Any business owner or organization should be aware of their options, and one of the most important ones is the dedicated team model, which we use here at Web4Pro.
There are plenty of benefits to using a dedicated team model, and a few disadvantages to going along with it; however, our goal in this article is to ease some of your concerns and to tell you exactly why a dedicated team project structure is the way to go.
Dedicated Team Approach Briefly
A dedicated team works through a kind of contract; wherein, the client (you) and the outsource provider (us) will work under previously agreed-upon terms. The outsource provider and the client will determine a deadline for a project, as well as the workload and requirements that go with the project.
In a dedicated team approach, the client is the one who has control over management. He or she decides if the terms that are being negotiated are reasonable, if they need to be adjusted, etc. After all, it’s the client’s project, which means the client needs to be satisfied with it.
Pros of the Dedicated Team Model
Full Control. Clients have complete control over the project at hand. They can determine the workload that they’ll have out to dedicated team members according to how much they’re willing to spend.
Transparency. One thing that many people appreciate about this system is how transparent it is. Every month, clients are aware of the charges they’re going to have to pay. There aren’t any surprises, and the sum of the costs is composed of a few things; including, the salary of each team member.
Ongoing communication. In particular, you’re better off with our dedicated team model because we’re open to many methods of communication. You can Skype, Facetime, or even use Hangouts to get your messages to us. This means someone will always be there to answer your messages and respond to your concerns. Because of this, projects won’t go off-track often, and they’ll still work for the client.
Efficiency. Since every individual is assigned to a specific team, clients can count on the effectiveness of dedicated team models. This is because when people are spread out over many jobs and teams, their energy must be spread out across these projects; however, when they’re only assigned to one, they’re throwing all of their efficiency into that one team.
Time management. When clients have requests or concerns, there will always be someone to listen. For the team members, on the other hand, the benefit is that they can manage their time around their schedule so that when they work, they are as efficient as possible. Changes can be made whenever you need, so your budget can be changed as well.
Complete Team. When you choose your outsourcing team, they’ll usually be the ones who choose any other employees you need. While you have to choose this team very carefully, you don’t have to stress much about the rest of the logistics.
A Few Cons
Client responsibility. The client takes on a lot of responsibility in a dedicated team model, which is why some people prefer to stray away from it. That said, our dedicated team always makes sure to make our clients as happy as possible.
As well as the coherent work of our dedicated team, we always care about the quality, and if you don’t have enough time to check something or need assistance, our project managers will take control over the process, reviewing the code and mark all the important things.
Long-term oriented projects. For short-term projects, the dedicated team model is less efficient than it would be for long-term projects. Through an extended period, this team model allows the team to grow together and get used to how each works; thereby, allowing for higher efficiency in the end. With short-term projects, the team doesn’t have enough time to learn how to work together so that the work will take longer and the quality may not be as good.
Longtime matching process. It takes a while to find the people who will take part in the team. If you aren’t part of every decision and if you don’t carefully select every member, you won’t get the results you want.
Which Type of Projects Will Need Dedicated Team Assistance?
Usually, using a dedicated team model is better for people who are expected to have a long-term project. This is because, as we said before, the client will be billed monthly, and clients will have outsourced providers that they trust for an extended period. However, you can work only with a trusted service provider who cares about the quality and whom you could trust.
By working in the long-term, the client can go over the job multiple times with their outsource provider to change some requirements, adjust expectations, etc. Over time, the dedicated team becomes an integral part of the client’s company. They adjust to the overall needs of the company, and they work to get the job done based on specific requirements.
We’ve already mentioned this in detail, but having a long-term project is also better because the dedicated team has the opportunity to fine-tune its work environment. This means that the work that’s done is time-efficient and is of good quality.
Need Dedicated Team for Your Project?
If you have a big project coming up, you should consider whether you need to hire a dedicated team. The dedicated team project structure allows clients to have complete control over their projects.
When it comes to selecting your dedicated team, our teams at WEB4PRO have you covered. We have dedicated teams and professionals in Magento® 2, Drupal, WordPress, and PHP Frameworks.
Our dedicated team of professionals provides our clients with the following benefits:
Complete control
Easy communication
Transparency
Efficiency
If you’re not sure about sticking to a dedicated team right away, then you can take part in an 8-hour free trial to find out if you and your developer will get along. You can look through our developers’ CVs by dedicated team section.
The Required Skill List of Every Magento Developer
In a fast-paced world, it is important to develop solutions at a brisk pace. Similarly, when it comes to web development, speed is a crucial metric for success. Developers all around the globe are always looking for utilities and solutions that can help them build websites quicker, more stable, and securer.
That is where Magento® comes into play. It is an open-source platform that takes your beloved eCommerce business to new heights of success. Written and compiled using PHP, Magento is a powerhouse if you are looking to build websites in absolutely no time at all. But the bigger question is, if the platform is such a brilliant tool for the success of your business, how can you use it? To answer this, you need to look for Magento developer’s skills you are thinking to hire.
Top Magento Developer Skills
Magento is powerful, but a sophisticated, eCommerce platform that makes easy for you, as a business owner, to operate your business and increase brand visibility.
When looking for a developer to build you an eCommerce website on Magento, the first attribute you must look for is the ability to understand the dynamics of Version Control Software Applications. One of such applications is Git, using which, developers can create websites following a distributed chain of command.
Furthermore, crucial for a budding Magento developer is to spend time with the most in-demand IDEs that are currently being used in the industry. We don’t live in the age of Notepad, we live in an era of automation where time is vital, and IDEs play a crucial role in cutting downtime. As technical skills are essential and must to any developer, we will move straight to them.
For a topnotch Magento web developer, it is necessary to have an understanding of the best practices in the field. A worthy inclusion in the skills list is to be experienced at building websites, using not only Magento but know other frameworks and works with different platforms as well. Why? Because experience cannot be replaced by any means.
1. Knowledge of Programming Languages
As explained earlier, Magento is a platform, written entirely out of PHP; however, when a web developer has to get his hands dirty, he can always expect HTML, CSS, and Javascript to play a crucial role in the development of these sites.
