Countless threads have been created asking the simple question: should I use Magento or [name other popular e-commerce application]? I can very confidently answer this now: if you never had any experience managing e-commerce site, limited budget or resources, then look elsewhere. Many other e-commerce applications will save you money and headaches, while you can build up your revenue before moving to the next level.

Do not get me wrong, as stated in the beginning, I really like Magento. It opens up new possibilities of actions and automations that I could not do with previous systems I worked with before. But until you can see the limitations of other applications in your list, then keep it with lower priority in your list.

Here are a few reasons why Magento could create more problems than solution to your business requirements:

Magento requires more time and budget to develop

Given its complex nature, you cannot turn finalized HTML pages into Magento templates overnight. It involves break them into tiny blocks and combining them again through its XML-based layout file. Tons of free and premium extensions can also be very tempting, but implementation may not be as easy as adding plugins to your WordPress blog. Conflicts will be expected and your developer needs to have full knowledge in how your e-commerce site is set up in order to be able to debug effectively.

It is much harder to find good and experienced Magento developer

Unless you have very huge budget of course, in which you can just go to the best digital agency specializing in e-commerce and/or Magento development. Many developers may offer affordable budget and can actually build the site as specified, but they might sacrifice Magento’s strict rules which lead to more problems in the future. Or you could also spend a lot of money but do not get the results you expected. Bad coding will only make your site slow and vulnerable.

Related to the next point, if your developer does not have server or networking skills at all, that is another reason to look for another one. At the very least, Magento developer should be able to recommend a good configuration and setup.

Magento needs to run on a very good server

If you are not willing to spend more than $50/month, then you should forget about it. Even VPS might not be enough, depending on the traffic and how good the server is optimized. My suggestion: go with Magento optimized hosting providers. Installing and properly configuring full page cache will also improve the performance significantly.

Magento admin has long learning curve

You want to use e-commerce platform that does not require a formal training? Then Shopify is what you are looking for. Magento settings have so many layers which you can easily get lost or forget. Google is always your best friend, but if you do not want to go through the trouble just because you want to change the contact email address, then Magento is not for you. I even feel that it is not designed to be self-managed, instead you need a dedicated person to help you manage it.

Taking The Risk

All the reasons above will be worth if you have identified the restrictions of other systems and could only find it on Magento. For me, here are some:

1. You need advanced price and marketing rules. This one is very obvious. You can create extremely complex promo rules out-of-the-box, or even extend them further if needed. This is achievable because you can create multi-level conditions and actions within Magento’s Shopping Cart Price Rules.
2. Integrations with other systems. Including accounting, warehouse, fulfillment.
3. Multi store setup. This is always one of key decision factors against other systems. Magento multi store feature is very mature and deeply integrated with everything else. It is part of the framework and very solid.

Still confused of which e-commerce platform you should use? Please share it here.

The post Things to know before choose Magento appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

…think of it as “anything that isn’t bulk“. Basically, it is email sent to an individual based on some action.

In my own words related to e-commerce, transaction emails are all notification emails sent out by your e-commerce/shopping cart platform related with a customer’s account or order activities such as:

• Account creation welcome email
• Password reminder/reset instructions
• Order confirmation/invoice
• Order status update
• Shipping tracking number
• Order review request, etc

By default, if you host your e-commerce platform on your own server, most likely these emails are sent directly using the server’s built-in mail application like sendmail on Apache/PHP environment. If you have this running then all is good, but what if you can make it even better? By using 3rd-party transaction email provider, you send out these emails through their server. Usually communication between your server and theirs is done through APIs or SMTP.

Benefits

Why is it better? There are additional features that you can gain from using a separate server/service to send our your transactional email:

Higher rate of deliverability

Even if you have a very good and clean server, there is still a possibility that your server’s IP to get rejected by certain ISPs (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) when they feel that too many emails coming from the same origin. Like email SaaS, transactional email services most likely have a farm of servers with multiple IPs that has been optimized to get maximum acceptability across different ISPs.

Additional insights of your email activities

You now have the options to track the numbers of bounced emails, open rates and click rates just like when you are sending your newsletter email campaigns. While the accuracy of this not 100%, you can only track open rate if the customers’ email readers supports HTML, it is still a valuable additional insight. Let’s say you see that the open rate for your invoice emails is very low, probably the subject is not clear enough and you can make an improvement on it.

Create additional rules

Customers occasionally enter wrong email address in their order details which may result the notification emails never get delivered to them. By setting a simple rule like to notify you when an email gets bounced, you can then check the cause and email address, and if possible correct it before the customer contacts you regarding his order.

Services Compared

There are few services that offer to send transactional emails. There are typically 2 types of pricing:

1. Monthly plan
   You pay a flat monthly fee and you will be given a quota of number of emails that can be sent within that cycle.
2. Pay-as-you-go
   You pay based on the number of emails or credits that you have sent out within that month.
3. Buy bulk credits
   You buy a bundle of credits where it will be subtracted every time you send out an email.

Honestly I cannot rate each of the services’ quality and features, as in the context of e-commerce applications we are not using the features or APIs too extensively. For now, I only compare them based on pricing and compatibility with most popular self-hosted shopping cart platforms, Magento and OpenCart.

