Breaking news! Our team is proud of the latest events in our company. We worked hard during this year, and finally, this day has come. Our developers passed Magento® certification and got the status of Magento Certified Developer Plus.
How We Became Certified Magento Developers
First of all, they have been mastering their skills and knowledge for several years. Then they prepared for Magento exam, which is pretty complicated and allows the specialists to know their real level of experience.
There were 120 minutes for the test, which included 87 items. The test was based on Magento Comunity Edition 1.9 and Magento Enterprise. You should pay 260$ to try out. Magento U provides the specialists with free study guides. Here you can learn more about Magento certification.
There are two exams in Magento certification – Magento Developer and Magento Developer Plus. Our guys got the last one. They have certificates of Magento Developer Plus.
What Does It Mean?
The level of Certified Magento Developers means that this specialist is:
skillful in all processes and techniques in Magento;
experienced in a catalog structure, indexes, promotions, checkout processes, payment and shipping methods, price generation, widgets, API, etc.
ready to make design decisions on code level;
skillful in Magento Enterprise Edition;
ready to go into details and create a unique solution on Magento.
Cyber Monday: Bonus for Winter Holidays
Hi, friends! The Cyber Monday has already passed, but it doesn’t mean that we should slack off.
Do you know that Cyber Monday is not just one day of the year in nowadays reality? It goes on for a month and allows the store owners to get more sales during the month before the Christmas holidays. So, today you have a bonus lap. We are going to boost up the sales even more and get the most benefits from our winter holiday campaign.
You will find the necessary assignments below. Here we go!
Task 1. Prepare Your Post-Cyber Monday Campaigns
Map your points of promotion for the winter holidays. As far as you know, we have several winter holidays, such as Thanksgiving day, Christmas, New Year’s Day, Hanukkah, Free Shopping Day. You can extend this list and come up with your own holidays. But your marketing campaigns should give emotions and attract people to take an action.
Don’t close up your shop in January. If you think that New Year’s Day is the last point of your plan, you are mistaking. What if I say that we can get more and more orders even until February? People like to buy products before and after holidays. Because they are still in the great celebration mood and are ready to use the discounts you give.
Task 2. Create Holiday-Themed Content
Of course, the most important part of the marketing campaign is its content. And this content should turn on people’s emotions. It should make them think about holidays, presents and conjure up the wish to buy something in your online store.Create holiday graphics. GIFs, videos, greeting cards, social media posts, and themed email campaigns will be suitable in this case. They should show and promote top products and related to them. Also, it will be a good idea, if you offer themed products, for example, the warm clothes for the winter, most wished presents for holidays, and so on.
Design the shopping guides for January. Create special offers and coupons to showcase the products that you need to sell. Make these offers interesting and unit the products into useful kits.
Task 3. Give the Reasons to Come Back
Here we need a brainstorm. Why do the customers should come back to our online store? They need some reasons and motivation. Let’s come up with some ideas:
Provide a discount or bonus that can be used only after January 1st.
Announce new products you are going to sell in 2017.
Give the free shipping for the purchase more than the specific sum of money in January.
You can use any great idea that comes to your mind, and try it out.
Analyze and save all your data. Now you have the results. Compare them with the last year data. You can evaluate what campaigns were the most successful, the income you’ve got and what you’ve done for this. All this data will be useful for you next year when it’s time to prepare a new Cyber Monday campaign.
Screenshot and save every piece of content you have. Why? – It’s evident. Next year you will need them all. Having prepared content will simplify the next year process in several times. So, don’t lose this data.
Cyber Monday Week 4: The Final Stretch
Congratulations to everybody! We have already learned how to outrun the opponents and now have a final point in our plan. This week we are going to finish Cyber Monday preparation. What do you think we should do at the end? Maybe, the best thing we can is to check everything, refresh our marketing campaigns and let them go! So, let’s see what task are waiting for us this week.
Task 1. Update Homepage and Category Page Signage
Add cool images and posters. Our brain processes image 60k times faster than text. So, make the conclusions, friends. You can create amazing holiday designs for your landing pages, but also, don’t forget about the newsletter. By the way, we have many beautiful email templates. You can check them here.
Built out Cyber Monday banners. Use such graphics, as popups, hero images, a countdown, GIFs, promo videos, and other visual things.
Use professional tools. How to create great graphic? Use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, ask for designer’s help or do it yourself using templates found online or Canva.
