Magento POS: 2x Your Sales & Growth

One of the reasons which make Magento popular and favorite among online retailers is the availability of the abundance of options for customizations and integration. In the present world of online shopping, Magento stores carry the capability to do wonders. To stand at the top among competitors, Magento’s Point-of-sale (POS) integration is exactly what is required. Magento’s POS integration is easy to use and quite powerful to work enhancing the overall customer journey.

Why is there a need for POS integration?

In the present highly competitive time, where online store owners leave no stone unturned to streamline the shopping experience of their customers, it is important to have POS integration in your online store. Magento’s POS integration is transformed using PWA technology that has created an innovative and unique touch-point customer screen to communicate with customers and is wireless. Magento POS has been successful in enhancing businesses in different fields like fashion, health and beauty retail, accessories, sports and toys, hardware and gifts, e-cigarette, food and drink retail and much more.

It also enhances the automated data exchange between the systems and streamlines business processes. Another interesting feature is that it helps in visualizing the checkout procedure with product thumbnail images and front-end look-alike screens. POS integration comes with a highly responsive design which makes it easily compatible with tablets even. With all these powerful features and high competition, it is important for online retailers to integrate it into their stores.

Benefits of POS Integration

After talking about the need to have POS integration in the online store, it is important to know the benefits that POS integration provides to its users. Let’s begin with the benefits:

• Increased sales with diverse payments

Magento POS accepts all kinds of payments like credit cards, debit cards, cash, stripe, Zippay, Tyro, Authorize.net, and much more. With the flexible web POS; the customers get the freedom to make the payments using whichever way they like. Customers can mix multiple payment methods per order, pay partially now and the rest later even. There is no mess at all while making payments.

• Speeds up the checkout process

By getting Magento POS, the checkout process becomes easier and quicker as it can be easily integrated with printer, cash drawer, barcode scanner, credit card reader. This POS integration helps its users to quickly create orders and visualized the checkout procedure by showing product thumbnail images.

• Fast transactions

Magento’s web POS integration makes the product searching and filtering easy and quick using attributes like name, SKU, price, color etc. It also allows adding a custom sale in a single click with comprehensive information.

• Easy flow of Magento orders to POS

Magento POS is developed using the latest technology and is highly responsive which makes all the orders to automatically flow down to the POS system and show up as a complete sale.

• Saves time and effort

Magento POS saves time and efforts of the resources by eliminating the need to enter the data manually. This also reduces the chances of human errors, thus saving a lot of time.

• Increased revenue

As Magento POS integration takes just 10 seconds in the checkout process, making the store run smoothly during peak hours even. One even gets customer support 24*7 throughout the week to ensure smooth functioning of the online store. This smooth functioning of the store results in improved and increased overall revenue of the store.

• Increased profits

Magento POS uses IndexedDB browser which keeps the data safe. This enables the online retail store owners to make money at trade shows and offline events regardless of the network status. This results in overall increased profits.

The present time is the high time to sync physical stores in real time with Magento to engage audience sitting online as well. After knowing all the benefits of Magento POS, one must integrate the same within their online stores starting today to gain 2x more sales and growth.

2019 Best Managed Magento Hosting for Greater Performance

Magento allows its customers to build an online store of their dreams with powerful extensions to stay on top of the competition. The major requirement for a successful running of a website is a robust and dedicated hosting platform which supports high speed, management of a large number of visitors, and provides the basis of the store’s upcoming success. With the availability of thousands of web hosting platforms, it is a difficult decision to choose the right hosting platform for your business. Here’s the list of the best Magento E-commerce hosting platforms which are liked globally by the E-commerce retail owners:

1. AWS

Magento is an open-source content management system for e-commerce websites. This automated deployment builds a cluster that runs Magento along with optional sample data, which lets you experiment with custom themes and view the web store.

The deployment uses your choice of Amazon Aurora or MySQL on Amazon RDS for database operations, Amazon EFS for shared storage between EC2 instances, and an Amazon ElastiCache cluster with the Redis cache engine to improve application load times.

For more detail: https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/architecture/magento/

2. Cloudways

Cloudways is one of the easiest and manageable interfaces among all the available hosting platforms. With just a few clicks and affirmations, the online store is ready for the customers. Cloudways is a cloud hosting solution giving its users a choice to choose among top-rated infrastructure providers like Digital Ocean, AWB, etc. It allows its users to host the store on 30 different locations across the world so that the website owners can be closest to the target audience. This specialty is combined by the Cloudways with their optimization formula i.e. Thunderstack which has made them the best because of quick loading speed and overall user experience. It gives its customers hourly managed backups of the website, one completely free managed migration, unlimited Magento installs and much more.

