5 Effective Measures to Raise Customer Engagement in eCommerce Sites

If it is about doing business online, customer engagement is one of the most crucial factors that drives traffic to your site and and converts them to purchasers. Satisfied and happy customers are your greatest marketer and the key to make them happy is enhancing their engagement. It simply means having a series of activities or any activity in your store that causes your visitors to interact with your brand and that too frequently. This led to development of loyalty somewhere deep down in the hearts of the customers as they feel valued, resulting in high conversions.

Let’s find out what are the prominent ways used by most e-tailers to have higher customer engagement. (Click to Tweet)

Personalisation

Understanding customer’s behaviour when they come to your site so that you can personalise your website’s appearance as per their preferences. For instance, you can personalise the transactional emails or the checkout pages. You may add some interesting contents connecting directly to the customers which will reflect that you care for those, who spends their valuable time on your site.

Introduce Live Chat

Customers seek for all types of convenience when they buy from your store. Live chat is a useful tool that allows shoppers to make queries or clear any doubts regarding products and services, just like the way they do in any physical store. Live chat system aids in reducing the exits rates and raises customer satisfaction by resolving their issues.

Social Media Engagement

If you are not leveraging the platform for social media, then you will be falling back in terms of customer engagement, as social networking sites have become an indispensable part of everyone’s life. Social media is supporting businesses tremendously, by helping them to broadcast company and products information, provide compelling offers, garner followers, let them engage and drive sales consequently.

Blogs

Blogs are one of the effective tools for customer engagement but often remain underutilised. They help in addressing customer’s queries, help you directly interact with target audiences and get their feedbacks in blog comments, and represent you as an expert in your domain.

Interactive Product Catalogues

If you want to make your products more appealing to the customer, help them relate to your products well by using videos and interesting images. Videos are revolutionising the way eCommerce businesses engages their visitors which is resulting in high conversions. It aids in providing a shareable and informative content that helps the customers to make right purchase decisions.

Video Source : Magento

Final thoughts

Businesses consider customers satisfaction as the key to success. They often fail to realise that before that they need strategies of customer engagement to develop a strong customer base that will drive their business in the market. However, you need the help of an assured Magento eCommerce development company that can assist you throughout to incorporate these strategies to increase customer engagement of your eCommerce business. Reach us at PHPProgrammers, a leading website development company, based in Australia and having expertise in the field of eCommerce.

Source : www.phpprogrammers.com.au

Magento Development Is More About Its Extensions!

Get These 3 Beautiful Marketplace Extensions if You Want to Manage Multi Stores.

Starting your own business seems the easiest these days with a range of eCommerce platforms available. But, Magento tops the chart! Why? It’s potential to host a number of vendors on one eCommerce site by the use of Multi-vendor Marketplace extensions.

“Magento is the World’s #1 Commerce Platform”and we at PHPProgrammers, a leading company for Magento development in Australia have been deploying it from the start to pave the way for businesses in eCommerce innovation. Magento is one of the few eCommerce platforms with the power to build exclusive marketplaces for sale of goods. The prime concern behind penning down this blog post is to help the aspiring online sellers to turn their online into one-stop, multi-store using the powerful Magento’s marketplace extensions.

Magento comes as a robust platform where the merchants, programmers and the system integrators come together to create exceptional online solutions to meet every need of businesses and help them fit well into the trend of digital commerce.

“Magento Marketplace offers merchants a curated selection of solutions, while providing qualified developers the tools, platform, and prime location for a thriving business.” Besides, marketplace extensions bring in perks for both the parties, sellers and eCommerce sites. While the sellers get benefitted by the name or brand reputation of a prevalent online store and did not have to invest on getting their own, the store owners can accommodate more than one vendor, increase their sales and garner more profits.

Not just a few, but there are many marketplace extensions provided by Magento. Give a look.

#1 VNECOMS: eCommerce Made Easy

Perhaps one of the best marketplace extension from Magento, it has the potential to turn any simple store into a vast marketplace. From empowering the sellers with full control over their activities using Vendor Cpanel from managing products and orders to credit memos. Further, each retailer can get a customised storefront within the marketplace.

On the other hand, the marketplace owners get to earn a specified commission for each order secured by the sellers.