Task 2. Schedule and Check Everything
Check your grammar. It’s important to write correctly and check the content for grammatical mistakes. There are many online services that can help you to do this. For example, Grammarly helps to correct your English. Hemingway editor will check your texts for readability. WriteCheck will check your texts for grammatical mistakes and plagiarism.
But also we have a good rule: ask someone to look through your texts. It’s better when two or more people check the grammar.
Put all your promotions and content to one place. It’s necessary because this way you’ll keep everything within reach.
Check your automation. Ensure that you’ve correctly set up all your marketing campaigns, automation emails, segmentation, and templates are ready to go, you’ve optimized your landing pages for desktop and mobiles. If you have a store based on Magento®, you can use our Abandoned Cart extension for your follow-up campaigns.
Here is the good advice on email marketing: send test email campaigns to all emails clients. Make sure that your emails look good at any email client. Also, check your campaigns for the spam words. Try to avoid them, especially in an email subject.
Task 3. Prepare for Activation and Generate Anticipation on Sunday
Make sure that you are ready for activation on Cyber Monday. We recommend you to contact your web hosting provider and make sure that everything is okay. Also, keep the reliable team, which will be responsible for orders, responses for requests, providing technical and customers support.
Launch the day-before social posting. This way you’ll announce your Cyber Monday campaign and surround it with the anticipation.
Case Study EquityX: Website from Scratch
Breaking news! The WEB4PRO team completed the project. We developed the website from scratch for the financial company.
EquityX is a place where their customers can get the most qualitative help on finances. It is the world’s first and trusted marketplace for top-tier startup and expert service providers to collaborate, with equity used as currency. And our main task was to make everything on the website run like clockwork and provided the best user experience.It was a project based on WordPress with the use of Visual Composer.
WordPress is powerful and flexible enough for such kind of website and allowed us to realize all necessary functionalities.
A visual Composer is a good tool for building pages on WordPress. It helps to create the back-end base of the website even without advanced coding skills. So in some cases, it allows a client to save time and money, due to the less number of back-end works. Read more about pros and cons of Visual Composer.
We got a specific unique design from our client, and most of the work was carried out by our professional WordPress.
It took nearly 1 month to launch this project. So now we can proudly say: “Mission Completed!” The website was tested, and it’s doing great.
And we are happy to know that our client, David Paluy, is satisfied. It’s our main passion and goal.
“I asked Web4Pro dev team to help me with WordPress website for my startup EquityX. I got a very professional team who understood my needs, developed quality product and delivered it on time. I had a single contact Sergey that helped a lot and saved my time. He did a great job while raising questions and suggesting immediate solutions. I highly recommend working with Web4PRO! And I will continue my dev with this team for sure.”
– David Paluy, CTO EquityX
Thank you, David! We wish you a pinnacle of success and new great projects!
We are glad to take part in our clients’ way to success. If you are interested in getting a qualitative WordPress based website, you can trust us WordPress development. Just contact our team using “Ask Questions” form below.
Cyber Monday Week 3: Outrunning Opponents
Today we finally came to the two most important weeks of Cyber Monday preparation plan. We already warmed up, had a workout and created targeted content, and now it’s time to run out the opponents. Days 14 – 20 of November we are going to do everything to win our competitors and attract more people to our promotional campaign. Let’s get it started!
Task 1. Give a Preview of Your Promotion
Here we should do something unexpectable. For example, discount the things we have never discounted, or announce some products we have never shown before.
Use the email you collected and promote your campaign before the Cyber Monday. Do you remember what we were talking about? When the Cyber Monday comes, everybody begins the promotional campaign. So it’s hard to predict the right time for a newsletter. If your customers are ready for shopping, you have more chances to attract most of them on Cyber Monday.
Create teaser campaign that shows your products, which will be on sale, the discounts and bonuses you are going to give on Cyber Monday. And don’t forget about the social media. Pre-Cyber Monday promotional campaign on social networks is also a good idea.Run the flash sale before the Cyber Monday. Why do you need this? – First of all, you increase the chances to sell more products, and finally, you see and reward your most loyal customers. As a result, you’ll be a step ahead of your rivals.
The goal of this task is to increase the interest to your promotional campaign, online store, and your brand in general. You have to agree that everyone likes to get presents and other pleasant things. The customers also do. They like something special. So, why not to make them happy and grow their loyalty?
Task 2. Update Your Retargeting Campaign
Add holiday-themed creative. First of all, we recommend you to update your retargeting ads and make them holiday-themed. This way you increase your chances to get more orders and turn on the positive emotions of the customers.
