with a bit of PHP experience can create a Magento extension, but it takes a commitment to excellence and knowledge of Magento’s internals to make a truly great plugin.

Poorly coded plugins can cause security and performance issues, not to mention the criminals who take genuine extensions, infect them with malware, and make them available to unsuspecting eCommerce merchants.

Good For eCommerce Developers

The Marketplace allows developers to make their work available on a trusted platform. The theme and extension marketplace is highly competitive, and even the best developers have trouble standing out from the cloud. A presence on the Magento Marketplace offers developers access to a large number of potential users, increasing their reach and reducing promotion costs.

There’s room in the Magento ecosystem for numerous vendors and marketplaces, from Magento Connect to individual developer websites and third-party marketplaces, but the Magento Marketplace has a prominent role to play in reducing confusion and eliminating poor experiences for new and established eCommerce merchants.

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Five Front-End Optimizations For A Faster Magento Store

Front-End Optimizations Black Friday and Cyber Monday are almost here, not to mention Christmas. eCommerce merchants all over world are battening down the hatches in preparation for the busiest and most profitable shopping season of the year. To make the most of the Holiday Season, retailers should take a careful look at their store’s performance. Harried shoppers don’t want to deal with slow eCommerce stores, and that goes double for mobile users.

Articles discussing Magento performance optimization often focus on server-side optimizations: choosing a hosting company that values performance, configuring caching, database optimization, and so on. But ignoring the front-end is a mistake. The most carefully optimized back-end won’t compensate for a poorly optimized front-end that leaves the shopper hanging while multiple scripts block rendering and enormous unoptimized images download.

I’d like to take a look at five ways Magento merchants can improve the performance of their store’s front-end.

Before you do anything, gather data so you know how well your store performs today. Without a clear idea of current performance, you won’t be able to tell which optimizations are effective. I recommend using Pingdom Tools and Google Pagespeed Insights to develop an understanding of your site’s performance.

Performance Budget

A performance budget sets limits within which your designers and developers must work. You might budget by load-times: this page has to load within two-seconds on a typical low-bandwidth connection. Or you might budget by page weight: this page can load no more than 1 MB of content in total. Performance budgets help focus attention on page performance.

Minify And Concatenate

When you order dinner at a restaurant, you don’t expect the server to bring each item to the table individually. They don’t bring you the bread, return to the kitchen to get a plate, then again for a fork, and a knife, and a spoon, and so on. They bring everything at once so they only have to make one trip to the kitchen.

Whenever the browser makes a request to a server, the load time of the page increases. If a store loads lots of JavaScript and CSS files, each file adds a bit more latency. The browser has to make lots of round-trips to the “kitchen” and back. This is inefficient.

It’s far better to join JavaScript and CSS files together in a process called concatenation, reducing the number of round trips.

You can use the built-in Merge JavaScript and Merge CSS options in the Developer menu to concatenate your store’s files.

Defer Loading Of Non-Essential JavaScript

If you want shoppers to see the content of product pages quickly, that content has to be loaded before everything else, including non-essential JavaScript and CSS. Otherwise, the rendering of the page will stop and wait every time a new JavaScript or CSS file has to be loaded.

Defer loading of all non-essential JavaScript and CSS, and, where possible, use the “async” tag to load JavaScript asynchronously.

Image Optimization

Images are an essential part of any product page, but the bigger they are, the longer they take to download. That’s not much of a problem for people shopping on high-bandwidth broadband connections, but it can negatively impact the experience (and the bandwidth bills) of mobile users.

First, make sure that your store delivers the right image sizes for the screen size of the shopper’s device. Hopefully, your theme does this for you. If not, consider modifying the theme so it makes use of responsive image best practices.

Many images contain data that isn’t especially useful for eCommerce shoppers, including EXIF headers and other metadata. Using a tool like ImageOptim or the Image Optimizer Magento extension will strip all that extraneous metadata and compress images for smaller file sizes.

Frugal Tracking

eCommerce merchants are often tempted to include as many tracking and conversion optimization scripts as possible on their pages. After all, data is key to improving shopper experience and optimizing for conversions. However, most tracking scripts are loaded from external servers, aren’t especially well optimized, and seriously impact page-load times. I advise Magento merchants to include only the services they really need.