Cloudways also provides its customers with managed security, cutting the cost of paying the third party to provide security to the website. Their engineers take care of any kind of malicious attacks and vulnerability that may breach the data and information. The site is constantly monitored by the engineers and the firmware is updated at appropriate times. This gives time to the website owners to focus on other important things.

This amazing hosting platform comes at just a price of $10 for a month.

3. Nexcess

One of the perfect solutions for midsize companies which provide many services other than just the hosting platform. It is known for providing customers with high performing dedicated servers and unparalleled tech support. Nexcess provides 24*7 customer support throughout the year with support options ranging from live chat, phone call and emails. It offers dedicated IP’s and Intel Xenon processors which makes it just a 1-click installation process for the customers.

The platform is PCI compliant which gives complete security to the websites hosted and protects form vulnerabilities and external threats. It also offers free migrations. The charges for Nexcess are $19.95 for a month.

4. Cloud Hosting By A2hosting

● Up To 20X Faster Servers
● Unlimited Websites
● Unlimited Storage
● Free Account Migration
● cPanel Included
● Free SSL & SSD
● Anytime Money Back Guarantee
● 99.9% Uptime

5. Cloud Hosting By Rackspace

● Optimized Servers for Magento 2
● Fast 24/7 Support

6. Cloud Hosting By Magemojo

● 100% Up-time
● Pay as You Go
● Premium Cloudfront CDN Included
● Storage 25G SSD
● World-class Services
● Support SLA: 1 hr

7. Shared Hosting By Simple servers

● Fast Magento Servers
● Optimize for Magento 2
● Super fast UK network
● Free Install & Support
● Storage 900MB SSD
● Bandwidth 3GB
● RAM 32GB
● cPanel Included
● Git Supported

8. Mgt-commerce

This platform promises a less than 0.3 seconds load time for the websites, making it best among all the available hosting platforms. It provides its customers with a panel which makes the managing of servers and hosting easy and simple. This hosting platform uses the latest technologies and pays special attention to lightweight components and optimizing configurations for assuring high performance of the websites. Mgt-commerce uses AWS cloud which is available in 190 countries, through 13 geographic regions, and over 50 local presence points.

It also offers one completely free migration to its customers. Mgt-commerce also provides high security as they offer VPN, DDoS attack protection, the AWS WAF web application firewall, and network firewalls and much more. The services provided by AWS are fully PCI-compliant, have ISO 27001 certification and PCI DSS Level 1 certification which keeps the data of customers safe and secure and offer 24*7 customer support. This comes at a starting price of $49 per month.

9. FastComet

With Uptime of 99.99% and load speed of 1.27 seconds, FastComet ensures its customers the best hosting platform. With Nginx, Memcache and Varnish at the back of the host and excellent knowledge base, it provides an excellent hosting experience to its customers.

The best part of this hosting platform is that it provides free CloudFlare CDN, Free Domain Forever, and completely Free Magento store Transfer for its customers. Daily and weekly backups are also offered by the FastComet. It also provides complete security to the websites with starting at from $49.95 for a month.

10. ZeroLag

Designed for Magento sites, ZeroLag claims to offer the highest level of performance and secured environment for hosting the websites. It uses latest-generation Dell PowerEdge servers, RAID Storage Systems, and World-class Data Center to provide a good hosting platform for the hosting Magento websites.

One of the unique features of ZeroLag is that it offers custom on-demand service to its customers. The price is also not fixed and depends upon the requirements of the customers’.

11. GoDaddy

GoDaddy offers Linux and Windows-based hosting to its customers. It offers a load speed of just 1.30 seconds, an uptime of 100% for hosted websites. It provides 24*7 customer support to its clients via phone, live chat, and ticket-based system.

It offers shared hosting for small businesses, VIP hosting, scalable cloud hosting, and dedicated servers to its clients. GoDaddy offers three shared hosting plans; Economy plan, deluxe plan and ultimate plan fixed at different prices.

12. SiteGround

If you have chosen to use Magento Community Edition to build your online shop, you can count on our unique handmade hosting solution and expert Magento help. We invest significant resources in applying technologies that boost the performance of our Magento shops even on our more affordable shared servers. We provide free Cloudflare CDN with Railgun to make both yours and your customers’ experience with Magento really fast and enjoyable. We also make sure that your Magento CE website is safer and better supported than anywhere else!

