Magento Tutorials

Hidden Magento Features You Might Not Be Aware Of

Magento Hidden Features

Disclaimer: Magenticians does not necessarily agree with the views expressed in this guest post. They are presented to bring to light all diverse views in the Magento and general ecommerce community.

Just like every merchant, you should ask yourself a simple question: “Am I getting the most out of Magento as an ecommerce platform for my business?” Magento is a robust and adjustable open source ecommerce platform that offers its users the ability to customize their stores, utilizing tools and tips that can help grow and manage their online businesses.

With such benefits, there are some “hidden” Magento Features and modules that are very useful in many places. Fully featured out of the box functionalities are the power of Magento. Many of these Magento hidden features are lesser-known, but they are undoubtedly helpful in many places.

Today, we are going to discuss some hidden Magento features you might not know. They are found to be handy and easy to use.

Session Lifetime (Admin Panel)

Have you ever spent a lot of time editing different things in Magento Admin Panel and when you click “Save”, you only find that you’ve been timed out by the server? It happens because of your Admin Session Lifetime is set too low.

You can fix it by navigating to System > Configuration > ADVANCED > Admin > Security > Session Lifetime (seconds). Set the value accordingly, so you don’t get logged out of the Admin Panel uncertainly.

Magento Ratings

You can set more rating criteria for your products in Magento, allowing your customers to rate your items based on quality, service, delivery speed, etc.

To do so, go to Catalog > Reviews and Ratings > Manage Ratings and click Add New Rating button.

Nested Static Blocks

Static Blocks are useful in that they allow us to add and control different types of HTML chunks, helping to be displayed throughout the Magento store. When you have a lot of content in the Static Blocks, we make it more manageable and decrease the amount of content in each static block by Nesting several static blocks into one block using Widgets.

Customer Group

In Magento, you can set up special prices for Retail, VIP, Wholesale, and Staff groups with the help of Customer Group. Customer Group in Magento allows you to offer various pricing to your different groups of customers. Customers in different groups can simply see their respective group pricing in store. This feature of Magento also enables you to hide the product prices for store visitors that are not logged in.

Tier Pricing

Tier Pricing, a useful promotional tool, allows you to price items differently for higher quantities. You can quickly offer incentives for customers to buy in bulk with Tier Pricing in Magento.

For example, Buy 1 for $50. Buy 10 or more for $45 each. Buy 20 or more for $40 each!

To set up Tier Pricing, navigate to Catalog > Managed Products > Add/Edit Product > Prices > Add Tier. Enter the “Qty” and “Price” to start tier pricing take effect on the specified quantity. Once you are done, click “Save” button.

Product Alerts

Product Alerts help customers get notified about the products. They can get notified when a product price gets change, or an out-of-stock product comes back in stock.

To set up Product Alerts, go to System > Configuration > Catalog and expand Product Alerts. Select “Yes” using drop-down menu for both “Allow Alert When Product Price Changes” and “Allow Alert When Product Comes Back in Stock.”

These options will enable customers to sign up for email alerts using the link which will display on all product pages.

Conclusion

Above are the Magento Features which are very useful in many places. Many of these Magento hidden features are you might not know, but they are found to be helpful and easy to use.

Did I miss something? Or do you have any other useful Magento hidden features or underutilized Magento features and modules? We would love to hear about them in the comments section.

Subscribe Newsletter

Subscribe to get latest Magento news

40% Off for 4 Months on Magento Hosting + 30 Free Migration