]]> As the Crunchies awards have been handed out, we’re interested in analyzing the world’s best shopping start-ups of 2011. In the category of shopping applications, these were the online stores that appeared:

Fab (Winner)

A New York based start-up founded by Jason Goldberg with over $51 million in funding so far with investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Kevin Rose takes this year’s Crunchie award for the best shopping application.

Fab started as a gay social network, but during 2011 transformed into a website that offers daily design inspirations and sales of up to 70% off retail. Although membership for the Fab.com is free, it is invitation only.

Warby Parker (Runner Up)

New York tech scene seems to be on a roll this year, as the runner up is Warby Parker. This online store is well known for its home try-on program. Whenever you buy a frame from them, they give another frame to someone in need. Find out more in this video:

BirchBox

Then we have BirchBox, again a New York based online store start-up which delivers beauty product samples to users on a monthly basis. The website is not just an online store but also a good source of industry related content and news.

Gilt Groupe

Gilt comes from New York as well. It’s an event driven shopping website. They introduce each designer and brand of the event to their members through videos.

Lot18

Last but not least in this blog post is Lot18, another New York based invitation only shopping site. Lot18 sells wines and specialty foods.

Which one was your favorite? Any comments on the fact that all 5 are New York based?

]]> Since we know mobile internet usage with smartphones have already grown to a market share that can’t be neglected in our marketing campaigns it is time to start using all of the smartphones’ amazing features. One such feature is ability to read QR codes, the 2-D barcodes that are likely to mark the new era in quick access to additional information.

Include a QR code in your printed materials

Do you have a printed product catalog? It is easy to include QR codes that will lead to individual product pages or offer a discount. Are you running an ad in a print magazine? Include a QR code to a special landing page on your online store that addresses the needs for additional information that this reader might have.

Give me some numbers

A recent eMarketer study shows that a pretty big percentage of all QR code usage can be attributed to mCommerce. According to the study, 23% of all US based QR code usage is for the purpose of making a purchase. The same study shows that QR codes are mostly used to get a coupon, discount or deal (53%) and access additional information (52%).

This data shows that you could really increase the amount of products you sell through your printed materials if QR codes are properly implemented into your campaign. It also shows the importance of creating special landing page for every QR code, since people will expect to be landing on content directly related to where they saw the code, not your website’s homepage or some generic landing page used in all of your campaigns.

We recently started using QR codes in our campaigns at Inchoo as well, even though these are not used in Croatia nearly as much as in the US. During the “Career Day 2011″, we printed big QR codes all over our business cards and flyers. I’ve seen people use them, but I also saw people with a big question mark above their head when they saw the QR code. Luckily, we can expect the amounts of question marks above people’s heads to start falling drastically very soon. According to a February 2011 report by Mobio Identity Systems, Inc. usage and adoption of QR codes in North America jumped 1200% in the last six months of 2010!

Although the growth in North America is mind-blowing, the global adoption is a bit slower but significant growth can be seen globally as well. The graph on the left is result of the study performed by 3gvision.

According to that study, US holds the number one position in terms of absolute number of scans in the time period. Italy holds the second position, but with the growth Hong Kong has I expect it already passed the Italy since the time this report was published. Note that this report excludes Japan, a well known leader in mobile barcode usage.

]]> This is a short story of how a bunch of Inchooers attended an ecommerce conference in Palic, Serbia. It was legen – wait for it…

…dary!

A team of 8 went on an ecommerce conference E-Trgovina 2011 organized in Palic, a beautiful resort on the Palic Lake in Serbia, only 2 hours drive from our offices in Osijek.

This is fast becoming a tradition for us – since 2009 we haven’t missed this conference as it is conveniently located, there’s a bunch of geeks we can get to know, and we’re getting out of office for a change.

The conference itself is a platform for most of Who’s Who in Serbian ecommerce to showcase their products and services, network and share some of their experiences of running web-based businesses in the region.