Of course, an understanding of PHP is mandatory as well as:
Modular Development
familiarization with MVC architecture
knowledge of Object Oriented Programming
MySQL, mainly for when you have to interact with data.
Knowledge and proficiency in XML are required to configure modules correctly.
Command over CSS Pre-processors, such as SaSS and Stylus, information about the working mechanics of Search Engines, and expertise in building responsive websites is a must too. For the Frontend part:
Javascript
expertise in PHP, Jquery, and Node.js
Grunt, Gulp, and Bootstrap as a huge plus.
2. Certification
Magento certified exam is the real test of a developer’s nerves because this is what labels them as a Magento web developer and shows the actual professionalism.
To ace this exam, a developer needs to have both – experience in the field and lexical knowledge of the platform as well as showing creativity in solving tasks. Being certified would put a candidate at a greater advantage.
The best eCommerce developers don’t work with one platform, they combine different platforms and create a website that demonstrates greatness at every level.
Similarly, a creative Magento developer knows the advantage and benefit of using different themes, modules, and extensions to add to his website using Magento.
4. eCommerce Integration
A bi-directional channel between a company’s eCommerce website and its inventory, it is crucial that a Magento web developer knows about eCommerce Integration.
eCommerce integration saves loads of time by automating the entire workflow and eradicating the redundancy of data and processes.
5. Clean Development and Testing
With lots of people working on a single website, it becomes a question of maintaining the integrity of the system. Via clean development, that particular problem can be solved conveniently and comprehensively.
In addition to that, testing the system using GitHub, can definitely result in smoother website development, which is why it is totally needed for a good Magento web developer.
Personal Skills
Apart from being good at developing websites using Magento, you also need to look for particular personal skills to be not only problem-solving but innovative as well. These are:
1. Ability to Multitask
Being a web developer isn’t only about learning the most in-demand programming language, it’s about learning as many programming languages and frameworks as you can to make yourself versatile and round out your profile.
Besides the programming languages, you also need to be good at effectively handling all the things at once. This is because most business owners have varied requirements for their websites.
2. Problem-Solving
Solving problems is the first thing eCommerce store developers learn to do. In order to solve problems with data, MySQL plays a key role, but don’t discount other tools that can help you do exactly that.
3. Responsibility
Besides Magento skill, you should know how to manage your time well. Since most web developers work on a tight schedule, it is imperative that they stay ahead of the curve by getting things done timely and effectively. Clients won’t come back for them if they can’t get things done in time, which makes time management a crucial element of the process.
4. Communication Skills
Communication is a two-way street. Not only is it essential for a programmer to understand the requirements of the client, but it is also important to convey his point accurately.
Most business owners aren’t technically equipped, as far as web development is concerned, which makes it the developer’s responsibility to voice an opinion if need be.
5. Teamwork
A definite inclusion in Magento developer skills list, because not all Magento developers are solo operators. If a developer is working as part of a team, it is imperative that he/she plays well with others to achieve the common goals of the organization.
Magento 2.2 Overview of Commerce Features
Magento® 2.2 Enterprise is here, and we certainly have a lot to talk about. The latest edition of Magento brings with it a brand new feature, a massive amount of fixes and changes, and certainly brings in a lot of improvement over former editions. Having read through the Magento 2.2 release notes, let’s take a look at all the features of this latest release.
Magento 2.2 Commerce Features
The functionality of the system is primarily designed for merchants who have companies as main customers, rather than a merchant who is aiming towards consumers. Magento 2.2 Enterprise is indeed not unique in that regard, but what it does it does very well.
Magento Cloud
Many improvements have been made to the deployment process of the Magento Commerce Cloud feature. There are new MCC replacements, ece-patches and ece-tools. It is not necessary to perform a full installation of the base code and patch. The fact this isn’t required makes things move a little faster, and a little more efficiently.
Magento has been optimized in this latest version, with its PaaS (platform as a service) production being tweaked. Its staging and development environments have also seen changes and are more efficient than they were before.
Usual continuous cloud integration tools are available with unlimited users. You get DDoS protection and significant bandwidth allowances as well as the unrestricted versions of Blackfire.io Enterprise (Performance Testing) and New Relic APM Pro (Performance Monitoring).
Signifyd Fraud Protection
Since October 2016, Magento has had a strong partnership with Signifyd. Signifyd is an eCommerce fraud protection company that has a pretty strong reputation for being efficient and secure. Plans were made to improve the Magento core by integrating Signifyd’s machine learning abilities into Magento.
Better Technology Stack
The technology stack has been upgraded in this edition of Magento. Support for PHP 5.6 and Varnish 3 have been dropped and replaced by support for PHP 7.1 and Varnish 5. Also supported are Redis 3.2 and MySQL 5.7.
Magento Social Module
Magento Social is an extension that can act as a gateway between your website (where your products are featured and sold) and your social pages. It uses Shopial, an integrator, to create this gateway. Shopial is compatible with every major selling platform on the market, including the likes of Etsy, Wix, GoDaddy and of course eBay.
It is handy for directing more traffic to your site as it showcases your store across all the most popular social networks. Building this exposure and then getting people to view your site and your products is a great way to boost interest and sales.
Faster Deployment Process
The process has been refined to allow development stages to minimize downtime of the production system whenever there is a site update. In this case, downtime is the time it takes for the static files and compiled code to be transferred to the server. The pipeline deployment process makes for easy control of the configuration between the environments.
Quote Requests
The Quote Extension helps improve the quote request process and makes it a lot easier for both you and your customers. Some of the added Magento 2.2 features here are:
Comments and documents can be added in an attempt to justify discounts that have been requested.
Quote statuses can be tracked throughout the processing stage.
You can directly correspond with the merchant so that you can complete the deal.
All your quotes can be seen in as a summary in the “My Quotes” view.
Magento 2.2 features added directly from the Quote Extension include:
Adding notes and comments for every product.
The ability to automate request for the whole quote process.
