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Developers: 5 Things to Know About Magento

Written by Danial Wright | Aug 14, 2014 5:00:00 AM

As one of the most flexible enterprise class ecommerce platforms, Magento has turned out to be a digital blessing for all those who can't afford to pay a hefty sum of cash to specific software vendors. For developers, Magento is easy to sell as merchants can update most of an e-store's elements themselves.

 

Being one of the most promising open source tools, Magento has been incredibly effective in building ecommerce applications for a wide variety of customers. Benefits such as user-friendliness, its open source nature, fast loading speed and customization make Magento one of the best ecommerce solutions. In addition to this, there are other hidden features of Magento that should be acknowledged by everyone owning a Magento-powered Web portal or those thinking about owning one. Here are five Magento facts that merchants, developers, marketers and the like should know about the ecommerce platform: 

 

 

 

1. Flexibility of managing the ratings

Online business involves taking care of numerous factors such as on-time delivery, perfect packaging and quality of products. If you're competent in doing well in all such areas of your online retailing business then you can freely ask your customers to rate your products/services. For this, all you need to do is simply enter in your Magento site dashboard, click on catalog tab, followed by clicking on reviews and ratings tab. Here, you'll find the way to add new rating for your e-store products and services.  

 

2. Product Alert Notification

With dozens of high-end ecommerce stores available over the Web, it often becomes tedious for the customers to return to your store for each purchase. Magento's Product Alert Notification feature is what plays a vital role here. By choosing Magento for your e-store, you can easily update your customers via the product-related notifications. This also serves as the perfect means for understanding your customers' preferences as you'll be able to notice their visits on specific product pages included within your ecommerce store. 

 

3. Tier Pricing

With a majority of ecommerce stores introducing tier pricing for their products/services, choosing Magento will enable the merchants you are working with to join this category of e-store owners. With Magento, it's easy to "convince" customers to buy a specific set of products at a comparatively low price. For this, all you need to do is simply go to your Magento dashboard, click on the 'Price' tab and add tiers. Here, you'll need to describe your equation, for example, 1 pencil for $10 and 10 pencils for $95. As per a research, it has been found that tier pricing can easily boost your ecommerce sales. So, if you too are inclined on empowering the online reach of your e-store, go ahead and leverage the best potential of Magento for your business benefit. 

 

4. Nested Static Blocks

Nested Static Blocks is a Magento feature that allows you to divide the lead blocks into multiple varieties of data blocks. For example, if you're running a content-rich website then you might have to face a number of problems in updating the site's content. It is here when nested static blocks work as a quick fix. All you need to do is simply create multiple blocks in one block and arrange the contents therein. Thus, the created blocks can hence be called on a particular category or product page. 

 

5. Admin Session Timeout

Admin Session Timeout is a common phenomenon among Magento owners who're trying to edit the product descriptions for their ecommerce website. Adhering to a specific session timeout limit will enable you to increase the session lifetime. For this, simply go to your Magento admin dashboard, configuration and security tab to reach the session lifetime tab. At this tab, simply replace the value of the session lifetime from 60 seconds to 1800 seconds. Doing this will affirm that your system will not expire after every 60 seconds.