Among 300+ participants, we met some really interesting people, so a quick shout-out to one of them who we spent most of the time with, Nebojsa Pantic – he was the one who coined the phrase from the title – in his overview of the conference he called us “Magento beasts from Croatia” – so there you go…

We also met some ex-Magento developers, but we witnessed an interesting phenomenon – all of them were making some strange sounds, had some eye twitching issues and were for some reason trying to make us switch back to osCommerce

Now, to the fun part – in addition to the conference itself, the resort around Palic Lake is a really beautiful place, with a fairytale-like atmosphere. It’s great for long walks, runs or rides along the lake shore or parks, and to top that off, local cuisine is extraordinary (trust us, we know good food when we see it) and you can really kick back and relax there.

We can’t wait for the next year’s conference, and in the meantime, you’ll be seeing several Inchooers at Magento Developers Paradise in Ibiza this June, so better come prepared!

]]> mCommerce (mobile commerce) is here to stay and due to the recently published researches, we have data to back it up and predict the growth. The only problem is, consumers seem to be accepting the change much faster than the industry is. Since both mCommerce and eCommerce are growing sectors, we know they will continue to coexist, however, eCommerce industry seems to be not very agile when it comes to upgrading their solutions to fit the small screens.

A recent article at eMarketer points out a very interesting study performed by YouGov for Antenna Software on a sample of ~1.8k US mobile phone users. This study indicates that only 24% of mobile phone users in US can’t (or think they can’t) access internet via their phone. Even though they can, 34% choose not to use internet through their mobile phones.

When asked why don’t they use the mobile internet, 44% of men and 38% of women said they don’t like the small size of mobile screen. I think they don’t have so much problems with mobile screen size but rather the design and layout of web pages that were never designed to be used on such screens, but we’ll need to dig deeper into the research to explain why.

The same groups tends to complain about the mobile internet speed – which we know will continue to grow – so we can expect that those that are reluctant to use the mobile internet due to the speed issues might change their mind in the near future. 50% of the mobile phone users aged 18 – 24 were annoyed that some website designs did not work at all on their phones. This is the group of users that “gets” where the problem is. It’s not the screen size thats broken, it’s the design and layout of the webpage.

Expanding eCommerce business to mCommerce

According to the same study, 28% of the mobile users in USA would be more likely to perform shopping via mobile internet if online stores were tailored for their screen size. Unfortunately, this study doesn’t cover the use and likelihood of using native mobile applications for online shopping.

So if you build a mobile version of your online store today, you can expect ~28% lift in mobile visitors’ conversion rate! This piece of data could help you calculate the short term ROI of building a mobile version of your online store and I hope it will persuade many of undecided online store owners to do it.

Also note that only 6% of mobile phone users said they don’t have problems with the display on their mobile phones. Since 46% said they would be much more likely to use e-mail on their mobile phone if the display problem was eliminated, we can expect more of your newsletter subscribers to read it on their phones as the e-mail and web-mail mobile clients continue to evolve.

Another study gives us one more very persuasive argument to build a mobile friendly eCommerce solution – the mobile only internet users. According to the study, ~25% of mobile internet users in the USA are using the internet only via their mobile phones. This means that if you don’t have a mobile friendly website, you are leaving these people without options, they are likely to use your competitor that has one. In some other countries the number of mobile only internet users is ridiculous, in Egypt it’s astonishing 70%!

These studies are well correlated with Jakob Nielsen’s study entitled “Mobile Content Is Twice as Difficult” in which he said:

When reading from an iPhone-sized screen, comprehension scores for complex Web content were 48% of desktop monitor scores.

Last year, Nielsen also performed a study on iPad native apps usability which concluded that there are some serious issues with user interface inconsistencies. I quote:

iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.

From these studies we can conclude that users are adopting the mobile internet usage much faster than the industry. If we are going to make significant progress, we’ll need to develop usability standards for mobile browsing and evangelize the importance of serving a mobile version of the website or a native app to the mobile internet users.

