1. CloudSponge

It’s tagline is meet everyone you know in five minutes, from existing connections to potential customers and potential friends. Contacts and connections remain a vitally important resource to expand your business and customers often trust the word of their friends. Reach them with CloudSponge and forget the pain of manually adding in address book after address book for every new contact you meet. CloudSponge integrates all your e-mail contacts from every e-mail server around.

2. Facebook Integration

Bring your store into the social network and connect with every Facebook user out there. With this Magento Extension, you can transform the social media experience into the shopping experience. A step up from the popular and powerful “like” button, this extension allows shoppers to like, browse, and buy your products all on Facebook. Marketing your store rarely gets any easier when you give your customers the option to like a purchase and post it on their wall for all their friends to see.

3. One Step Checkout

Anyone who has ever done online shopping knows how cumbersome the checkout process can be. Page after page of entering redundant information is not the simple swipe and go you’ll find at your regular brick and mortar store. But with a one step checkout extension, reducing the number of pages to go through before arriving at the “place your order” button saves customers time and convenience. Magento gives customers a single page to conveniently enter shipping and payment information and they’re ready to go. With a one page checkout, buyers will appreciate and remember this simple,quick and easy experience.

4. Product Page Discussion Extension

A useful tool to personally connect with your audience and spread valuable product information and updates, the Magento discussion extension can play a valuable role in elevating your store above others. Engage in Q and A sessions right with your buyers or encourage users to discuss products with other customers. Allow them to get to know your store a little better, all right from the product page.

5. Advanced Newsletter

Newsletters are a powerful tool in marketing strategies and almost a necessity to attract customers to your store. With the Advanced Newsletter Magento extension, distribution and segmentation of your newsletters has never been easier. You can use newsletters to keep up presence and awareness in your customer base and with the Magento extension, target your subscribers with the content they will find most relevant and helpful for their needs.

6. Search Autocomplete and Suggestion

Quicken your customer’s search queries quickly and efficiently. Suggesting products only after the third character has been entered, search autocomplete allows your visitors to bypass the procust results page and head over to exactly what they want. Suggestion also enhances your overall inventory and shows visitors the depth of how much your store can offer on the desired topic your customer is looking for.

7. Google Base Feed Generator

You don’t have to worry about refreshing your feed generator every 30 days with this Magento Google Based Feed Generator. Operate your Google feeds with a peace of mind and let this extension follow Google’s policies and refresh your feed manually.

8. ShipWorks

Ship in less time with this integrated service connected to your Magento Store. With Shipworks, you can easily download your orders, create shipping labels, update order statuses, and manager customer emails. The bonus of this extensions comes with the integration of all major shipping carriers (FedEx, UPS, DHL, USPS and others) into one platform. Make shipping easy for every customer, no matter what shipping process you choose.

9. Magic Zoom

Images are an important part of your product page presentation. Not only do they create a visual impression of a product, t. With Magic Zoom, you can enhance this impression. When customers browse over your images, Magic Zoom creates a box that . When the mouse hovers over the image, a box appears and offers a detailed close up at the image. With just a hovering of the mouse, customers get a more thorough look at your product and their confidence in buying increases.

10. Follow Up Email

The Follow Up Email extension serves as a powerful auto-responder and shows your caring for the customer. An excellent relationship tool, the follow up email gives them the peace of mind that their order has gone through and is quickly being taken care of through your expert service. You can also use this Magento extension to never lose track of your customers who have abandoned their shopping carts, but are still considering a purchase.

Points.com is a reward currency management platform allowing you to monetize loyalty currencies, including the following:

• Frequent flyer miles
• Hotel points
• Retailer rewards points
• Credit card points

Points.com also partners with over 50 companies worldwide, including Magento. As a Magento e-commerce website owner, you can give your customers points for making purchases on your e-commerce website.

For example, if your customer spends $150 then he/she can earn 150 points on their American Airlines frequent flier account. This is a great way to incentivize your customers to make purchases on your website and ultimately boost conversions.