Price starts from	$9.95 per month – 40,000 credits	$1.50 per 10,000 emails	Free for first 12,000 emails in a month	Free for first 6,000 emails in a month
Magento integration	documented	plugin	MagentoConnect extension	plugin
OpenCart integration	via SMTP	via SMTP or PHP class	extension ($10)	via SMTP
Website	sendgrid.com	postmarkapp.com	mandrill.com	mailjet.com

If you have experience using different transactional email services for your online store, please share it here.

The post Using Transactional Email Service for Your E-Commerce Platform appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

If you browse through the web, you can easily find dozens of solid e-commerce/shopping cart platforms to choose. If you look to the forums for a suggestion, you will literally get thousands of different opinions. The same case if you go to your digital agency or developer, usually each of them already set their own preferred platform. Nothing to be blamed here though, you practically need years to be able to fully understand the structure and functions of one of the platforms to be able to fully customize the templates.

My suggestion is this: before you go asking an expert’s or other people’s opinions to help in your decision, it is much better for you to define the requirements of your online business. Below are some guidelines to get this:

Business scale in short and long terms

This is something that would be easily passed through the considerations as you are in a rush to start selling. While switching platforms is a common phase as your business grows, it does require a lot of time and energy to set up a new one and migrate your existing data and assets. By anticipating the requirements beyond the present, it will help you to save time and money. Try to answer these questions, each with the a year, 3 years, and 5 years time scope:

1. How many products/SKUs do you sell?
2. What is your market segment?
3. Are you selling Internationally?
4. How do you work out your orders fulfillment

Essential features

These are always the toughest ones to compare and anyone can easily write down a separate post about this so I will try to explain it as brief as possible. If possible do not start looking or take any advise before you create your own list of features and functions that you will need. Each platform will brag about the advantages of using it and they will only confuse you more. Keep your focus by having a shortlist of must-have features, that way you can cross off ones that do not qualify without needing to look back later. While doing this, always keep in mind about scalability point above.

Here are few vital points that I always write down before I look on the options:

1. Payment gateways, make sure it supports the type of payments that you plan to accept
2. Shipping methods and carriers
3. Marketing/sales tools integration, if you have any

Note that in some cases you will not be able to find a platform has all the dream features you want. There are 3 options for situations like this:

1. Develop custom modules/functions on top of the platform that has most features you need. Most modern platforms allow you to create plugins and extensions. If you are lucky, you may find modules built by third parties that fit your needs.
2. Think of an alternate process to apply the feature in different form that works with the platform.
3. This is always the last option, but if your business process is very unique then you may need to create a custom platform for the entire store.

Resources and skills

How do you plan to develop and maintain the site, do you have an internal or external team? What is their level of expertise and experience in the platform that you prefer? If they are not specialists, then give them a chance to take a look and time to learn if needed.

In the chance you already have a good web server with good team handling it, then installing an open source platform on top of your server can be a good option to minimize costs.

Tip: if you do not have reliable resources to manage your server, then using SaaS can be a very good idea. If you are serious about your e-commerce business, then throw away the idea of using a shared hosting for your store. I would suggest of at least using a VPS (Virtual Private Server).

Design customization

Every e-commerce platform gives a different level of flexibility in terms of customization, although the good ones should allow you to customize the template design to any form you desire. Do your research thoroughly on this. The easiest way is to find examples of other sites that are built on that platform, if you find many that have similar looks to your ideal layout than it is a big plus.

Interface

Keep in mind that you and your team will be interfacing with the dashboard/admin panel for almost everyday. Imagine that you find the CMS interface is frustrating but you are forced to deal with it all the time, easily said you may not want to explore it too often and lose the interest to work on it after a while.
This is a very subjective matter though, some people may not really care much about this.

Popular recommendations compared

These are not direct suggestions. As explained on this post, you need to pick the one that fits your business best. But there are 3 big players on the market right now and I want to use them to make comparisons based on the points listed above. Because of the popularity, you would be able to find human resources that are highly familiar with either one so I will only compare the ‘resources’ related with the server.

Magento Community Edition

Magento is most ideal when you are planning to sell hundreds to thousands of products as its framework was designed based on enterprise level of e-commerce platform.
Business scale: medium to very large
Features: extensive
Resources: requires optimized VPS or dedicated server
Customization: very flexible, but more complex
Interface: good, but requires time to understand the steps to complete each process
Price: free

OpenCart

Another good option for open-source shopping cart. The strongest value with OpenCart is that it is built on MVC architecture and makes it easy to learn without worrying to break the core functions.
Business scale: small to large
Features: basic out-of the box, but highly extensible
Resources: can run on most hosting servers
Customization: easy and flexible
Interface: good
Price: free

Shopify

Shopify is the pioneer when it comes to e-commerce in SaaS. It is not the first for sure, but the first one to gain the level of popularity with very high customer satisfaction rate.
Business scale: small to large
Features: basic out-of the box, but highly extensible
Resources: stress-free maintenance as it is a SaaS
Customization: one of the easiest to create custom templates
Interface: great
Price: from $14/month

I hope after reading this, you find it a little bit easier to make your decision. If you have any opinion or question, please share it here.

The post Which E-Commerce Platform Is Right for Your Business? appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.