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Magento Archives

Magento may be one of the best eCommerce platforms in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that easy to use. Quite the contrary, setting up a storefront using Magento can be a complex, involved process which only technical experts can weather their way through. The results, however, are more than worth it – and there’s a reason for how complicated the platform is, at any rate.

The programmers wanted their platform to be extremely flexible and adaptable; a bit of extra complexity was a small price to pay for that.

Regardless, Magento’s intricate nature means that it’s incredibly easy to mess something up if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why today, we’re going to go over a few of the most common errors, issues, and bugs you’re likely to encounter with the platform – and walk you through how to solve them.

Let’s get this show on the road.

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The problem

Magento 2 aimed to augment the security of its predecessor. One such improvement set the default permissions on certain static files to be stricter than normal. This had the unintended side effect of preventing default versions of Magento 2 from functioning on some systems, some of which we host.

Before v. 2.0.6, Magento 2 set permissions of some files to 640 and some directories to 750. These permissions restrict read-access and write-access to the owner of those files and directories, meaning other users have no access. While this successfully tightens permissions, it is incompatible with systems that rely on a web server’s ability to read and write to these files.

For example, many Magento sites use Apache or Nginx with PHP-FPM. In this setup, PHP-FPM runs as the file-owning user, and Apache or Nginx function as separate users and therefore had no file access. This prevented these systems from functioning properly with default Magento 2 installations running versions older than 2.0.6. Read More »

Magento is fast, but, each time a Magento page is built and loaded, billions of instructions are executed on the server’s CPU and memory resources are consumed. On a busy server, that can lead to slow page loads and insufficient resources to serve every page quickly.

The solution is caching. When pages — or parts of pages — are cached, instead of being recreated every time a user requests a new page, they are served from the cache. Caches save the product of earlier page builds, so that when a request for the same page is received, the cached version can be served. Caching both increases the speed at which pages can be sent to users, and reduces the load on the server.

While Magento has some advanced caching technology built in, it’s often better to move the overhead of caching to a separate dedicated application. In this article, I’d like to look at one option for external caching: the caching reverse proxy.

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Pricing is one of the most difficult tasks facing online retailers. Customers are willing and able to go to significant lengths to compare prices, and there are many comparison marketplaces that will do the job for them. Set prices too high, and sales will be lost to the competition. Set them too low, and retailers miss out on potential profits. Following a fixed price set-it-and-forget-it strategy leaves retailers vulnerable to being undercut by competitors.

Dynamic pricing is the answer. Dynamic pricing — the alteration of prices to reflect demand, supply, and the competitive environment — can help retailers set prices at just the right point to maximize sales without cutting too deeply into profits. Read More »

This February was the first anniversary of the discovery and patching of the Shoplift Magento vulnerability. In spite of a patch being made available immediately after the vulnerability was discovered, it appears that a significant number of Magento eCommerce retailers have yet to patch their store or upgrade to a version of Magento without the vulnerability. Stores that are not yet patched are at significant risk of compromise.

Shoplift is a serious remote code execution vulnerability caused by a coding error that allows an attacker to inject SQL into a store’s database. It can — and has been — used to add new admin users to Magento stores. At that point, the attacker has complete control over the store and its data. Read More »

After surviving the busy holiday shopping season last November and December and now with the first quarter of 2016 in the rear-view mirror, hopefully your Magento store is still going strong.

Need to fine-tune things a bit? There’s still plenty of time for renovations and enhancing stores before the 2016 holiday season arrives. Now is a great time to review the last few months and consider what changes could be made to improve your store’s eCommerce experience

Much of that effort should be focused on sifting through the data generated by stores over the last year to develop evidence-based strategies, but in this article I’d like to suggest a collection of Magento extensions that, at the very least, will give you some ideas about how you can go about improving the shopping and checkout experience.

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