]]> For those who are still not aware; at Inchoo we handle your store front design with the same care we do your development and transform your online store into an online success. Teraflex is a good example, last Friday we were advised that Teraflex’s storefront design had been nominated for the CSS Design Awards.
Just like when inchoo.net was nominated for the prize; we need your support, vote for Terraflex.biz on cssdesignawards.com

The design credits go to Renato Carvalho and our Design Lab. Congrats!

Lyssandro Reis

]]>

Everyone knows that the ecommerce industry is growing.
But do you know how fast? Or what percent of all the retail sales it takes?

United States Census Bureau published Quarterly E-Commerce Report on November 17th, 2010.
This is the latest statistics on ecommerce available for United States.

The U.S. Census Bureau, pre-eminent collector and disseminator of timely, relevant, and quality data about the people and the economy of the United States, conducts a population and housing census every 10 years, an economic census every five years, and more than 100 demographic and economic surveys every year, all of them evolving from the first census in 1790.

3rd quarter of 2010 shows rather good results with 41,5 billion USD retail sales in ecommerce. It accounts for almost 4.2% of the total retail sales in US.

What is interesting is that the estimated ecommerce sales increased 14.1 percent in Q3 of 2010 compared to Q3 of 2009 while total retail sales increased 5.8 percent in the same period.

This proves that ecommerce is growing much faster than the overall retail market.

You can follow the growth of the share of ecommerce sales over time in this graph:

Estimated Quarterly U.S. Retail E-commerce Sales as a Percent of Total Quarterly Retail Sales:
1st Quarter 2001 – 3rd Quarter 2010

Red line shows estimates that are not adjusted.
Blue line shows estimates adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes.

It will be really interesting to see how holiday shopping season (with Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner) will affect these numbers for the last quarter.

Go Ecommerce!

Related links:

• http://www.census.gov/retail/ – Monthly & Annual Retail Trade
• http://www.census.gov/retail/mrts/www/data/pdf/ec_current.pdf – Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales 3rd Quarter 2010

This is a guest blog post written by “Turnkey Ecommerce Solutions” web design and development company.
Turnkeye.com specializes in ecommerce solutions with full life cycle support.

]]> Every now and then someone in the social web world asks for eCommerce solution recommendation. One of the awesome trends I noticed in these answers is the answer of a “happy customer” that goes something like this:

I tried XYZ and it’s awesome! You should try it two. I don’t understand any of this HTML, php, CSSS mumbo-jumbo, but this XYZ cart works out of the box!

The sad part is, people tend to fall for that. What’s bad with it “working out of the box” you ask? Well, most of the open source carts I ever saw work “out of the box”, including Magento. Certain features, however, require additional set-up, and some even advanced custom development.

Did you ever ask yourself how come someone goes through years and years of learning all of this HTML and php mumbo-jumbo if they could simply use the “works out of the box” solution for everything?

Did you ever ask yourself how come big online stores whose core business is eCommerce are not using the “works out of the box” solution? Why are they spending a lot of money reinventing the wheel?

Because, we’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re upgrading, modifying and improving the wheel. We’re modifying the wheel to suit your particular target audience, brand, budget, strategy and product line. You can’t put a tractor wheel on a racing car, it simply doesn’t work that way.

Big companies with eCommerce as their core business don’t like throwing money around. They are usually very analytically driven companies that know exactly how much money they can invest into a certain feature of their online store, since they have a projection of the sales improvement it will make and ultimate projection of time needed for this feature to pay for itself (feature’s ROI).

]]> This post will explain the situations in which removing certain elements of your online store might give you better conversions or improve your search engine rankings. There are lots of online stores out there that tend to add too much stuff to their store in hope of improving their income, not realizing that these things might actually create a completely opposite result from the one they hoped to achieve.