Signing up is easy, and Points.com offers an easy-to-use dashboard for you to manage your points. Customers can redeem points or miles for other items like gift cards, subscriptions, or add funds to their PayPal accounts.

For all you e-commerce website owners, especially Magento e-commerce store owners, this is a great opportunity to boost sales and build brand loyalty.  You can find out more details about Points.com here.

Contact us to help integrate Points.com reward points, today.

There are a few configurations that can be easily missed, but make a large impact on performance.

Enable Flat Catalogs

Magento Community Editions 1.4 and newer, as well as Magento Enterprise Edition 1.9 and newer, offer “Flat Catalogs” that summarize the highly normalized data in flat summary tables. Using these flat summary tables makes a noticeable difference in the database query execution time.

Check your Flat Catalog configuration now to ensure that your Magento store is taking advantage of this key performance enhancement.

1. Log into your Magento administration panel
2. Navigate to System > Configuration > Catalog
3. Expand the “Frontend” accordion tab
4. Set “Use Flat Catalog Category” to “Yes”
5. Set “Use Flat Catalog Product” to “Yes”

Enable Magento Flat Catalog

Now that we have enabled the Flat Catalog options, we must refresh the indexes and populate the summary tables with the newest data.

Refresh Indexes

1. Log into your Magento administration panel
2. Navigate to System > Index Management
3. Click “Select All”
4. Set Actions to “Reindex Data”
5. Click “Submit”

The resulting screen should show all index statuses as “READY” with a green background.

Refreshed Magento Indexes

Enable JavaScript and CSS Merging

Magento offers built-in JavaScript and CSS merging. Merging JavaScript and CSS reduces page load time by combining multiple files into a single include file with the whitespace characters stripped out. This improves page load time on your customers’ web browsers.

To enable JavaScript and CSS Merging, follow these steps:

1. Log into your Magento administration panel
2. Navigate to System > Configuration
3. Click “Developer” in the left navigation
4. Expand “CSS Settings” accordion
5. In the ”CSS Settings” accordion, set “Merge CSS Files” to “Yes”
6. Expand “JavaScript Settings” accordion
7. In the ”JavaScript Settings” accordion, set “Merge JavaScript Files” to “Yes”

Magento Merge CSS and JavaScript Files

Use the Database To Store Sesssions

For Magento hosting configurations that have a dedicated database server, or for hosting environments with the proper hardware resources, use the database or memcached to store user sessions. Contact your hosting provider to verify that this is an option for your Magento online store.

1. Edit app/etc/local.xml
2. Inside the “session_save” element, change “files” to “db” or “memcache”

Need Help?

Contact us for more assistance.  Our team of expert Magento developers have experience troubleshooting and fine-tuning MySQL and Apache web servers.

Persistent Shopping Cart

This new feature will greatly enhance the user experience by providing cookies to be persistently stored across browsers and multiple devices once the customer logs in. Information such as the customer’s wish list and shopping cart are stored during a customer session until the customer logs out. This provides not only an element of convenience for the user, but also encourages the purchaser to follow through in the order cycle.

Shipping Integration with Label printing support

You can now generate your own shipping labels via Magento Community Edition version 1.6. This convenience will reduce your time and improve your order flow dramatically. The shipping integration works with USPS, FedEx, UPS, and DHL.

Minimum Advertised Price (MAP)

Now you can show both the manufacturer’s advised pricing and your sale pricing either in the product page or shopping cart page. This feature is more for those retailers who are not allowed to price their products below a particular price that is mandated by the manufacturer.

Added two-step password reset flow

This is not a unique feature by any means, but more of a must-have. For a user who forgets his or her password, he or she can go to forget password, and an email with a random password will be sent to him or her. He or she can then change his or her email during initial log in.