Making it a lot easier to check the quote request process.
You can quickly enable (or disable) quotation search.
Customizable Catalogs and Price Lists
Magento 2.2 b2b Functionality has been increased. Now customizable catalogs and price lists are both available as features the merchant can take advantage of.
Businesses can make and maintain their special accounts, and they can specify a group of buyers with particular roles and differing levels of permission on each account. There is a flexible API included that allows you to integrate a variety of different ERP solutions. Credit to Companies Extended
Magento 2.2 b2b customers have the ability to complete the purchase with deferred payment who can choose Payment on Account, rather than going for the choices of paying via PayPal or another available payment method. The company account can be managed via Magento Admin.
As a merchant, you can configure credit (terms and conditions) and restrict credit for specific countries. For customers, there isn’t the opportunity to postpone payment as they must pay upon checkout. PayPal is integrated so that users can pay via PayPal without having to leave the merchant’s site. This is a positive for conversion rates.
Advanced Review of Commerce Features
Below we highlighted all main features updates that will be essential to know before upgrading your Magento store to the latest version or switch from another platform to Magento.
Pricing and Promotions Update. Work with coupons: create, track, and report coupon usage as well as control promotional pricing for specific stores, categories, customer segments, or products.
Admin Page Usage. Organize your content and a website page’s design for multiple stores and websites from one admin panel. Also, don’t forget to generate system reports to avoid technical issues.
Updated Checkout. Use Instant Purchase option as a progressive tool to simplify user shopping experience. As well as a that, your customers can quickly checkout with or without registration, save their orders for later, and be happy with the offer gift wrapping and gift messages per order.
Orders and Payments Management. Integrate with more payment gateways that were before, accept different payment options as checks, payments on account, bank transfer payments, and cash on delivery. As for order management, you can do multiple tasks with invoices and orders from the Admin Panel, customize orders and work with clients via newsletter and Contact Us form.
Earn Customers Loyalty. Use reward system for different customer’s actions (purchase, registration, reviews, etc.). Set up various gift campaigns and offer exclusive shopping experiences with private or flash sale sites.
Customers Accounts Features. Simplify the account profile and add necessary functionality such as order status and history, re-order from the account, recently ordered items, tracking of the store credits, gift card totals, reward points and many more.
Theme and Layout Customization. Use customized store theme and inherited base theme to varying it for different countries, brands, and campaigns.
Store Performance and Scalability. Use integrated Varnish page caching to accelerate your store performance. Faster Admin rendering will speed access to product, customer, and order management views.
Additional Integrated B2B Functionality. This enables you to simplify the life of your business customers in managing their company’s accounts, clients orders, handling over 300 line items out-of-the-box, including insights of more than 25 B2B-focused reports in easy-to-use dashboards.
The Ultimate Magento 2.2 Community Edition Feature List
With every new feature of Magento®, people are converting to the platform more and more. That’s because Magento takes the concerns of its clients and customers to hear, so each Magento update is unique. Below, you can read about The Ultimate Magento 2.2 Community Edition Feature List, which describes technology stack upgrades, security enhancements, new deployment process, improvements in indexing, cart, and cache, Signifyd integration, and advanced reporting mode.
Magento Open Source 2.2.0 Features
Technology Stack Upgrade
The new update shows a stack upgrade. The Magento upgrade revamped the technology stack. Previous versions of Magento 2 requires PHP 5.5 and 5.6, but the new Magento 2.2 requirements only include PHP 7.
While the platform uses a variety of frameworks, it upgraded them in Magento 2.2.0. Now Magento doesn’t have to rely on frameworks like Zend because they rely on their interfaces, adapters, etc. Magento suggests that you use their unique system to avoid any problems that could occur with APIs due to using other frameworks.
A composer is supported out-of-the-box, and it’s one of Magento’s requirements. The composer is offering Magento customers a dependency management package for PHP.
HTML is a coding language that allows coders and developers to edit code in websites and online stores and eventually, it also included in Magento architecture.
Magento Social
The great thing about Magento Social is that it’s free. The feature allows you to connect your store with Facebook so that the social media page becomes a commercial page. It doesn’t add any buttons to your stores like other add-ons and extensions; instead, it allows you to gain more customers and generate more traffic.
This is because people are more likely to buy products from brands they’re following on Magento. When they’re following you on social media, these people are already showing you that they’re loyal to you and that they like your brand. All that you have to do is integrate your page into a fully-functioning commercial store.
Magento social allows you to save time and money on advertising and marketing because your customers are already converted to your store. Another perk is that you won’t have to spend money on a developer because your Facebook store is created within a few minutes.
The people who are following your store on Facebook will likely share your products with their friends, and your page will come up on other people’s’ feeds.
Security Enhancements
Magento 2.2 comes with a few security updates that you might not have heard about. The platform allows for stores to close Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and Local File Inclusion (LFI); it also helps developers to verify remote code execution and detect vulnerabilities within arbitrary file delete.
With Magento’s 2.2 community edition update, you’ll see that the company removed serialize and deserialize from code to prevent security hacks. If the use of this is necessary, though, Magento has upped security in the code.
New Deployment Process
In the Magento 2.2 community edition, we’ll be seeing updated deployment processes as well. Normally, your server would be put into maintenance mode; then it would get the needed code, and carry on with deployment. Now, though, Magento 2 is attempting to limit the amount of time the site is down for, which was previously an extended amount of time.
The way Magento is planning to lessen its maintenance time is by moving the compilation and the web asset generation, and it removes the database dependency so that they don’t have to run on a production server.
Another improvement to the development process is an automated test, which takes place after each build to determine whether or not there’s a problem with the production code. Magento’s new Pipeline deployment reduces production system downtime.
The future version of Magento is looking to have no downtime deployments. Magento now uses a “compact” deployment strategy, which identifies files that aren’t changed per locale. Tests have shown that this method of deployment completed web asset generation two times as fast as other methods.
You can also lock your settings by placing them into config.php or env.php. When you do this, the Admin will allow people to see the value of the setting; however, anyone else won’t be able to edit the value.