Let’s start with the one I encounter a lot lately: Social Sharing and Bookmarking Icons

On many online stores nowadays you will see a “Share to any” or similar widget that looks something like this:

Although there’s nothing wrong with enabling visitors to easily share all the content on your site, we need to apply the less is more rule here. Less social icons means stronger call to action on those that actually exist.

You need to face the reality here. If you’re not selling some crazy funny products, you have no use of StumbleUpon, Digg and similar social sharing icons. Your product pages will never be popular there and even if by some divine miracle you receive some traffic from there, it will be so random and non-targeted it will not bring any sales.

To make things worse, sometimes they list all of these social sharing icons in form in which they will dilute link power of your page since each and every one of them will be an no-followed link, and we now know how rel=no-follow actually works, right?

Now this is a good practice of how to add Social Sharing / Bookmarking Icons to your on-line store:

They obviously figured out that best performing Social Networks for their business are Facebook, and a very niche specialized one for their products, so they decided to include only these two icons. Smart move. Their call to action is much stronger with only two sharing options to choose from.

Less is more candidate number two: Featured Products

Some stores don’t understand that featured products are supposed to be a few products that you really want to stand out, not a front page full of products. One more awesome thing that tends to happen with featured products is this:

Now why would you feature an out-of-stock product to your visitors? That one needs to go. You have this awesome space on your front page that is able to influence the first impression of your first time visitors and what you give them is an out of stock item? You can swap this product with another one that can actually be bought, or you can apply the magical less is more rule here and feature one less product on your homepage.

Additionally, if you’re using Magento, it doesn’t support Featured Products functionality by default so you will need to use our free Featured Products Extension for Magento.

Candidate number three: Poll and other unused features

Do you have a community poll that features a standard question? You didn’t change the question for over a year now since you don’t have inspiration or anything you’d like to ask your visitors? Then why have the poll? The same applies for the newsletter subscription box if you’re not sending newsletters, twitter account that you’re not updating, live support that’s never actually “live” or online and the list goes on.

]]> I’ve been reading an article at GetElastic blog, one of my favorite resources regarding e-commerce marketing. At the end of the article “A/B Test Case Study: Can Split Test Results Be Trusted?” they showed us a case study in which they tested two exactly the same variations against each other and one of them performed 4.97% better than the other.

The possibility of statistical mistake in optimization tests is a pretty big issue. I’ve seen case studies all over the internet with ridiculous conclusions and ridiculously big improvements all because the performer of the test made a mistake (sometimes I believe they even do it intentionally to show better results to their clients).

There are several things that can go wrong with these tests and here are the most common mistakes:

Low test sample

During the latest presidential elections here in Croatia, some smart people calculated that possibility of statistical mistake with a test sample of 10 000 randomly selected people is ~3%.

They weren’t wrong in all these years that these tests were performed; these tests were always accurate with exactly ~3% deviation.

Please note that this is a test sample of 10 000 people that performed the desired action. If we transfer this knowledge to the world of e-commerce, it would mean that our sample should be 10 000 transactions, not 10 000 visitors.

There isn’t a lot of stores in the world that can get 10 000 transactions in a reasonable time period, so I’m led to believe that most of the conversion rate optimization split tests performed out there are not really accurate.

This calculation (10 000 transactions = ~3% statistical mistake) is true for the election body of 4 402 045 people. In order to get the right calculation for your specific case, you need to calculate the amount of people out there that fit the criteria of your targeted audience. This means that some B2C e-commerce store with wide market of lets say 45 000 000 potential customers would need 100 000 transactions to achieve ~3% possibility of statistical mistake.

Low time period

Let’s say you have a store and you could actually get a relevant test sample of 10 000 transactions within days. You need to extend this test to a longer time period then a few days.

What could happen is, you tested variations during the working days and only a certain population of people with certain behavior comes to your site Monday to Friday. Your test didn’t really capture the behavior of people visiting your store during the weekends and this population might have a completely different behavior compared to your test sample.