To give shoppers the best experience this Holiday season, optimization efforts should focus on both the back-end and the front-end. Front-end optimization is a easy win for eCommerce retailers and their customers, and ignoring the front-end optimization may well lead to shoppers deciding your store just isn’t worth their time.

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Four Ways Small eCommerce Merchants Can Take Customer Service To The Next Level

eCommerce MerchantsCustomer service is a key differentiator for eCommerce stores. Only a retailer who cares about excellence in customer service can build a positive reputation and distinguish their store from the competition.

In an eCommerce market dominated by giants, many of which sell the same products as smaller stores, it’s vital to build a strong relationship with customers so they become brand ambassadors and return for future purchases.

Amazon, which the vast majority of eCommerce stores count among their competition, has established a well-deserved reputation for excellent customer service. To compete, smaller merchants have to be just as committed to making customers feel valued.

Customer service can be a major cost center for smaller eCommerce busineses, but it’s a necessary component of long-term success — it’s difficult in the extreme for an eCommerce business to recover if it develops a poor reputation for customer service.

Offer Multiple Ways To Get In Touch

Personally, I’m not a fan of talking on the phone, and if a retailer only offers phone support, I’m likely to go elsewhere. I prefer to contact retailers by email. My father, however, much prefers to be able to talk directly to a representative on the phone.

An excellent customer support experience takes account of its customer’s preferences and offers multiple contact channels. In today’s world, that means phone, email, instant chat, and social media at a minimum.

Many smaller eCommerce stores avoid offering customer support over the phone, because it can be expensive, and for some stores, it’s not necessary.

Stores that focus on millennial customers who often prefer not to make phone calls can probably do without phone support. However, retailers should make sure they have a clear idea about who their customers are before closing any line of communication.

Track Customer Service Interactions

The best customer service happens when there’s no need for the customers to reach out at all because their needs have been anticipated and pro-actively resolved.

Online retailers have access to a lot of information about customers. Data about previous customer support interactions can be used to identify common pain-points in the eCommerce journey. Retailers can design processes and informational resources that give customers what they need before they ask for it.

Self-Service Support

Most customer service interactions are the result of customers seeking information. Is this product suitable for me? Does it do what I want it to? What are your return policies?

Smart eCommerce merchants anticipate these questions in advance and create content that answers them in the form of blog posts, FAQs, tutorials, and so on.

Support content has the added benefit of being an excellent SEO resource.

Set Response Goals And Take Them Seriously

There’s little benefit to offering multiple channels of contact if no one is there to answer customer queries. There’s nothing quite so frustrating as waiting on hold for half-an-hour for a response to a simple query. Ignoring user email for several days will not endear you to the sender or incline them to make future purchases.

If you offer multiple support channels, set response targets for each channel, measure the speed at which customer service operatives are able to respond to customer requests, and focus on improving response times.

Much of the above is common sense, but for online retailers focused on marketing and promotion, customer service is often not a priority. That’s a mistake: recurring custom is less expensive than attracting new customers, and the cost difference frequently makes it worthwhile to spend a little more on keeping current customers happy.

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Does Your eCommerce Store Support Apple Pay?

eCommerceThe faster eCommerce merchants can get customers through the checkout process, the more likely they are to complete that process. Much digital ink has been spilled on the value of a fast checkout, and there’s little faster than a quick tap of the finger, which is exactly what Apple Pay offers.

Apple is generally in favor of the native-app approach for obvious reasons. When it first launched, the easiest way to give eCommerce customers the option to use Apple Pay at checkout was via a native app, and for many smaller online retailers, that’s not an option.

Apple Pay has been available on the web for a while now, but there are some requirements customers must meet to use it. The most intuitive way to use Apple Pay on a non-mobile device is with the new Macbook Pro with Touch Bar. The Touchbar includes a Touch ID fingerprint scanner and the Macbook has the requisite secure enclave.

Of course, almost no one has the new MacBooks, but that doesn’t mean they can’t use Apple Pay.

Anyone with a Touch ID-equipped phone and the most recent version of MacOS and iOS can use Apple Pay on the web via the Safari browser. Apple’s Continuity technology, which powers several integrations between devices running iOS and MacOS, has been adapted to enable desktop Safari users to make purchases with Apple Pay and verify their identify using either an iPhone or an Apple Watch.

From the customer’s perspective, it works like this: the customer choose the product they want to buy and clicks the Apple Pay payment option when they checkout. Their connected iPhone or Apple Watch will ask them to confirm and authenticate, and that’s it. Checkout doesn’t get much easier.