Improvements in Indexing, Cart, and Cache Operations
There are plenty of ways in which Magento has decided to upgrade its indexing; it’s improved the way it calculates batch sizes and category indexes can complete indexing of more significant profiles that have more than half a million products.
Regarding Magento’s cart upgrades, you might be satisfied to know that your shipping information will stay the same when you reload your checkout page, you can add messages which confirm a product was added to your cart, and several glitches were fixed.
Previously, it was hard to move multiple products from your wishlist to your cart, but Magento has fixed these problems.
For this feature to work, you have to have your business running on a public web server. You should also have your SSL certificate and a functioning version of Magento. Advanced reporting occurs when Magento analyzes your information or data with Magento Business Intelligence Analytics. In doing so, you’ll have a better idea of how your company runs.
The latest version of the Magento community edition includes Signifyd integration. This feature protects you and your clients against fraud. If you’re interested in including Signifyd on your site, you should click on the Store section, followed by configuration, sales, and fraud protection.
So, how does Signifyd work? The module reviews orders that are placed on your eCommerce store to figure out whether someone is trying to fraud you or if they’re a legitimate person. This only takes seconds, and one of the following for options will be sent: approved, declined, pending, canceled. All of these are pretty straightforward, so we don’t have to go into them any further.
Would You Choose Magento Community For Your Store?
If you’re looking for a platform to enhance your eCommerce store, Magento Community edition is the way to go. The new update allows for more confidence in the system’s security, and it cleared up some bugs from previous versions.
Just as a short review, here’s a list of all the features Magento has to offer.
Better security with Signifyd against fraud
Data analysis with advanced reporting
Cart, Index, and cache improvements to handle big data and increase the page and operation’s speed
Faster deployment for a better development process
Turn your eCommerce store into a Facebook store with Magento Social
Upgrades in the technology stack for better performance avoiding API’s problem with other frameworks
How Can Elasticsearch Help Your Magento Store?
Once you get people to your website, the aim is to convert them into paying customers. How will they find the item they want to buy? By searching for it. The Search feature in your online store is a simple but powerful tool. When customers search for items, it means they want to buy something that they already have it in mind.
Studies show that customers who use the search tool have higher conversion rates. This is in comparison to those who just come to browse. When a customer uses a search tool, they want fast and intuitive results. And Elasticsearch in Magento® online store is the way to achieve this.
Elasticsearch Explanation
Elasticsearch is a search engine for your online store. It is an open-source tool that uses Lucene’s information retrieval software library. Elasticsearch is built for scalability and can be used to search all types of documents. It offers an almost real-time search and offers a distributed search which gives the customer very fast results.
Elasticsearch Feature List
Let’s take an overall look at some of Elasticsearch key features.
Stop Words Support
These are small supporting words for the search phrase (e.g. “the,” “for, “and”). It also supports synonyms and several languages. It makes your searches more instinctive, like the way natural language processing works. It enables Elasticsearch to understand what you want to search. This might differ a bit from what you typed.
Indexed Search Techniques
This eliminates the need for SQL queries which has a significant effect on speed. The result is very quick search speeds.
Standard Configuration
It works well even without customizations. It is also quite easy to scale horizontally.
Additional Applications
Elasticsearch offers other applications in its framework that go beyond mere searching. There are useful reporting, personalization, and storage options.
Autocomplete Function
It starts analyzing the customer’s search for the first character they type. As they continue typing, results that don’t match the search bar get eliminated. The customer is eventually left with the right product. This also extends to matching categories and related products, not just product descriptions.
Typo Correction
When words are mistyped, Elasticsearch assist customers with possible corrections to what they might have meant in the search bar. It uses a “Did you mean …” message. The suggestions given are based on actual products that can be found in the online store.
Relevant Search
It shows results that have an exact match to what the customer searched for. This smart feature incorporates past customer behavior when determining relevancy. This means that Elasticsearch considers consumer behavior when determining relevancy to that customer. Demographics and previous purchases are also considered.
This allows for all kinds of product specifications to be met first and focusses the customer’s search by using different facets and filters. So, only related items will be displayed. The customer gets to cut everything that does not meet his exact needs. This is quite useful for stores that sell items in several brands, colors or sizes.
How Will It Affect My Store Search?
The main advantage of Elasticsearch is it almost reads your customer’s intentions. Your customers will be able to search massive product lists at blistering speeds. The searches are very reliable and quite easy to manage.
So, how does Elasticsearch make Magento online stores, in particular, work better? Let’s look at a few Elasticsearch extensions, built for Magento online stores.
Elasticsearch Ultimate is an extension available for Magento 2 online stores. Their goal is to create the ultimate search experience for customers. This will naturally lead to an increase in conversion rates. Searches are completed within milliseconds. The additional search features are all built into the search engine. So, the customer does not need to fiddle with numerous settings.
Elasticsearch Ultimate also speeds up your store catalog pages. You can search through several different content types, and all languages are supported. Incorrect spellings autocorrected, as the customer types in the search bar. It also fully supports searches where keywords contain stop words, hyphens, and slashes.
Elasticsearch Ultimate Community Edition costs $249, and the Enterprise Edition costs $448. There is a separate installation fee of $49, which is optional.
Magento 2 Elasticsearch is also available for Magento 2 online stores. It is the preferred choice for online stores that need a highly scalable search engine. It can handle massive amounts of data in very little time. It is powerful enough to replace MySQL search engines. Magento 2 Elasticsearch also support multi-match and simple-match queries. As expected, it also features a clever auto-correct feature for misspelled words.
It is available in 3 editions: Community, Enterprise and Enterprise Cloud. The Community Edition costs $99. The Enterprise and Edition Cloud Editions each cost $198. All three editions come with a free 3-month support period. 6-Month and 1-year options are available at an extra price. There is a separate installation fee of $19-80, which is optional.
Extension for Elasticsearch is a distributed real-time search solution, built for the cloud. Indexing is lightning fast. It integrates well with other hosted services like Found, Bonsai, and others.