Unrepresentative test sample

Choose your methods wisely. I’ve actually explained this in the article before. You could increase the conversion rate of a store by actually decreasing the revenue. It’s highly recommended to read this article to understand how increasing the conversion rate (the percentage) is not the actual goal of conversion rate optimization (I know, it sounds crazy, but just read it).

]]> “Yes” is a great, positive word. There’s nothing better than getting that “yes” from your prospects that miraculously turns them into clients. “Yes” puts food on the table and that’s why it’s really easy to assume that its counterpart – a small, underappreciated “no” will have exactly the opposite effect. You rarely hear about the upsides of saying “no”.

We get many inquiries thanks to all of our inbound marketing efforts and, even taking into account that I rarely use my email for saving children around the world by the sheer power of a “forward” button, quite a lot of emails are getting sent. My job revolves around handling all the leads, filtering them out to figure out which of these are prospects and then preparing quotes with the help of our senior developers, basically everything leading up to signing the agreements. Essentially, the whole lead to prospect to client process. After that, project managers take over.

So, you can imagine there’s much communication going on to determine their needs and to see if we’d be a good match for their projects. There are many hurdles along the way (budget vs. our rates being the most common one), but you all know that feeling when you finally land a deal. It’s great and exhilarating – your efforts were worthwhile. And that’s clearly the best case scenario.

But, let’s get back to when that dreaded “no” comes into play. More often than not, leads will be the ones saying this word, but there are times when you have to be the one to say it, even to those you know might turn into a very good client down the road. So, why would you do that? You might simply be swamped, which is a great thing, but what if a great opportunity comes along at a time when you simply don’t have a single developer to spare?

It’s simple – play it fair. Be honest, tell the prospect what’s your availability and clearly let them know when you’d be able to start working with them. Of course, this requires having a clear overview of all your projects and good planning skills, but not many things are worse than promising what you can’t deliver. Don’t stall the communication and just remember how WYSIWYG makes life much easier.

But make sure your “no” doesn’t feel like “never again”. Don’t leave your prospects hanging, offer them some alternatives – send them directly to some of your partners or companies you believe can help them out. If you don’t have anyone that springs to mind, let them know about some places where they can find more resources. A huge must – give them information on when you expect to become available again and, if possible, offer them ways to stay in touch (the option to subscribe to your newsletter is nice if you have one).

And, above all, don’t forget to follow up in a month or two to see what’s happening. The follow-up alone has brought us a couple of projects recently.

So, what are the good things that can come out of saying “no”?

• you’ll put out a professional vibe – instead of getting your grip on a project and then overloading your developers only to see your overall quality of work go down the drain, just be honest and let them know you simply don’t have the resources to meet their deadlines – they will appreciate it as they can quickly move on

• you’ll have more time – just make sure you invest it in something you feel useful, and if time=money, turns out that by saying “no” you’re actually in a position to earn more down the road… funny, isn’t it?

• you’ll “spread the wealth” – you should always give your prospects some alternatives after saying “no” and help your fellow developers get a piece of the cake

And there you go. I dare you to say “no” the first time you get the chance, and truly mean it. Many good things can happen…

]]> Given the sheer size of Magento system, its quite easy to loose valuable time when trying to achieve even the basic things like “Creating simplest ORM model class”. Substantial amount of serious programming in Magento requires you to write some values to database.

By now, most of us have seen how “cool” Magento models are, and how “easy” it is to write values to models by using syntax like

//$someModel = new Company_Modul_Model_SomeModel();
//or the preferable way
$someModel = Magent::getModel('company/somemodel');

/* To use some existing model record from database */
//$someModel->load(); /* Some valid id in database */

//$someModel->setSomeField = 'Some value';
//or the preferable way
$someModel->setSomeField('Some value');

//Save model
$someModel->save();

Code example shown above is clean, easy to use, etc. Probably the main thing to note is the usage of “$someModel->someField = ‘Some value’;” or “$someModel->someField(Some value);”. Safest, and more “cooler” way would be to assign field values trough “virtual methods” like “$someModel->someField(Some value);”. By doing so you are preparing a “safe ground” for yourself for possible latter modifications on individual fields (attributes) of model before “save” operation.