Whether it’s worthwhile implementing Apple Pay on your eCommerce store depends largely on who your customers are. If 99% of your customers are Windows and Android users, there’s not likely to be much upside. But if even a small proportion are iPhone or Mac users, it’s more that likely worth the minimal effort to deploy Apple Pay.

Apple Pay is relatively easy to add to a Magento eCommerce store. If a store uses the Stripe payment processor, integrating Apple Pay is straightforward.

Apple Pay isn’t the only game in town for fast payments, but Apple’s mobile devices are extremely common and it’s only a matter of time before more of Apple’s laptop and desktop machines are equipped with the necessary technology. Apple users tend to occupy demographic groups with disposable income, the same groups that include the biggest eCommerce spenders, so implementing Apple Pay is likely to prove attractive to the most valuable online shoppers.

As a side note, non-profit organizations can now accept donations via Apple Pay from supported devices, so it’s worth considering adding Apple Pay for the web support to non-profit WordPress and Craft CMS sites.

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How Does Varnish Make Websites And eCommerce Stores Faster?

VarnishMost modern content management systems and eCommerce applications – including Magento, WordPress, ExpressionEngine, and Craft CMS – generate pages when they are requested by a user. On-the-fly server-side page generation is one the two main strategies for creating an interactive web page. Without that capability, web pages would be static documents. The other major strategy is client-side with JavaScript, but we aren’t going to talk about that today. Server-side page generation typically involves executing code that interacts with a database, building pages by combining templates and data. That page is then passed to the web server, which sends it to the user’s browser.

Although this process is essential, it’s also intrinsically slower than sending static assets and it uses more server resources. If every part of every page had to be unique, we’d have to live with those downsides, but, in reality, many requests are for pages that are essentially identical. It would be wasteful to generate an identical page every time it was requested by a browser, so we use caching. There are many different types of caching, but let’s focus on Varnish.

Varnish is a caching HTTP reverse proxy, which sounds more complex than it really is. Consider a typical web request to a newly published blog article. A browser sends a request to the web server, which initiates the process we mentioned above. The contents of the article are extracted from a database, combined with a template, processed in various ways, and returned to the web server, which sends the end result back to the browser.

The next time a user requests the same article, exactly the same process occurs. But, if we add the Varnish HTTP Cache in front of the web server, something different happens. This time, the initial request goes to Varnish. If it’s the first time Varnish has seen a request for this article, it just passes it on to the web server as before. But when the web server sends the response back, Varnish will remember it. It stores the page in the server’s memory. Next time a request for that article arrives, Varnish simply sends the copy it already has in memory. The web server, the database, and the code interpreter aren’t involved at all.

Varnish works on a simple principle: it’s a key-value store. It associates a chunk of data with a key, which is used to find that data. In many programming languages this type of key-value data structure is called a dictionary, because just like the familiar word dictionary, a key (the word) is used to look up some data (the definition). In the case of Varnish, the key is a URL, and the data is the web page. If Varnish is given a key that it doesn’t have data for, it just passes the key through to the web server, which generates the pages.

Sending a page from the cache is much faster than generating the page anew: how fast depends on various factors, but it’s not unusual for it to be 1,000-times faster. And because the server has less to work to do, its resources can be used more efficiently.

As you might imagine, I’ve simplified the explanation a bit here – caching, and cache invalidation in particular – is considered one of the hardest problems in computer science, but the basic principles we’ve talked about should help you understand why putting Varnish in front of your Magento store is a great performance optimization and why we developed the Turpentine Magento extension to improve the integration of Varnish with Magento.

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How Can Small eCommerce Stores Compete Against Amazon?

eCommerce StoresAmazon is a behemoth that dominates the eCommerce world. If shoppers want a product, they’re almost certain to find it on Amazon. They know it’ll arrive in good time. And they know that Amazon has great customer service and a customer-friendly return policy.

How can small eCommerce stores compete? First, it’s obvious that small eCommerce stores can compete because there are thousands of flourishing eCommerce stores — many of them use our eCommerce hosting platform.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to compete against a brand with the name-recognition and market penetration of Amazon. Let’s take a look at some of the ways smaller eCommerce stores can stand out from the crowd.