For more detail: https://www.siteground.com/magento-hosting.htm

13. Bluehost

FREE Domain Name for 1st Year
FREE SSL Certificate Included
24/7 Support Starting at $7.99 $2.95/month*

Magento, being the most popular website development platform, selecting a good hosting service holds great importance. To select the best-fit host, it is important to analyze the features offered by it and its scalability. The above list will help you to analyze the best hosting platform for your business.

Buried Treasure Fossil achieves 2X revenues by focusing on Magento store Maintenance

“Having the site page and product opening performance restored is great news. Thanks to Sigma and the team. I received 4 orders in the past 4 hours.”

– Gary Greaser
Owner, BTF

Buried Treasure Fossil is the place for new and seasoned fossil collectors, providing a wide range of incredible fossils to choose from. As a purely online business, BTF strategy is to offer great fossils at great prices, and super service for customers across the USA. The relatively young company is owned by Gary Greaser, an avid enthusiast, and collector of the fossils. Having realized that migrating to Magento Opensource from Magento 1.7 could enable him to boost his sales while delivering an excellent customer experience, Gary chose Sigma to migrate their site to Magento Opensource which was completed and went live in 4 months.

The team worked hard to ensure that all features and functionally made it easier for customers to navigate through the site. Some of the enhancements like Featured Category on the homepage and filtration of the fossils by species enabled customers to find what they need in half the time that was required earlier. By using landing pages for product categories, customers could see all relevant information about a specific fossil on the product page, and add it directly to their cart.

Present Business Need

Launching an e-commerce site takes a lot of work, and so does effectively supporting, maintaining, and evolving it. Proactive maintenance, site updates and applying security patches are a critical part of managing an e-commerce site.

As with many companies, Buried Treasure Fossil does not have the in-house tech team to keep a modern e-commerce site running effectively and securely while the business is growing. To bridge this gap, Sigma is responsible for keeping their site running optimally – both from a technology and a marketing perspective.

Support and Maintenance

The team defines and prioritizes the site updates, functional improvements, patches and site issues when they arise. For every task, we have a turn around time of 4 to 8 hrs. We track these changes and issues within our issue tracking tool – JIRA, assign a unique tracking number to each task and get them done. We have regular status calls and generate weekly reports in order to track the progress of all support issues and to ensure the process is being followed and most importantly, expectations are being met.

Sigma’s client support activities include a combination of the following activities:

• Ongoing website maintenance
• Troubleshooting for technical issues
• Magento training to clients hold of their Magento store
• Performance improvement
• Website speed optimization
• Feature up gradation and installations
• Security patch updates
• Suggestions and solutions for improved search engine ranking
• Solution to the server or hosting related problems
• Daily status reports and weekly progress reports

Sigma Magento Experts are always ready for any kind of Magento support and maintenance. We work as the client’s go-to experts and help them with up-gradation of software and improved functionality with new and updated features in the E-commerce website.

Based on customer requirements and hourly support they need, we offer customized Magento maintenance and support monthly packages. We discuss clients’ requirements and agree with them for a particular number of hours per month and make a schedule as per their suitability to catch up during business hours through telephonic, email, chat, video chat and face to face support.

Top 5 Magento Enterprise Edition Features – 2018 - Sigma Infosolutions

A good number of small scale and medium scale businesses prefer the Magento Community Edition for being budget friendly but the Magento Enterprise Edition is built for the development of a rapid and cost-effective innovation in the long run. The platform uses a combination of rich, out-of-the-box functionality, enterprise performance and powerful business tools to get ahead of increasingly complex commerce operations and growing customer demands.

Let us take a look at some of the Magento Enterprise features—

1. Advanced Search –Magento Enterprise Edition includes Elastic Search for the most powerful customer search experience, with advanced search rules that deliver the results your customers expect. Magento 2 EEs Elastic search comes with powerful features such as

1. Automatic suggestion for better user experience (aka “Did you mean?” feature)
2. Very fast autocomplete
3. Smart correction when text query is misspelled
4. Search for product attribute options

And much more.

2. Advanced Targeting and Segmentation tools – Magento 2 Enterprise Edition has an interesting feature that allows you to dynamically display content and promotions to specific customers, based on properties such as customer address, order history, shopping cart contents and so on.You can also optimize marketing initiatives based on targeted segments by using shopping cart price rules and banners. Because customer segment information is dynamic and is constantly refreshed, customers can become associated and disassociated from a segment as they continue shopping from the online store.

This boosts the conversion rate for the business and creates a unique shopping experience for their customers, promising more potential ones.