The extension boasts to:

Support a large variety of products
Have 3 different extensions mode
Manage vendors, vendor attributes and transactions
Multi-language support
Extension support and upgrade

#2 WebKul Marketplace Multi-Vendor

Rewarded as “Top-selling Extension in 2017”, this marketplace extension converts the store built with Magento 2 into a fascinating online supermarket store housing many sellers. From adding up multiple categories of products, to managing inventory, shipment, Webkul helps the sellers in all. Most preferable for big marketplaces where buyers of varying behaviours come along because it has support for different shipment and payment plugins. Apart from great features, it allows the store admin to set different commissions from different sellers.

The good news is Webkul supports Magento 2.1.x as well as 2.2.x!

Special features of the extension:

Extensive product management, order and vendor management
Commission scheme management
Search Engine Optimisation
Multi-language and Multi-currency support
Easy customisation
More Shipping Modules and Payment Extensions

#3 Apptha Marketplace Extension

Another popular extension of Magento 2, Apptha is equipped with a lot of intrinsic features that can take eCommerce store management to a whole new level. It does all for the store owners, from setting commission rates to maintaining of sellers subscription. Besides, they can also have a look at the live sales, popularly sold ones and approve requests of sellers.

Video Source : Webkul

To the vendors, Apptha offers easy one-step checkout, placing of deals, dashboard customisation of vendor URLs.

Some highlighted benefits:

Seller Dashboard to view sales performance
Vendor-specific URL to put brand-name in the URLs
Four product types support: Simple, Virtual, Downloadable and Configurable
Free installation
Product Sold Count
Admin Dashboard to view order and sales in request/in progress/completed
Fully customisable to best fit every requirement of the owner

Besides, there are free add-ons too like Social Login, Banner Slider, Merchant Shipping, Super Deals, One-step checkout. Earlier compatible with Magento 1.5.x, 1.6.x, 1.7.x, 1.8.x and 1.9.x , Apptha Marketplace now supports for Magento 2.x versions too.

So, how does Magento 2 Multi Vendor extensions work?

The multi-vendor marketplace extensions help the present Magento store owners to revamp their stores and transform them into a fully-functional marketplace that is capable of accommodating different vendors, selling different categories of products. However, picking the right multi-vendor marketplace extension is not that plain sailing. Analyse your as well as your vendors’ requirements well before going for an extension.

Apart from that evaluate the features that an extension is providing, consider the inbuilt plugins and reputation it holds in the developers’ forum.

Also, Read Our Latest Blog on Magento 2.1 Features:

“Magento 2.1: Empowering Merchandisers to Scale Business Profit

Source : www.phpprogrammers.com.au

Aspects that Emphasize on the Exquisite Features of Magento

Magento, with its latest ‘Magento 2’ version, became independent of eBay in the month of November last year. With this separation, Magento is now being provided with the freedom to set its own ways, goals and strategies. This series of new trends was the event of Magento Imagine 2016 which, led to a number of announcements including Magento Marketplace, Magento Enterprise Cloud and the dynamic quarterly release of Magento 2.

However, to get consistent momentum and keep growing as a dominant eCommerce platform, it needs to embrace latest technologies, thereby delivering value to all associates within this devoted and enthusiastic ecosystem. It contributes to improve expertise of the developers, thereby offering valuable attributes to the enterprise clients for staying ahead of its business rivals.

# Challenge 1: Cutting-edge technologies, extensibility and performance

Being a comprehensive refractor, Magento 2 comes with an excellent set of features directed to cater the aforesaid aspects including enhanced modularity in the frontend and backend, technological renewal and improved performance.

# Challenge 2: Continuous improvement and new features

Magento’s strategy for some of the recent years is to add more number of exquisite features to Magento 2, thereby adding real distinguished business value for the enterprise clients. (Click to Tweet)

Magento 2.1: With respect to checkout along with PCI compliance in partnership with Braintree and PayPal.
Magento 2.2: This release will concentrate on Enterprise B2B Edition features including account permissions, quoting and repeat ordering, pricing and custom catalogs.
Magento 2.3 and later releases: New promotion types, improved content management system, expanded analytics and reports

# Challenge 3: New dimension with respect to quality of 3rd party extensions

On the event of Magento Imagine 2016, the enterprise has announced Magento Marketplace, where the merchants can directly purchase modules verified by Magento. Adding to its quality assurance, Magento strives to battle against plagiarism, thereby serving the interest of both merchants and vendors. Magento also aids in re-investing the revenue from Marketplace extension shop into the same process.