This Magento Elasticsearch extension has the highly-demanded autocomplete and autocorrect features. Related suggestions are also offered when an inconsistent search phrase is entered. This extension has received great reviews from online store owners. They cite wonderful customer support for this product.
It is available for €95. There is a 3-month free upgrade service. 6-Month and 12-month options available at an extra rate. There is a separate installation fee of €40, which is optional.
Magento Latest News: PWA Studio, Bluefoot, Klarna, and Many More
Magento® is a leading figure in the world of eCommerce. The company provides businesses with the opportunity to create the site they want, to expand their reach, and to have superior layouts and designs.
With Magento latest news about 2.3 and 2.4 versions, it proves to be the company’s best updates yet. With Magento 2.3’s Bluefoot, it’ll be easier than ever to customize your site to reflect your brand. With Magento 2.4, on the other hand, you’ll be able to take full advantage of Full GraphQL and advanced reporting.
The Magento updates show that the company has listened to the concerns of its clientele and that it’s ready to deliver. Below, you can read about Magento’s latest news, Bluefoot, PWA studio, Klarna, and more!
Magento 2.3 and 2.4
Magento 2 is upgrading its platform once again with Magento 2.3, to be released in mid-2018. The latest version of Magento will provide client-side performance, and in the enterprise edition, customers will be presented with a business-friendly page builder. Not only this, but the platform is integrating tools that will make it easier for companies to create PWAs that are more efficient.
By considering Progressive Web Applications, this Magento update is ahead of the game. PWAs provide instant page loads, offline browsing, lessens the traffic on your network, and more.
Magento 2.4, on the other hand, will provide advanced reporting and Native PWA, adding on to M 2.3’s PWA Studio. It will also incorporate Full GraphQL so that your page will have better product descriptions.
Magento PWA Studio
Let’s move onto the field of Progressive Web Apps Magento e-commerce. Magento’s PWA studio has a few features to present.
For one thing, there’s the enhanced API Layer in Magento’s latest release. The platform is currently debating whether or not they should provide a new API style, which would customize responses more than other designs. The Magento third-party API integration will make it easier for consumers to customize their sites.
Next, you’ve got your application shell, which won’t need to be frequently edited and is created early on in the project. When it’s loading, your application shell will minimize your branded UI; it will also be responsible for your PWAs critical CSS, its global data, etc.
The PWA feature sets itself apart from the previous version of Magento because while your Progressive Web App is hosted by Magento, it won’t interact with its data unless you use API calls.
Magento’s PWA Studio will handle all events or renders from inside the PWAs app shell. This will be done using ReactJS, and it will use Redux to handle your core library and to allow frequent tasks to function.
Benefits for Your Business
Progressive Web Apps are better for your Magento 2 business because they convert more people to you than both web pages and applications. This is partly because, in regards to apps, people don’t want more.
Beyond this, you aren’t confined to your CMS thanks to Magento’s PWA Studio API connection. In the long-run, you’ll also have lower costs because you can use the same app to run both mobile and desktop; thereby, costing less in maintenance and development.
Google’s developer website has released data which demonstrates the higher conversions you can get with Magento’s Progressive Web App Studio.
The study showed that across browsers, there was 104% new users, there was an iOs conversation of 83%, and there were double the page visits per session in any browser.
Progressive Web Applications for eCommerce shops are more advantageous because they’re faster, more reliable and engaging.
Their offline modes are what make them more reliable – customers can surf through the page when they have either little or no connection.
Magento PWA Studio Shops are faster because their instant page loads provide you and your customers with pages that load your pre-cache instantly. There are no white pages while your page loads.
Your web page will also update silently in the background so that your customers don’t have to be bothered with them.
Bluefoot CMS and Page Builder
Bluefoot is all the rage this year. The page builder allows you to develop your website through tools and content editors. With Bluefoot, you won’t have to hire third-party services, platforms, or developers to make your content the best it can be.
Here are just a few features that you can find with the Magento update, which includes Bluefoot CMS and Page Builder:
Drag & Drop
Most people avoid editing their pages on their own because they don’t want to get into coding. Bluefoot remedies this problem by incorporating a drag and drop option. This will allow you to make complex designs without being experienced in coding.
Extensible
Since the code for Bluefoot isn’t encrypted, it’s easy to extend Bluefoot. The latest version of Magento is tailored to satisfy merchants, agencies, and developers.
Klarna Integration
Klarna is made to keep your customers’ shopping experience simple. Klarna was founded in 2005 in Sweden. The bank and payment-processing service have a total of 60 000 000 end-customers and 70 000 merchants. They provide customers with support at any time. All they have to do is call or send an email to have problems resolved.
Late payments will also be prevented because Klarna will send customers reminders. Any old or new orders will be in the same place, and they can buy orders with one-click with the use of either their debit card or credit card. They’ll have the “pay now, “slice it,” or “pay later” option so that they can choose when they pay for their items.
Progressive Web Apps for eCommerce: What are the Benefits?
Do you have an online store? Are your pages taking a long time to load and do you lack in conversion rates? If so, we have the solution for you. Progressive Web Apps are the best option for eCommerce because they provide your customers with a fast, safe, and reliable way to shop online.
What are Progressive Web Apps?
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are web applications that deliver an experience that is similar to apps. Web apps are an upgraded version of web pages which must meet specific requirements. They must also be accessible through URLs, and they’re deployed in and by servers. They’re mostly a combination of responsive web design and native apps.
The PWA website can also be converted into an app later on if you want it to. They use application shells, which are the lowest standards of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and they use service workers, which independent scripts that help to run the PWA page.
Useful Functionality of a Progressive Web App
Many will convert to responsive web design in order to make their apps more efficient. That said, simply optimizing your web page to be more responsive isn’t enough. That’s because responsive web pages only make it easier for information to be shown on different devices and formats.
Because responsive web design doesn’t always provide eCommerce businesses with the conversion rates they want, these businesses will invest in native apps. Native apps, on the other hand, are expensive and don’t have enough reach.