Added PayPal Express Features

For your customers who prefer to use PayPal Express, this new feature will allow them to register for PayPal Express during checkout enhancing the all around online shopping experience for these members. The administrator benefits too, because orders can now be automatically canceled via the Order Valid Period field. Therefore you can input the amount of time allowed to complete the order in the checkout before the order expires. This is a great security feature.

Prototype JavaScript Library updated to version 1.7

If most of your customers are using Internet Explorer to browse your e-commerce website, then this will dramatically improve your customers’ user experience. This update will improve the performance and functionality of your website, because of all the fixes Magento made to the back end and its interaction with this particular browser.

This is just a short list of a myriad of greatness that Magento has made to CE version 1.6 that will aide your Magento developers in creating an optimal e-commerce website for your customers. Upgrade today and you’ll see instantly what you’ve been missing out on! If you need help with your upgrade, you know where to find us.

This extension will fully install the CloudSponge address book service and will enable your users to import their contacts from the most popular email services: Yahoo!, MSN, Hotmail, Live, Google, AOL, Plaxo, and Apple Address Book.

With CloudSponge, your users can share your products with friends, family, and coworkers quickly and efficiently. Manually typing address book contents into a web form is definitely a thing of the past now that CloudSponge allows quick and easy address book import.

The true beauty of the integration is that CloudSponge let’s your customers import from multiple address book sources, online and locally.

Create a CloudSponge account today and download the Magento CloudSponge Extension to enhance your Magento store’s viral-ness.

Check out the video below to see how CloudSponge works.

This module is completely free. The first 20 users to contact us will receive a free installation.

Download Now

At the X.commerce Innovate conference last week (October 12-14), eBay announced ground-breaking integration across multiple platforms that will ultimately benefit Magento store owners by tighter integration with PayPal and eBay, increased sales channels, additional tools for payment processing and online marketing, and much more.

We are excited about the announcement because merchants on the Magento platform will be fully integrated with eBay, PayPal, and other sales channels without making a single investment in integration software; it will all be included.

We took the X.commerce Pledge

We are so excited about X.commerce, we took the pledge to optimize customer experience across the entire commerce ecosystem.

Along with powerful new developments in commerce, The Shins played an amazing set to bring the first night of the conference to a close.

Stay tuned for more developments regarding Magento, x.commerce, eBay, and PayPal.

The tunnel into the evening's festivities

Developers and Merchants Mingling at Innovate

The Shins were the Headliners at this year's x.commerce Innovate Conference

EYEMAGINE is offering free installation of the latest stable release of Magento Enterprise Edition to customers that purchase or upgrade Magento Enterprise Edition. Contact us to find out how.

As you can imagine, this level of control over customer lists can be incredibly powerful for targeted email campaigns.

In addition to being able to separate lists of customers with Magento Enterprise Edition, customers can be provided with targeted content based on their customer attributes and/or past purchase behavior.  If you want to promote a certain product to a customer that has not yet purchased it, Magento Enterprise Edition makes it easy as a few mouse-clicks.

Contact us to find out how Magento Enterprise can help your business target customers accurately and effectively.

• No complicated modules to install in your Magento store
• No development required
• See new store orders as they are placed in your store
• Invoice orders from your iPhone
• Ship orders from your iPhone
• Cancel orders from your iPhone
• Magento Magnate can give you access to an unlimited number of stores

Why would I want it?

• Check on store activity while you’re out of the office
• Continue operations during network outages or power outages
• Allow your support staff to help customers while they’re in or out of the office
• Send shipment updates while you’re waiting for your table at the restaurant or while waiting in line at the movies
• Process invoices… from the beach
• Reduce or ELIMINATE losses caused by computer hardware failures

Would you like to see all of your closed/completed sales in a single Magento report that includes: Order ID, Order Date, Shipping Date, Merchandise Amount, Tax Amount, Shipping Amount, Tracking Number, Refunded Amount, Net Amount?

We have created a custom Magento report that includes all of the information above for each report within a time frame that you can specify.

Now available for Magento v1.4.

Buy Now