# Challenge 4: The Cloud

Being announced at the Imagine 2016, Magento Enterprise Cloud comes as a full stack Cloud hosting and continuous delivery platform, thereby offered as a service for Magento Enterprise Edition. It comes with an exciting new turn-key, all-inclusive cloud hosting and devops meant for the big enterprise clients. However, the technologies assembled together, the innovative approach and the high standards are also inspiring for all other participants of the industry as well as for the entire Magento community.

Video Source : Magento

All these innovations and features of the Magento platform truly makes it a truly robust and highly-effective eCommerce web platform that can raise the standards of your online business to a whole new level. Over time, it has gained wide acceptance across the business fraternity of Australia and experienced Magento developers are in great demand now. Thus, keeping this in mind, seek for extensive technical expertise of professionals to facilitate the task of seamless Magento development in Melbourne.

Want to know how? Have a look at our latest blog : “Small Business Owner? Get Magento Online Store! Read to Know Why”

“3 Topmost Causes For Developing Webshop On Magento”

Source : www.phpprogrammers.com.au

5 Rewarding Features Of Magento 2 Benefiting Online Businesses

Magento, already hailed by businesses for developing powerful and stellar eCommerce sites because of its versatility gained much more momentum with the unleash of Magento 2.0. Magento 2.0 comes with extensive features that make it a better platform on the overall. Leveraging the upgraded functionality of Magento with its latest version, Magento developer in Australia and other parts of the world are crafting eye-catching eCommerce solutions for businesses from a wide range of domains.

Here’s enumerating the key features of Magento 2, that contributes to the success of the online shops built with the platform. (Click to Tweet)

#1 Augmented site performance

In comparison to Magento 1.0, the newer version runs with more speed and faster site speed will help in boosting sales and enhancing website’s SEO. This is mainly because of full-page caching included in this new platform which helps to build web pages that load faster. Also, it helps in better managing of catalogue pages without slowing down the pages. This makes it a scalable platform for building large sized stores, capable to grow as the business flourish.

#2 New Attractive extensions

With the unleash of the latest version, there are more variety of extensions across different categories, whether you are using Magento’s Community or Enterprise version. Availing from the lot of newer extensions, developers are now customising websites by incorporating features that best suits with the nature of the business.

#3 Offers key integrations

Magento 2 beside integrating a number of extensions that enhanced the functionality of eCommerce sites, also integrated a multitude of payment gateways including Paypal, Authorize.net, WorldPay. By offering integrations with multiple payment gateways, Magento 2.0 facilitate enhanced checkout UX, the key success factor of every eCommerce sites.

#4 Provide customer-centric experience

Magento, a platform that aims at converting eCommerce site experiences into customer-centric experience. With the new version that comes with useful improvements including an API enhanced API (Application Programming Interface) compatibility, Magento 2.0 leads to a comprehensive user experience.

#5 Comes with greater flexibility and compatibility

Magento 2.0 comes with enhanced compatibility, highly compatible with Zend and PHP 5.3 framework, which helps in managing cache engine and performance of translations. Further, the new version brings an improved level of flexibility in eCommerce site development. There are series of components including CMS, check out, catalogues, and others that can be disabled or enabled any time.

Video Source : Magento

Offering more robustness and adaptability, Magento 2.0 is the ultimate platform for retail enterprises to craft exemplary sites that convert well. At PHPProgrammers, you can get a team of proficient and well-versed Magento developers who uses the platform to build user-friendly and vibrant eCommerce sites.

Source : www.phpprogrammers.com.au

5 Proven Ways to Hike Conversions & Escalate Sales of Online Shops

Success of any eCommerce site depends on its potentiality to drive traffic from the search engines. But with more and more retail brands coming up with their online stores to cater to the ever-increasing demands of people shopping online, you need to be more unique and relentless in the online market. So far, Magento is recognised as the one of most reliable eCommerce cart for developing excellent solutions for an online store to businesses across diverse industries. Being one of the feature-packed and flexible platforms, Magento-powered sites acquire all those functionalities which help in attracting, converting as well as retaining customers, making online businesses more profitable than ever.

Let’s quickly wrap up the major ways through which Magento helping eCommerce sites in spurring up conversions and sales of online shops. (Click to Tweet)

Enhanced user experience

It has become imperative for eCommerce retailers, to make the sites responsive in different mobile devices apart from desktops or laptops, owing to the increase in the use of smartphones and iPhones in the recent years. So, having a non-responsive site will let you lose a substantial number of customers to your competitors. Magento is capable of developing responsive sites that easily adapts to any devices for which your target audiences can shop seamlessly from your site, enhancing the probability of sales.