Lets say you wish to parse some logic on certain field before its set, in that case its easier to do “$someModel->someField(Some value);” and later implement the actual “someField()” method inside the model that handles the necessary logic.

Hopefully you catch my point

Moving along, the model itself. To get the model class to behave like the one shown above, you need to implement it in the proper way.

Attached is a sample module, that does exactly that. All you need to do is un-archive it, copy-paste the /app folder to your demo store, and refresh the demo store home page.

Module creates database table called “ajzele_hello” and appropriate “installation mark” entry in core_resource table called “hello_setup“.

Once you refreshed your home page, you should be able to do something like:

//$model = new Ajzele_SimpleModel_Model_Hello();
$model = Mage::getModel('hello/hello');
$model->setField1('Branko');
$model->setField2('Ajzele');
$model->save();

This should make a new entry in the database table “ajzele_hello”.

Download Ajzele_SimpleModel.

Note, DO NOT USE this module on live site. This is merely for educational purposes. As much as I can confirm that module is essentially simple and it works out of the box, I do not wish to comment on any “it broke my site” replies.

Cheers.

]]> As some of you may know, our team is located in lovely small country called Croatia (it is in Europe). Our mission is to create a microbrand for  eCommerce development services. Since we were using Magento as a platform of choice, we ended up creating a microbrand for a Magento development services. On the long run, our goal is to be recognized in eCommerce community and not just Magento’s. There is a long way to go to achieve this, but here we are: working in the international world, with clients all over the globe. From US ones, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, France, United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong. Only one Croatian client hired us for iPhone development services. Is it time for first Croatian eCommerce client?

When I compare January 2010 with January 2009, many things have changed:

• Team is more than doubled (from 5 to 11 employees)
• Number of projects is greatly increased
• Number of project managers increased from 1 to 3
• We have dedicated sales manager
• Number of phone calls in the office is increased by ten

Working only with international clients emphasized the usage of eMails, Collaboration tools like Basecamp, Skype, Yahoo IM, etc. Phone was ringing only rarely. Things are changing now and we have at least one phone inquiry per day mostly from Croatian clients.

Having a local clients will definitely be something new for Inchoo. This old fashioned meetings that end with handshake instead of  meeting review eMails will be part of our daily activities.  We will face new challenges, but in case the choice of partners is good, I am sure this will bring fun and action to the team and everyday work.

We will keep you in the loop.

]]> I believe most of you Magento enthusiasts out there are using (or at least had at some point used) the official Magento Forum – it’s a great meeting place for a growing community of developers who want to get in touch with experts from all over the world. With 250,000+ total posts to date it’s clearly one of the fastest growing e-commerce communities out there. Of course, for actual collaboration purposes it might be more efficient to create or join an existing Magento Group, but this time I’ll stay with the forums since they are the place most developers would come to initially.

As you have probably noticed, in addition to official forums where most of its 149,420 community members (as of November 14) are usually lurking and/or contributing to discussions, there is also a number of international forums available (46 at the moment) because Varien tried to give the opportunity to developers who are less comfortable with English to participate using their language(s) of choice. I’ve looked over the Magento international forums stats on Saturday since I was curious to see how well these are used.

The international forums make up for only 18% of the total Magento Forum posts, which is understandable since pretty much everyone is using English, especially developers. However, there is considerable activity on these language-specific forums as well.