Unique Branding

In many ways, Amazon’s scale isn’t an advantage at all. It can’t easily experiment with its brand or create a brand that appeals to a niche audience. The Everything Store must be all things to all shoppers.

Smaller stores, on the other hand, are free to focus their branding on specific groups, something we see most prominently with fashion eCommerce retailers. Brand is a big deal where fashion is concerned, and boutique eCommerce stores can directly shape their brand message and design to a specific audience.

Build A Community

People like to spend money with businesses they approve of, identify with, and feel affection for. In the modern eCommerce world, there are any number of ways for a brand to build a solid community of shoppers who will keep buying from what becomes their store.

Branding is important here, but eCommerce retailers should also focus on content marketing and social media to forge an authentic identity.

Specialize

A friend of mine loves rare science fiction books. Many of the books he buys are available on Amazon or eBay, but he refuses to buy from those retailers because he values the in-depth knowledge and personal touch of a smaller retailer — a retailer he’s never met in real life and is based in a different country.

Smaller retailers that specialize in a particular type of product, whether that’s books, engraved spoons, bespoke dresses, or whatever, have an advantage — they can use their personal knowledge about the products they sell to build lasting and authentic relationships with customers.

My friend can’t send an email to Amazon asking if a book he wants to buy is the rare 1947 edition with a misprint on page fifty. He can do that with his preferred retailer, and that’s why he’s loyal to them.

Domain knowledge and an authentic passion for the product is key to generating customer loyalty.

Curate

Quite often, customers don’t want to choose from 300 slightly different versions of the same product. They want someone with taste and knowledge to choose for them and present a selection of the best. Once they trust that your eCommerce store is great at curating the best selection of products, you’ll have a customer for life.

Amazon’s size gives it many advantages, but it can’t do authentic, it can’t do niche branding, and it can’t curate with the individual sensibility many shoppers yearn for. Small retailers can, which is why they’ll continue to flourish.

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How Can Algorithms Help The eCommerce Bottom Line?

AlgorithmsOnline retailers have access to far more data than their brick-and-mortar peers. In fact, brick-and-mortar retailers go to great lengths to collect data that eCommerce merchants get for “free”. But just because we have the data, it doesn’t mean we’re using it well. Big data is all well and good, but it’s just a collection of ones and zeroes without the will and the algorithms to turn it into useful information.

Many leading merchants are investing significant amounts of money and time into cracking the problem of algorithmic eCommerce. The dream scenario is retail operations that are almost completely automated. The potential benefits are huge, not the least of which is cost streamlining. At the simplest level, if we can buy at the best price and sell at the best price, we stand to reap considerable bottom-line advantages.

Unfortunately, determining what’s best is a difficult challenge because there are so many constantly changing variables. Monitoring the totality of the eCommerce environment and making predictions that can be applied to eCommerce operations is a task perfectly suited to machine learning and big data algorithms.

Gartner recently released a paper that discusses how algorithms can be used, today and in the future, to optimize eCommerce operations. Using Algorithmic Retailing to Drive Competitive Advantage explores four main areas to which algorithmic analysis can be applied. The four areas cover almost every part of an eCommerce business, but let’s have a closer look at a couple of major areas.

First is “Cost of goods sold”. This is the area most of us think about when we consider applying algorithms to eCommerce decision-making. It includes intelligent pricing, an area in which several companies already offer products. For a store with a large catalogue and a substantial number of competitors, automated smart pricing can make a substantial difference to competitiveness. Manual pricing at this volume is expensive and too slow for fast-moving markets.

Under the “Cost of goods sold,” Gartner also includes product selection, promotions, and inventory decisions — all of which impact the total cost to the company of buying and selling goods.

However, it’s not only the obvious “pointy” end of the eCommerce process that will be impacted by algorithmic decision-making. Many back-end processes are also amenable to automation, including IT — a significant cost-center for eCommerce merchants. There’s been substantial progress in this area too, especially around warehousing and distribution. Intelligent algorithms are being used today to determine maximally efficient warehousing and delivery — enabling retailers to have fewer products taking up warehouse space and reducing fulfilment times.

Gartner is perhaps a little optimistic in its claim that by 2020, the leading eCommerce merchants will be largely algorithmic, but there’s no doubt that online retails has embraced machine learning and algorithmic decision-making in a big way. Merchants that don’t invest in algorithmic eCommerce are likely to find themselves at an increasing disadvantage.

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