PWAs are unlike responsive web design and native apps because they attempt to solve many of the problems that eCommerce businesses face. They can provide retailers with higher conversions, as well as an experience that’s very app-like. Google also introduced this feature to give companies with SEO and, thereby, expand their reach.
You can have this feature installed to add a shortcut on your customers’ home screen. They’ll have more access to your online store, and they’ll be more likely to buy from you in the future.
Offline Mode
Every web page has cached data. Offline mode uses pre-cached data to allow customers and clients to browse through web pages and sites when they have either low or no connection. While this doesn’t work for days on end, it will work for short periods of time when the connection is limited.
Payment Request API
Web security is a concern for anyone who shops online. That’s why your customers will appreciate payment request API, which provides everyone with a secure and fast way to shop.
Instant Page Loads
Instant page loads are one of PWAs most valuable features. Instant page loads mean that all of the information on a given web page is loaded instantly. In many web pages, a white page will appear before the page loads; however, PWAs resolve this.
By having quicker loading times, your customers will be able to navigate through pages more efficiently, and they’re more likely to come back to your store.
Web Push notifications are useful because they aren’t as intrusive. They’re made to draw someone’s attention when their phone or tablet’s browser isn’t on. Most often, it’ll pop up as a notification box on their main screen. For retail companies, it can say things like “Your order is almost ready!” when they haven’t completed their order or “Items you might like!” if they’ve already ordered from the store.
ECommerce businesses appreciate push notifications because their customers are more likely to click on them than they are emails. This is because emails from retail stores are more likely to go in a junk folder or, like in most email accounts, they get lost in thousands of messages.
Full-Screen Mode
Sometimes clients want to be able to shop with their entire screen and without the URL bar on the top of the page. By having a larger screen, your customers will be completely immersed in the eCommerce store and have the opportunity to see the items more clearly.
PWA For eCommerce: When and How to Use
If all of the above advantages are appealing to you, you might now be wondering when and how to use Progressive Web Apps. You should decide to use PWAs if your website needs to be frequently updated. This is because mobile web pages will continuously have new content to upload and without instant page loading, your site will run more slowly.
You might also want a PWA website if you’re going to give your customers the opportunity to surf through your site offline, or if you have a chat platform that will allow push notifications to update your customers with new data. To use a Progressive Web App, you should make sure to use a supported browser and to avoid Googlebot cloaking.
You should continue to use your URL structure to improve your site’s SEO. This is because there are some PWAs which have hashtags in the URLs, which doesn’t work in Googlebot. Whichever numbers or letters come after the hashtag will be erased.
Artificial Intelligence in Magento 2
Artificial intelligence has brought a new dimension of productivity to eCommerce. Magento® 2 takes full advantage of this technology. They have led the eCommerce industry into the future. Certain features can’t be automated. But Magento 2 has struck the right balance in this regard. Magento uses Artificial Intelligence in all the right places to boost functionality.
Features of Artificial Intelligence in Magento
Here are some ways in which Artificial Intelligence has enhanced the way Magento 2 works.
AI Context Search Solution
Traditional searching in an online store has always operated on a keyword-matching basis. It relies on matching keywords to information tags attached to product descriptions. This is effective enough. But it still means that exact keywords have to be used. Also, there will always be products that get included because they share a keyword. But, they do not have any contextual relationship.
Artificial intelligence solves this problem. It adds the element of “context” to all searches. AI uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) to understand the meaning of keywords. It uses this information to show the most relevant results. AI-based searches always yield more accurate results for your customers.
Artificial intelligence uses machine learning to teach itself the buying patterns of customers. It analyses what products get browsed versus demographics versus historical data.
AI combines these factors, including others, to create predictive models. These models show you what customers respond to. Magento 2 uses them to figure out who their target base is so that marketing efforts can be more focused. Using AI, less energy gets wasted because you can target the people most likely to buy your products.
Magento 2 extensions help gather the information they need to learn customers’ shopping patterns. These extensions are a crucial investment for any Magento 2 online store. Using them eliminates the possibility of human bias or error.
Magento’s Security Standards
Security in eCommerce is of utmost importance. AI and Magento 2 help keep your online store safe against fraud. This is thanks to the fraud detection and prevention tools built into Magento. Combining these tools with AI can help solve business problems more quickly and in a cheaper way. Queues of manual transactions can now get processed using AI.
AI processes learn the necessary steps and then perform these actions. The fraud prevention and security measures in Magento will work better. Using AI as the programming model for fraud prevention cause results in a smarter and faster “brain”. Thus, it is less open to human fallacy and interference.
Artificial Intelligence in Magento 2 Extensions
Magento 2 extensions can add AI capabilities to your online store. Here are a few types of these extensions.
Chatbots
Chatbots are virtual conversational partners. They allow for real-world language conversations between customers and the store. Thanks to AI, the chatbot can interpret certain conversation parts as commands. It understands the context of your conversation and can seamlessly carry out commands. Orders can be placed right there in the chat window. There’s no need for a separate checkout process. It’s a faster purchasing experience, and that’s what customers want.
One example is Facebook Chatbot for Magento 2 that gives a business the options to serve customers via the Facebook chat feature. Another example is the Chatbot by Webkul. It also connects Magento 2 online stores to customers via Facebook Chat. It enables customers to bookmark any product via their preferred chat app. They will also receive instant alerts for products.
Modules
Modules offer amazing extra features to your existing online store. Mollie is a module that creates a more streamlined payment solution. It provides reliable security which your customers will love. It integrates all major payment methods and gives a simple refund process.
The Magento 2 Product Slider module shows suggested similar items to customers. It lets them easily find what they are looking for in one place. The Personalized products module shows predicted suggestions for what the customer wants. It also suggests complimentary items. These are items that would pair well with what the customer is searching for. This module also gives suggestions about what combinations other customers have bought.
How Artificial Intelligence Affect Marketing?
Artificial intelligence is only at its most effective when used as a tool. It cannot be used to replace actual marketers. Instead, it should be used as an aid to marketers in creating excellent marketing strategies. Artificial intelligence works well for automating tasks and analyzing data. But the human creative element is necessary and that is the job of the marketer.
