So here are my 7 great reasons why you should seriously consider Magento as your next ecommerce platform:

1. Multiple stores - Whether you want one single ecommerce shop or to migrate a handful of shops to Magento, the platform has the capability to meet your needs. The creation of new stores is made extremely easy and can all be carried out in the back-end of Magento. A single Magento installation can happily have multiple stores using different domain names, different IP’s and different security certificates. Find out more in the Knowledge base article How Multiple Websites & Stores Work

2. A/B testing – Magento’s integration with Google Website Optimizer gives you a powerful, easy-to-use tool for driving sales online. Google’s Website Optimizer is a popular free tool that helps website owners dramatically improve conversion rates by conducting A/B testing and multivariate testing of their website content and layout. Net Sales Trainer (Membership required) have a great How To video for setting this up.

3. Guest Checkout – The word Registration can send fear into even the most experienced online shopper. Magento avoids this issue by offering the shopper the option of making a purchase as a Guest. By obtaining the essential customer, payment and delivery information it makes for a quick and easy checkout experience. This Magento screencast walks you through the Guest Checkout.

4. Expandable – Magento Connect is to Magento what the iTunes App Store is to the iPhone. The variety and quality of extensions is excellent and following a recent revamp it’s now even easier to find the right extension for your needs. Pricing for extensions does vary, but the detailed information, customer reviews and support forums give you all the information you should need on whether your buying the correct add-on to your ecommerce store.

5. Numbers – Built into the back end are a really useful set of Reports, from Best Sellers to Search Terms it gives you a lot of the answers to common ecommerce reporting requirements. The other great ‘numbers’ related feature is the built-in support for Google Analytics. This is more than just your basic statistical reporting, it offers full ecommerce tracking for products and conversions as well.

6. Themes – Magento Themes are certainly not for the light-hearted, but once you have an understanding it does offer some amazing visual design and customisation options. To see some brilliant examples of what is possible with Magento take a look at the Magento Spotting section of their blog.

7. Online Support – Magento has become one of THE most talked about ecommerce solutions by creating and supporting their online community. This community has grown into a comprehensive support network through great forums, groups, IRC chat and even broadcasting a problem on twitter can usually get a prompt response.

Hopefully the 7 points above and links included within them will leave you more informed about Magento, but if you have any other questions or queries please do post a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Over 244 pages Tony Hsieh, CEO of the world famous Zappos.com brand provides a wonderful insight into what made him the ‘hip, iconoclastic’ and inspirational CEO that he is today. When was the last time a book left you with a inspirational thought or idea after every section you read? This book not only delivers happiness, it delivers inspiration.

Undoubtedly there will be reviews that are cynical over the way he progressed from selling button badges from his bedroom through to a multi-billion business in Zappos.com. Did he just get lucky? Was he in the right place at the right time? Quite possibly a little bit of both, but what comes through chapter after chapter is that he is an inspirational business leader that has a different way of approaching business.It also talks about the mistakes he and the business has made and what the lessons they learned were.

The book is a three-parter. Section one looks at Tony’s journey to create a profitable business = The end result being LinkExchange, which sold for a mere $265 million to Microsoft. Section two provides a fascinating insight into his approach to investing in start-ups and how one investment really grabbed his interest and became his baby! The last section is the coming together of the three key themes through out the book – ‘profits, passion and purpose’. It is divided into two sub-sections, the first part openly discusses the Amazon buy out of Zappos and the way that it was communicated to the business. While the second part, turns to focus on the reader and how through reader participation, the added benefit that the book may well deliver is personal happiness.

For me this is a brilliant book for anyone with a entrepreneurial streak in them or anyone who is looking for inspiration to improve the culture of the company that they work in. Highly recommended.

Find out more at the official website – Delivering Happiness Book or pre-order a copy today at Amazon

6pm.com is the sister site to Zappos.com, one of US’s biggest and best online retailers. The 6pm site focuses on end of line clearance and bargain items at up to 70% off retail. Unfortunately for them (fortunate for their customers) for 6 hours every item on their site cost no more than $49.95. With any kind of incident that involves online transactions for a large number of people, how the brand deals with a mistake is critical.

Recently The Outnet ran a $1 sale to celebrate it’s 1st birthday, unfortunately they under-estimated the popularity and the site constantly fell over during the course of the promotion. They came out, apologised and offered free shipping for a whole month to say sorry, but while their customers were having problems the Twitter-sphere was full of brand negativity.