Simple and faster checkout

One major factor that turns out many visitors from eCommerce sites is the complicated or lengthy checkout process. Higher cart abandonments or lower sales conversions are mainly due to flaws in the checkout process. With Magento, inconveniences in the checkout process are reduced as it comes one step checkout extension for the shopping sites.

Multilingual offerings

You may lose a certain number of customers if you do not have multilingual presence of your site as many leave immediately when they could not read and understand your site. So, make your online shop friendly to major regions across the world with the help of Magento. eCommerce sites built with Magento at first identifies the geographic location of the customers and readily direct them to the site based on their local language. With support for multiple languages and multiple currencies, you can be assured to fetch more traffic than before.

SEO friendly

One big advantage of using Magento for eCommerce site is its responsiveness to SEO. Long-tail links are difficult for the customers to memorize and this can seriously affect your sales, as shoppers cannot reach your site via search engine results. Luckily, Magento offers you an extension feature that will help in converting long tail links into SEO friendly and short URLs. The Magento extension will help you create keyword optimised links or titles will help you in converting traffic from search engines.

Video Source : Magento

Magento is a great way for impacting sales for eCommerce sites and these are some effective ways for converting traffic on your site. There are more ways like adding up feature of product reviews, ratings, discount codes and many more, that can make your store more popular to the shoppers. So, what are you waiting for? If you want to skyrocket the sales of your online store, then reach us at PHPProgrammers, a renowned Magento development company in Australia, that houses a team of highly skilled Magento developers who create outstanding and responsive online sites for clients across diverse businesses.

Want to know how? Have a look at our latest blog read to Know Why

“4 Effective Ways to Help Online Businesses to Optimise Sales”

Source : www.phpprogrammers.com.au

When Is The Time To Upgrade Your Magento eCommerce Store?

Growth in any business is evident as well as exciting! But what’s necessary to realise all the benefits of growth is scaling the business infrastructure to cater to the new customers. And if you have a Magento eCommerce store for your online business, the best way is to upgrade it to the latest version and make it effective to go along with your growing needs.

We, at PHPProgrammers, a renowned Magento development in Sydney offer exceptional services from new store development to version migration/upgradation. We know that Magento Open Source is the primary solution for smaller businesses to start with, it is always wiser to move away to the better version of Magento Commerce or Enterprise Edition. But, the big question is when? Here’s the answer.

#1 When visitors has risen to an overwhelming number

It is obvious that when you’re are gaining popularity, more people will be flocking to your site. However, your website is not capable to deal with the rising number of visitors and are plagued with issues like poor UX, slow loading, broken pages, or frequent crashes. Clearly, it is the signal for you to expand the limits of your site.

#2 Conversion rates are going down

Now, this is a serious concern. The only way to keep yourself in the eCommerce business is continuous conversions. A higher rate of conversion is a sign that you are playing-off well in the virtual market. So, whenever the rate goes down, it means your store possibly could not make any impression on the visitors and they just leave away. So, buck up your store with new and enhanced features from an improvised version.

#3 On-page content looks shoddy in comparison to other websites

Website’s content help eMerchants connect with the customers. So, if you feel that your store’s content is no longer driving customers’ emotions and looks poorly developed in comparison to market trends or other websites, upgrade it to the latest version that offers modular content presentation, preview, good staging or layouts tools. They help you place content, catchy elements as per your wish.

#4 You are not ready for newer customer segments

Achieving growth simply means you are now targeting new segments in the market with new products. You need different webpages for showcasing new range of products. So, if your present store is not ready for the modifications needed to serve the new markets, you need to upgrade it.

#5 All the performance indicators are showing a downtrend

Naturally, if you use the same age-old and small-sized store, it is going to hamper the other aspects like the number of visitors, bounce rate, session time, conversions. Until and unless you are starting with something fresh, you could be easily outpaced by other eCommerce sites that have better offers, free shipping, good customer services, etc.

All said and done, it is generally recommended to update store at an interval of 2-3 years to remain in the competition. So, if have a Magento store and it is still running with an older version, PHPProgrammers will be happy to help you to upgrade or migrate to the latest version.

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