One of the pillars of effective marketing is personalization. You should aim to create a scenario that is relevant to the audience. Then you are more likely to convert them into paying customers. Good personalization uses AI to understand the mind of the customer. It does not suggest products simply because they already bought it before. Artificial intelligence helps you put different personalized experiences together for each potential customer.
We know how difficult it can be for you to choose a platform to host your online store. We will consider two major competitors in this field – Magento® 2 vs. BigCommerce. Why? The base costs of both are cheap: Magento community edition is free to install, and BigCommerce standard package is only $30/month. Let’s move on and compare them to see who will be the winner.
Difference Between BigCommerce and Magento 2
Now we can move onto the differences between BigCommerce and Magento 2. This way, you can make an informed decision about which platform is best for you.
Features
Magento 2 is an open-source platform. This means that it is incredibly customizable because you can change themes, colors, and add features to it.
Magento 2 offers its customers’ search engine optimization, instant purchase, coupon tracking, catalog browsing, and product browsing. Magento 2 customers get to experience your online store’s social media integration, as well as messaging displays for out-of-stock products and even coupons! You also can integrate your store with Amazon, eBay to boost your sales!
BigCommerce offers 5GB of storage with its base package, and you can have unlimited products. You also have unlimited staff accounts, eBay and Amazon integration, Google Shopping, a branded store, product ratings, etc.
With BigCommerce pro plus package, you can make up to $150 000 online sales per year, and with the pro package, you can make more.
When it comes to features and functions, Magento is the best because you can tailor it entirely to the needs of your company and your customers.
Pricing
Magento 2 has two different packages. The first one is the Community edition, and it’s free to install. That said, most people want to tailor their company to their needs, which is why you might want to buy some add-ons later on. The second option is Enterprise edition that cost 22,000 per year and has excellent features around B2B and now order management. It is flexible to any changes and additional functionality solutions.
BigCommerce, on the other hand, has three plans. The first is the standard package, which is $30 per month. The second is the additional package, sitting comfortably at $79.97 per month. The pro package is the most expensive and costs $249.99.
Community Support
Magento 2 offers its users technical support and help within its development community. Magento has many forums that you can ask questions on, and plenty of professionals will work to make sure that your problem is solved.
BigCommerce has the support that you can reach by email, phone, or instant chat.
Server Requirements
To run Magento 2, there are a few server requirements that you should keep in mind. For one thing, you’ll need to have Apache 2.2, 2.4, and nginx 1.x. When you have Apache, you’ll need to enable mod_rewrite, which is a feature that allows you to edit your URL.
BigCommerce handles your hosting on its own, which allows you to have more time to work on your online store. BigCommerce servers are certified and prevent server breaches.
Marketing Opportunities
Magento 2 is known for its marketing opportunities. For one thing, everyone can take advantage of the platform’s SEO. This means that you can optimize all of your products by adding metadata so that they are favored in Google. One of the best things that you can do in this case is to create individual URLs. This will make it easier for customers to find your product sites and it will be easier for Google to recognize your page, as well as what your page is about. Magento 2 offers its users Google sitemap, which makes any of the online store more user-friendly.
BigCommerce holds its own in marketing opportunities because it also offers sitemaps, meta information, and you can customize your URLs.
Social Media
BigCommerce has built-in blogging opportunities. Blogs are some of the most useful features that you can add to your eCommerce store because they allow you to expand your reach. With a blog, you can discuss your brand, and you can even take advantage of SEO to improve your search results. You will be able to get more customers by creating “How-To” guides and Q&A’s.
While Magento 2 does not have built-in blogging solutions, there are plenty of add-ons that you can install to create blogs. You can host them with your online store.
Email Marketing
Magento 2 takes the lead in email marketing. The company allows you to install add-ons that will connect you with newsletter services. Their add-ons will enable you to manage your subscribers, send welcome emails, more. If you have an existing mailing service, you can also connect this to one of your addons.
In comparison, BigCommerce offers necessary email marketing, with welcome emails and opt-in forms.
Magento 2 vs. BigCommerce: Usage Prospects
Magento 2 Clients
Magento 2 currently hosts around 0.1% of the top 100 000 sites around the world, 0.3% of the top million, and 0.2% of the entire internet. The number of eCommerce stores being hosted by Magento 2 appears to be increasing among the top 100 000 and top 1 million.
Not only this, but there are reportedly about 11 500 physical businesses that use Magento for the online store in the United States, which is followed by just over 1 thousand companies in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
BigCommerce Clients
BigCommerce, on the other hand, runs about 0.6% of the entire internet. 0.1% of the sites that use BigCommerce are among the top 100 000, and 0.5% are within the top one million. The number of the top one million websites that use BigCommerce varies depending on the year, but the platform experienced a significant drop in users at the beginning of 2018.
There are around 50 thousand U.S. stores with physical locations in the United States that use BigCommerce, followed by approximately 3700 in Australia and 2700 in the U.K.
Magento 2 or BigCommerce: What Will You Choose?
The platform you choose to run your online store depends entirely on your needs. Overall, though, you’ll probably find that Magento 2 is the better fit for your store because it is extremely customizable. This is due to its being an open-source platform, and because you can install various add-ons that will make your store your own.
Artificial intelligence is now being introduced into more industries and sectors. The idea of a machine being able to reason “like a human” may seem overwhelming. But, it has opened up a new dimension of productivity and service in eCommerce. Online businesses can now offer customers so much more. Let’s look at artificial intelligence in eCommerce and how it has affected the community.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
It is also called the machine intelligence, which is created in a contrast to the human intelligence to use it in computer science, mathematics, information engineering, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and many other fields.
Why Artificial Intelligence Is Needed?
AI is needed to simplify the process of receiving the required information. Now, we have tons of data, questions, answers, articles, and videos. Physically we are not able to find relevant information, for example, without Google search with related questions, best match, the assortment of data and other helpful AI-based solutions
That’s not all. With the growth of technologies, most fields require complex solutions to operate their products. IoT is a network of devices connected with the Internet. To perform such complex task requires AI to build a secure and stable system of devices for a house or office.