So how did 6pm.com respond to such an error? I’ll give you two options:

Option 1) Send every customer that bought an item at a discounted price an email, apologising and blaming a clause in their T&C’s for their legally sound reason for cancelling the customers order.

Option 2) Honour every single order made, at an approximate cost of $1.6 million dollars.

Yep, they went for Option 2 and the reason I am writing about it on my blog is two fold. Firstly to make such a significant decision so quickly shows a well run, finely tuned organisation. Secondly, they handled it perfectly – open, honest and most importantly the decision they made was the best one for their customers. Read the full blog announcement over at 6pm.com – http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/inside-zappos/2010/05/21/6pm-com-pricing-mistake

For businesses that are used to focusing on their PPC ROI and website conversion ratio, it’s often easy to take the normally reliable distribution of customers orders for granted. The recent strikes have resulted in a change of focus for pro-active, customer focused businesses from online to offline. Over the last week time has been spent:

• Researching, contacting and negotiating with alternative couriers.
• The implementation of a new third party courier into daily workflow and IT infrastructure (online & offline).
• Adding and updating online content to keep customers informed and reduce the impact on their conversion rate.
• The cost of upgrading customers orders to the least effected postal service Royal Mail offer (whilst negotiating with couriers) to ensure timely delivery and customer satisfaction.
• Dealing with the increase in customer communication via phone, email and live chat that delayed deliveries causes.

Large volume mail order businesses are in the envious position of having the resources to be able to switch couriers and take a fairly small hit on their bottom line, but for a small-scale e-commerce venture that relies on Royal Mail the strikes have had a serious impact:

Quantitative estimates of the number of items delayed (30 – 65 million items!) gives only a partial impression of the real impact on businesses around the UK that rely on post as a key part of their business. The unknown factor in all of this is customer perception, will people simply not even consider firing up Google and searching for the item they need to purchase. Instead heading for the safe harbour of the local high street, knowing that it maybe more expensive, but that potential delivery problems are not a factor in their buying decision.

One thing is certain, ‘bricks and mortar’ shops on the high street will have benefited from all of this.

The 2008 edition is around the 500 page mark and gives an insight into how the business ethos was created and then has page-upon-page of testimonials. Now the difference with these testimonials from traditional customer ones are that they all come from the staff that work there! Whilst it sounds crazy, each one is a response to a question put to them by their CEO – What does the Zappos culture mean to you?

If you haven’t heard of Zappos, take a trip to their site, browse their blog and look at Zappos Twitter stream to begin to get under the skin of a business that in 2008 just passed the $1 billion sales mark. The whole business is built around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible. This is a fantastic goal for any company and particularly in the current economic climate should be at the top of any companies to-do list and from my experience is part of the company culture from the CEO down!

To get a copy of the book, you can now simply order one online and at $15 is amazing value for the difference that reading it could make to your business – Zappos 2008 Culture Book

1. Website Independent Gift/Wish Lists

One of those moments when you think – ‘Damn wish I’d thought of that’. The system has been developed by US retailer Best Buy, but in Web 2.0 tradition they’ve turned it into an seperate online service named – Giftag. Take a look at the Giftag site, where there are short videos of how it all works.

2. Consumer Reviews Everywhere and Anywhere

A new US service called TurnTo that allows you to see what your friends think of products and brands whilst on participating online retail sites.

TurnTo turns your customers into trusted references for their friends regarding your site and the things you sell. Nothing is more persuasive than advice from friends your visitors know and trust.

The big challenge her is to get the TurnTo brand established and build up a good size userbase for it be worthwhile using. Maybe a tight integration with an existing network like Facebook could give this idea a kick-start?

3. Transactional Banner Adverts

Not the first time I’ve heard about these (NMA had some coverage on a scheme trialled by Boots 6 months ago), but with Christmas just around the corner the idea of a customer being able to complete an order on someone else’s website within a transactional banner advert does sound like an interesting development.

I’m on the look out for an individual or company that’s experienced with the relatively new e-commerce platform Magento. Our current e-commerce solution has done extremely well, but it’s time to move to a more substantial e-commerce solution. If you can help, email me – info [@] simonlilly.co.uk