By my own arbitrary decision, after the initial number crunching I’ve decided to leave out of this brief analysis all the international forums that have less than 3 replies per topic or less than 200 posts (topics+replies) in total. I somehow felt that was a minimum for a forum/discussion to even be considered as valid. Otherwise, its “discussion” purpose is simply not achieved (becoming more of a Q&A feature).

And guess what? I checked out the stats for the entire Magento forum – the response rate of the Magento community as a whole is currently at 3,08 replies per topic… who’d have known?

Unfortunately, that meant I had to exclude the Croatian forum as well but I’ll rationalize that by assuming that this is just the result of Croatian Magento developers being good enough in English to use the official forums without any problems…:-) So, how are these international forums utilized?

Top 5 forums by volume (total posts)

Unsurprisingly, the German forum is the busiest one with over 20,000 posts (topics+replies) with the French one way behind in 2nd place (some 7,500 posts). Then there are Italian, Brazilian and Russian forums completing the top 5 international forums by sheer volume. This somehow makes sense since most developers from Austria and Switzerland probably also went to German forum with some Swiss developers joining in the French and Italian discussions as well.

Top 5 forums by response rate (replies per topic)

Of course, these are also the countries with huge population and large numbers of developers so I wanted to come up with a stat that would be somewhat less biased. Let’s see how these forums and their participants rank when it comes to their response rate, i.e. number of replies per topic.

And the numbers have turned around completely. Indonesian forum is by far the most responsive one with 9,66 replies per topic. Norwegians run the 2nd most responsive forum, with Hungarian, UK and Slovakian forums also in the top 5. Funnily enough, Germans and French are nowhere to be seen here, both are very near the bottom of the table with slightly over 3 replies per topic.

I guess if you want to get a better response rate on your fresh Magento questions, you have a couple of options: create your own group and invite the people you think may help you or start learning Indonesian fast…:-)

So, how often do you use international forums in your own language? Or are you, like most of us, also focusing your attention only on the official forums in English?

]]> Many times we need to implement new functionality of existing Magento core classes, but we don’t want to modify core classes.
For controllers, that’s quite easy. Usually we can copy controller from core and put it in the same place in local directory, modify class and that’s it.

Of course, there are better ways to do that (make module), but I’m not going to write about that right now since it is not subject of this post.

I only mentioned that because we can’t do same thing for models even if we want to, so how to override Magento models without modifying core files?

Fortunately, that’s very easy =)
Let’s make one extension of that kind!

Extension we are going to  make will be useless, only difference between this extension and original class will be  class name var_dump =)

What we are  going to do now is to take a random model class from Magento core.
Let it be Mage_Wishlist_Model_Item located in app/code/core/Mage/Wishlist/Model/Item.php

What we want to do is to add new functionality to that class, so let’s make new module.

Call it Inchoo_Wishlist.

Create app/code/local/Inchoo/Wishlist/model/ directory and copy app/code/core/Mage/Wishlist/Model/Item.php
there.

Now,  rename class Mage_Wishlist_Model_Item to Inchoo_Wishlist_Model_Item.

Add this line:

var_dump(get_class($this)); exit();

in loadByProductWishlist method

Now, let’s create Inchoo_Wishlist.xml in app/etc/modules/
Put this code there:

< ?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
    <modules>
        <inchoo_wishlist>
            <active>true</active>
            <codepool>local</codepool>
        </inchoo_wishlist>
    </modules>
</config>

Now, make app/code/local/Inchoo/Wishlist/etc/Config.xml file and put this code there:

< ?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
    <modules>
        <inchoo_wishlist>
            <version>0.1</version>
        </inchoo_wishlist>
    </modules>
    <global>
       <models>
          <wishlist>
              <rewrite>
                  <item>Inchoo_Wishlist_Model_Item</item>
              </rewrite>
          </wishlist>
       </models>
    </global>
</config>

You are done! Try to add something to wishlist! =)
Play with other models as well!