3. Advanced Merchandising and Promotion –Grabbing a customer’s attention is an expensive task. Once you have got it, the next challenge is how do you show your customers the right products and promotions to increase your chances of making a sale? Merchandising and promotion are great tools to increase conversion rates. Drag and drop merchandising, flexible pricing and promotions, rules-based cross-sales and up-sales, and customer segmentation tools are all features of Magento Enterprise Edition that help you automate creative strategies for maximizing customer sales.

4. Advanced Content Management –Integrating third-party CMS solutions to your Magento build adds cost and complexity. Magento 2 Enterprise Edition includes drag-and-drop content management capability with staging and preview features that allow your content creators to build content and get it approved without involving a developer.

5. B2B Support –Business-to-business eCommerce is growing. Companies are working on their B2B eCommerce strategy, increasing the competition. Many companies are using an obsolete custom-built eCommerce platform, or don’t have one at all. A proper eCommerce platform for B2B allows your business to grow by giving smaller customers an opportunity to self-service, allowing you to focus on higher-value customers. Magento’s B2B functionality includes requisition lists, quotes, negotiated pricing, product exclusivity, and corporate accounts. These built-in features allow you to focus on customizing the features that are unique to your business operation.

While Magento 2 has an affordable Community plan perfect for small businesses, companies who are serious about e-Commerce or drive high revenue are encouraged to invest in Magento 2 Enterprise.

It offers different payment methods for you and your customers. You can download these as extensions to your Magento account for different Magento Enterprise pricing options. These include:

Amazon Pay: You can integrate Amazon Pay into your Magento account.

Apple Pay: Your customers can easily purchase your products through their iOS device or on their Apple ID.

Google Wallet: You can accept payments from your customer’s Google accounts and from the card they have saved in their Google Wallet.

Bitcoin and Altcoins: Because of its security and effectiveness, more digital consumers are choosing bitcoins and altcoins as payment methods. Accepting bitcoins and altcoins can help your store attract these consumers.

PayPal: This payment service is by far the most widely used because of its efficiency and safety. PayPal is also great for international shoppers.

These extension options and add-ons will help you appeal to a wider audience while also benefitting you in terms of gaining revenue. It is important to identify the right platform based on your business needs. Magento Enterprise Edition allows the businesses to build a well-designed, responsive and secure website, enabling the owner to control the web store efficiently in order to scale up their online marketing game.

Advantages of Using Magento Enterprise Edition - Sigma Infosolutions

Magento Enterprise Edition blurs the lines between what is possible; giving the business owner the power to create bold and unique shopping experiences that will transform the customer’s experience on the website. Although many small to medium businesses prefer the Magento Community edition for being budget-friendly, the Magento Enterprise edition is built for rapid and cost-effective innovation in the long run. The platform combines rich, out-of-the-box functionality, enterprise performance and scale, and powerful business tools to get ahead of increasingly complex commerce operations and growing customer demands. Let us take a look at some of the Magento Enterprise features which make it stand out from the Magento Community edition:

1. Enhanced Enterprise Efficiency & Flexibility

Magento Enterprise Edition comes with a powerful Admin experience. The modern and intuitive user interface allows the owners to effectively manage and maintain online stores. The Admin dashboard comes with a quick access to the sales, orders, product data and other features saving the time during administrative tasks. It comes with features that allow the users to save and customize the views in the Admin Panel. Magento Enterprise Edition’s step-by-step product creation tool guide has made it very simple and 4 times faster to add new products to the store.

2. Customer Segmentation and Personalization

Magento Enterprise Edition has an interesting feature that allows the segmentation of the users based on gender, location, history, purchasing value, wish-list and other factors and provides more marketing options. It also allows creating personalized shopping experiences by dynamically displaying promotions and content based on the demographic and geographic behavior of the target audience. This boosts the conversion rate and creates a unique shopping experience.

3. Elasticsearch

Magento Enterprise Edition has an integrated Elastic search technology which makes it very easy to set up and handle large catalogs efficiently. It manages global search-results in 33 languages which gives the Magento Enterprise Edition extra brownie points. Elasticsearch offers suggestions for misspellings, synonym management and support for stop words helping in increasing the conversion rate.

4. Better Payment Security

Magento  Enterprise edition provides a secure payment gateway for the payments. It comes with integrated payment gateways like Braintree, PayPal, Authorize.net, CyberSource and WorldPay securing the payments. Although the Magento Community Edition users can get payment extensions through Magento Marketplace, the problem with using a lot of third-party extensions is that sometimes they can conflict with each other, causing problems and instability in the system.Magento 2 Enterprise Edition comes with secure payment gateway and PCI complaint standards to make the whole process of purchasing super-fast and equally secure.

