Magento News Weekly 020: How to Boost Conversion Rate, US Tax Rules Demystified, Common Magento Problem Solutions and More

Zain Imran
July 15, 2016

Hello Magenticians!

We hope all is well with you and your Magento store is performing well. We are here with another weekly round up to satiate your hunger for Magento news, tips and tricks, strategies, and tools.

Time to dive in.

We start off with the write up of Jenna Warren, Magento Certified Solution Specialist at Creatuity. In Magento Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies she lays out some strategies to boost your conversion rate. Jenna begins by mentioning a couple of cool Magento 2.1 features which many don’t know can help their sales: ElasticSearch, and PayPal in-context. These tools help to attain an improved conversion rate by saving the customer’s valuable time. She mentions Visual Merchandiser and Customer Segmentation as more tools to increase sales. Jenna goes on to discuss how Google Universal Analytics can be exploited to further your sales. A list of free conversion optimization tools and “Conversion Killers to Avoid” follow.

The United States is a large country and sales tax rates vary, which causes a problem for sellers. In The Anatomy of a Sales Tax Rate Jennifer Dunn does a huge favor for US-based sellers by explaining how sales tax rates work at the state, county, and taxing district level. She delineates the difference between origin-based and destination-based sales tax. Jennifer goes on to discuss exactly what is taxable (shipping and products). She even shares a cool free extension which makes the sales tax conundrum simple for you. Don’t miss out on reading this article!

Despite the best efforts of the developers, Magento isn’t always easy to use to set up an online store. Even techies are sometimes stumped by a problem which crops up unexpectedly. In Fixing The Five Most Common Problems In Magento, Corey discusses how to solve some of the most conspicuous issues. The problems tackled are invisible categories, configuring Magento to work with a new domain, SQL queries within a loop, and more. Check it out!

Speed is vital. I don’t have to remind you of that. Previously, to make your Magento store super fast via Varnish cache, you had to rely on plugins like Turpentine. But Magento 2 has made your life easier. It has integrated Varnish by default! Syed Maad Jahangir explains How To Setup Magento 2 With Varnish. It is a sureshot way to make your store blazing fast. Similarly, you can setup Memcached on your dynamic database-driven Magento 2 store. Fayyaz Khattak explains the process in How To Configure Magento 2 To Use Memcached.

If you regularly create Magento Modules, this one is for you. You always make a registration.php file, along with etc/module.xml along with some helper files. Wouldn’t it be great if you could automate that process? Jisse Reitsma shows you how to do that in Magento 2 Code Generation Tools. Staying on the topic of modules, if you want a store with multi-vendor abilities, read Top Magento 2 Multi-Vendor Marketplace Modules.

Ever wondered exactly how big Magento really is? In Are there really 235,000 Magento stores out there? Can we trust the numbers?, Gábor Imre details the market share of Magento, analyzes market segments, and shares his opinion of the future trends in ecommerce and Magento.

Oh yeah! Happy Birthday, Rebecca!