Cheers ^_^

]]> Isn’t it easy to sell hamburgers, dishes, glasses? Of course, there are good and bad practices everywhere, but you must admit that selling a web development services is kind of unique. Take a look at this video to get a feeling how negotiations look like sometimes in our business. Hope you enjoy.

Congratulations to Scofield Editorial for this one!

]]> As many things in Magento, removing product comparison is not available thru the admin interface. Thus, leaving us with the only option of getting down and dirty with theme files editing.

This guide is pretty straightforward and is based on the Magento ver. 1.3.1.1

Before beginning of this procedure please Go to: System-> Cache Management and disable cache. You can turn it on after you’re done.

Step 1 – reports.xml

Open: app/design/frontend/deafult/Your Theme name/layout/reports.xml and delete the following lines:

<block type="reports/product_compared" before="right.permanent.callout" name="right.reports.product.compared" template="reports/product_compared.phtml" />

<block type="reports/product_viewed" before="right.permanent.callout" name="right.reports.product.viewed" template="reports/product_viewed.phtml" />

Step 2 – catalog.xml

Open app/design/frontend/deafult/Your Theme name/layout/catalog.xml and delete the following line:

<block type="core/template" before="cart_sidebar" name="catalog.compare.sidebar" template="catalog/product/compare/sidebar.phtml"/>

Save the files and refresh the page you we’re checking. Product comparison should not be there but if you click on any of the products you ‘ll see that the “Add to compare” text link is still there.

The way to remove it:
Step 3 – addto.phtml

Open up app/design/frontend/default/Your Theme name/template/catalog/product/view/addto.phtml and delete the following line:

< ?php if($_compareUrl=$this->helper('catalog/product_compare')->getAddUrl($_product) ): ?>
<li><span class="pipe">|</span> <a href="<?php echo $_compareUrl ?>">< ?php echo $this->__('Add to Compare') ?></a></li>
< ?php endif; ?>

Oh, of course theif you don’t want to actually delete the code can always use the following:

 <remove name="name_of_the_ol_block"/>

That’s it. You should now be free of product comparison for ever and ever

]]> Inchoo team attended a great ecommerce conference called “Etrgovina“. This was the 9th time this conference was organized and it lasted for three days. It was held on Palic lake in Serbia.

Generally, we had lots of fun and met many interesting people. The conference was oriented more to the marketing and business part of ecommerce then to development and technical stuff, which is probably the reason why there were no talks about Magento.

There was a live broadcast over the internet for anyone that couldn’t be there and everything was pretty much covered via twitter tag #etrgovina09. Unfortunately, the conference was in Serbian language so there are no videos or text reports that we can show to non Croatian or Serbian speaking readers. However, we can give you this link to the pictures of the conference, hope you like it!

]]> This is the list of collective knowledge of the top web shop annoyances and frustrations that ordinary web surfers and your potential costumers tend to hate about e-commerce web sites.

I talked with many experienced users and researched many different relevant forum topics to create this ultimate list of most often web shop user experience issues.  If your web shop has any of these, you should seriously consider fixing it as you would probably sell much more. Having any of these reflects in symptoms such as high bounce rates, low conversion rates and negative ROIs.

• Image For Illustration Purposes Only – This is one of the most common issues in the world of e-commerce and users tend to complain about it a lot. If you are not able to provide a valid image of a product (especially in today’s modern age in which you probably have two cameras in each of your pockets) it just shows you don’t care about your costumer experience or, worse, you are trying to hide the actual appearance of the product.

• Not being able to find delivery costs (shipping costs) – User wants to know how much does he have to pay for a product. The user does not care what’s the price of the product without delivery or without taxes, he wants to know how much money does he have to spend on it in total. Do not hide delivery costs from users.

• Flashing flash banners, animated store assistants and similar – If you already brought the visitor to your website, you don’t want to scare them away. Remove these big flashing and annoying banners from your website. Remove the virtual shopping assistants as they are not actually assisting. Users often find them disturbing, more then helpful.