5. Full Page Caching

When it comes to your website’s performance, EE makes it possible for your site to grow without limits. Whenever a user visits or re-visits the website, the updated version of Magento displays the HTML cached data stored in the buffer area rather than fetching the information from the database. The benefit of full-page caching is that it reduces the load-time on the server, improving the response time and boosting the performance. In times of high traffic, full page caching helps in avoiding the downtime as the load on the server is reduced.

6. Easy Checkout Process

Magento EE has been successfully enhanced with the highly customizable interface to place orders and complete the checkout process. The platform is now 50% faster, requires a very few steps and customer related information while making the purchases. This has made the checkout process easier, quicker and secure as compared to the previous version.

It is vital to select the right platform based on the business needs. A smaller company that doesn’t need the upgraded performance capabilities or advanced features that Magento Enterprise offers, is advised to go with the Community Edition. However, for chasing a larger audience, Enterprise Edition enables you to reach specific segments and grant much more flexible options.  Magento enterprise edition allows the businesses to build a well-designed, responsive and secure website, enabling the owner to control the web store efficiently in order to scale up their online marketing game.

Ecommerce Web Design Trends for 2018

An e-commerce business is not successful for just the products or services it sells or how well it markets them, but by the way, it designs its websites for user’s ease of access, functionality, and features. When you are starting out as an e-commerce business or one that is already set up shop in the World Wide Web, then you need to remember that you are right away competing with the well-established businesses that preceded you. You cannot just be famous by being the new kid on the block, the first things that users of your website will look for are how you have aesthetically designed it, how you connect with them, and ultimately how your e-commerce website appeals to them. To drive that appeal to the user, you need to ensure that your website is not simply a page with tools, but has the required administrative features that are embedded naturally into your business process. Customers enjoy innovation and creativity, and these are driving factors that can increase their affluence towards your business. Some of the top trends that are key to driving customer satisfaction and influencing sales are:

Guided selling

There is the no bigger joy for a customer than a website that has an interactive website that perks up the interest and picks out the right list of items they are looking for based on their selected preference. Guided selling makes it all the more interesting as it is more than a filter option and a shorter more attractive form of a form where a customer is asked to choose and navigate through the website with ease. A good example of guided selling is found on Victoria’s secret page for selecting a sports bra.

Micro-interactions

The best examples of micro-interactions are the like button that pops up when clicked on in Facebook, and the payment success symbol that opens up when your payment has fallen through on the modern day payment portals. Having plenty of apt micro interaction features in an e-commerce website definitely encourages the user to be more interactive and actively participate in adding items to a shopping cart, subscribe to a service, or provide feedback. According to the author Dan Saffer, Microinteractions, there are four main parts to a micro interaction:

• A trigger that initiates or begins the micro-interaction.
• Rules that define or determine what happens in the interaction.
• Feedback communicates what is happening or what just happened.
• Loops and modes which govern, if you will, the content.

Using product pages as landing pages

The reason Apple Store’s landing page designs are mystically beautiful is that its web pages are designed with simple yet catchy descriptions to products, enhanced levels of photography, and the compelling placement of the call to action. Websites today are more focused on linking the landing pages to the product sale page as they have become an essential element of CRO. The best way to capture a customer’s attention is to set up cluster free landing pages that have relevant and concise content on a clean landing page design with an inviting and intriguing call to action feature. There is no better tool to drive sales when you can give the customer a mystical experience of shopping online.

Full-screen Search, Forms

Modals that are controlled typically with a script and overlaid as a cover over the page’s elements has been an effective user interface medium for quite some time. The only change that has modified the trend is that these models are now full-screen so that both the mobile and computer web design are similar for the search and forms features, and this seemingly captures the full attention of the user.

Material design and Card UI layouts

These two features are forming the face of most e-commerce web design and development is due to the seamless and engaging user experience that this layout provides. One of the best ways to improve brand recall and awareness is by adapting material designs that have a smooth and easy to access grid layout with customized transitions, shadow effects, and animations. More importantly, the material design is integral to increasing store level activity and engaging customers efficiently. Card UI layout is a sub-feature of material design and is the success factor of Pinterest’s appeal to visitors. The three key factors that drive the success of Card UI layouts are readability, responsive web design, and development to create the perfect fit for social media dominant store layouts.

When you build your web design to improve user experience, the end result is better site visits and a drive in overall sales. The change of a user to an active buyer depends on how far you can engage them onto your site and improve brand recall.