How Does Artificial Intelligence Work?
AI works by handling a large amount of data and its fast processing with intelligent algorithms which was broadened to the classification of subfields where AI is used:
Machine learning – analyzes data and make predictions without being programmed for this purpose. It is used to predict the best matches and give you the variation of things that you might like.
Cognitive computing – imitates and recreate the process of human thinking for better understanding of human language and the meaning of images. Together, cognitive computing and Artificial Intelligence aim to empower machine with human-like behavior.
Deep Learning – are neural networks that learn by processing data. Machines use many inputs to determine one output. Another form of deep learning is speech recognition which allows the voice assistant to understand and answer difficult questions like our article covers.
Neural Network – learns with examples to identify the right object. Neural networks were created from human neural connections example. These computer systems learn from large data sets by analyzing data many times to make associations and give meaning to the previously undefined data.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) – allows machines to learn, understand and process human languages in context and create logical responses. This enables machine intelligence to facilitate communication between people. The example of using NLP can be apps that translate sentences and any text to other languages in a real-time.
Computer Vision – enables computers to identify, process and interpret the content of an image. It serves in a healthcare and R&D sector.
Artificial Intelligence – Examples
As we are interested in eCommerce, we’ve collected the most common features where AI can be used for an online store. This includes:
Product recommendations
Advanced searches with autosuggestion and autocomplete
Personalization services
Fraud detection
Voice search
Also, we can’t forget about live examples. Below you can find the tools that are widely used in eCommerce and which companies have successfully implemented those tools to their stores.
The Growth of Artificial Intelligence in eCommerce
The popularity of artificial intelligence in eCommerce has grown exponentially. It has become easier and cheaper to implement in online businesses. These are some of the leading business aspects that benefit from AI:
Unique Customer Experience
Artificial intelligence can be used to personalize customers’ shopping experience. Using their buying history, it is possible to determine what other related items you should advertise to them.
AI allows this to happen, based on the guidelines that you provide. For example, if a customer buys a mobile device, the next ad they see might be for accessories for that device. Your conversion rates can increase if you market the right items to the right customers. Artificial intelligence helps make that possible.
For example, well-known VPA Alexa made by the Amazon. It is built on skills. They give a platform an opportunity to understand the verbal commands and requests. It is a cloud-based solution, and you can just use it for playing the music, creating to-do-lists, streaming podcasts, etc.
Chatbots
In the past, online chatting was only as responsive as its pre-programmed responses. By using AI, the chatting experience is now as satisfying as chatting with a real person.
A chatbot can act on specific conversational cues, rather than wait for hard-commands. It can mimic a conversation with a real person. They are intelligent and relatable. Customers respond to chatbots, thanks to AI development and machine learning in eCommerce.
There are many chatbots existed in Telegram messenger to stimulate customers reaction and engagement for events and posts. As well as Bank of America uses instant notifications to help customers make better financial decisions.
Virtual Shopping Assistant
Online shoppers can now enjoy the services of an intelligent virtual shopping assistant. These virtual shopping assistants can help a customer pick items based on that the customer’s preferences are. They can learn about the latest trends and combine them with the needs and tastes of the customer. They use that information to make smart suggestions to the customer.
Imagine having an assistant that accompanies you whenever you browse an online store. An AI shopping assistant who knows that you prefer plain white sneakers. Or, for example, that you’ve had your eye on a new coffee machine for a long time. Now imagine that assistant finding the best deals on those items for you.
There are vast amounts of user data that is now available. These are just collections of raw data that need to be processed into useful information. This would usually take a lot of computing resources and workforce to analyze all this data.
We want to mention excellent Netflix strategy with the usage of AI in preempting marketing. They use history of the viewing data, flow it through their AI programs to suggest similar movies or TV shows that their customers may enjoy.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, we can let a computer sort through everything. It will create useful information by itself. This still requires some initial programming. But this is more of a guideline-giving practice. Once these guidelines are set, the data can start being analyzed. It can be used to predict trends and determine buying patterns. It is an effective way of learning about customers and what they want. It is based on their past actions and not on traditional, outdated models.
Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in eCommerce
The benefits of AI commerce are so much greater than traditional eCommerce practices. It merges the efficiency of a computer with thought processes similar to that of a human. Intelligent systems in e-Commerce can generate more profit because many functions get improved. Let’s look at a few of them.
Artificial intelligence is based on massive data sets from various sources. This means direct customer involvement with the conclusions that are reached. Your strategies can be found on actual customer data, not assumed predictions that one cannot guarantee.
The customer can engage more actively with you on all your media platforms. Customers would rather give their business to a friendly chatbot, rather than a cold, lifeless order form. The conversation between customer and merchant is more amiable.
Sales Growth
It must be noted that artificial intelligence is not meant to replace a salesperson. Instead, it provides sales staff with the information they need to deliver a better sales pitch. A successful sales pitch means more sales growth. The sum of all your AI usage ultimately leads to increased sales.
Efficient Sales Process
Artificial intelligence can accept voice and natural-language input. This means that one could place an order by only having a normal conversation with an online machine. No need for individual commands or specific processes. Asking your phone to “find a cheap flight to New York” it will do exactly that. No need to be redirected to other sites or to be put on waiting for an actual salesperson.
AI can process an order based on a regular human conversation. Customers want that kind of efficiency. This is possible, thanks to artificial intelligence online shopping.
Targeting Potential Customers
Research has shown that one-third of all marketing leads do not get followed up. This means that you could be losing potential customers by not even talking to them. Perhaps, you simply don’t have the human resources to give all that personal attention to every single lead. That is where artificial intelligence can help. It could determine how long customers spend perusing certain products (i.e., dwell time spent on a web page).
Your AI-enabled system could flag the sales staff of a potential customer showing actual interest in a product. It could also send them special offers or perhaps advertise other options for that item.