Adjust your budget to accommodate the increase in website holiday traffic. Yes, the traffic of your website will be much higher on holidays. And your server should be ready for this. Also, don’t forget to count the budget for shipping, packing of products and the other cost. We did it a week ago. The average growth in traffic from October to December can be up to 32%.
Imagine that you have 3000 visitors a month (current traffic). Let’s count the possible increased traffic from November to December:
Possible Traffic = Current Traffic Current Traffic*32% Possible Traffic: 3000 3000*32% = 3960 visitors.
You can use this formula and count your possible holiday traffic.
Incorporate social to your retargeting campaign. Social media can become your main channel of promotion. People spend much free time there and like to shop online. On average, conversion rate can increase by 73% if you use social media like an additional channel of promotion.
Now we are working on the “white paper” on Cyber Monday and preparation for any holiday in the online stores. Subscribe to our newsletter, and we promise to send it to you when it is ready.
Task 3. Update Your Abandoned Cart Emails
Build your abandoned cart campaign. It’s very important. Do you know that reminding emails of this kind are helpful in returning the customers to the online store? They really work and grow your sales. To learn more about them, you can read our article on how to use automated emails. If you have Magento® based online store, our free Abandoned Cart extension can help you return more customers to your store.
Make your abandoned cart emails holiday-themed. This way you’ll bring the positive emotions to your customers and cheer up their mood. Also, you remind them about the necessity to place an order, because the holidays will come soon, and they should hurry up. Moreover, your offer is limited 🙂
Consider the limited time discounts and promo codes in your first Cyber Monday email. And make sure that all your coupons and unique promo codes are generated and work correctly.
Task 4. Shadow Your Opponents
This is the most interesting part of the Week-3 preparation. Now you should take on a role of Sherlock and spy in order to gather as much information about your competitors as possible. Learn more about how to explore the competitors and act like Sherlock.
These are the things you can do first of all:
Sign up to the opponents’ newsletter. And look what email marketing approaches they use and think about how the way you can do better.
Follow your competitors on Social Media. Look through their profiles, consider their targeted audience, and decide what you can do differently.
View your competitors’ product and landing pages, and website in general. Highlight the products that are on sale in their store, the prices they have. Then come up with your own bestsellers, discounts, and special offers.
Search your competitors in Google. See where they fall in search results, what keywords they use. Then try to overcome them. Google Keyword Planner can help you to come up with the best keywords for your campaign. Create your account there and start to optimize your website. You can also read more about this in our article on how to make keyword research.
After you do this, put all the gathered data to a sheet and create the full picture of your competitor’s portrait. Write down your ideas and use them on Cyber Monday campaign. We have already created this sheet for you, so you can copy it and use.
Click on the image below, and you’ll get the access to the sheet.
Now we have mostly everything to start our Cyber Monday campaign. It’s only one step to launching it and getting the victory. Collect all your data and plan to act on World Cyber Monday. Let’s meet in one week and complete our preparation.
Productive week to you!
P.S. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter and get the Cyber Monday “white paper” for free after its release.
Cyber Monday Week 2: Bulking Up on Content
We have already warmed up and continue to prepare for Cyber Monday. And our Week 2 will be dedicated to the creation of mega-popular targeted content.
Content and targeting go hand in hand. You can create the absolutely best message in the world, but if it’s delivered to the wrong recipients, it’ll be a real flop. The first thing we recommend to do is the segmentation of your customer database and creating the targeted content for each segment.
These are the things we are going to do this week.
Task 1. Create Segmented Holiday Email Campaigns
Segment your email database. You can make segments around demographics, purchase behavior, the number of orders, favorite products, and more other criteria for the most targeted messages.
Choose your segmentation tool and try to divide the customers into such groups as exhausted, involved, and exclusive. Then set up targeted campaigns.
Recall the last year Cyber Monday. Segment the customers who purchased from your online store last year Cyber Monday. Consider them as a loyal audience.
Create a campaign targeted to your most loyal customers and big spenders. Here you can use recency, frequency, and monetary segments. This data is often stored in your online shop database.
It’s pretty important to know what products each customer prefers. For example, if you know that your customer is a woman, and she often buys clothes in your store, it’s too little chance that she could decide to buy men’s shoes.
Task 2. Launch Your Collection of Emails
Prepare your sign-up form. Take the time to optimize your email-collecting strategy before the Cyber Monday. If it’s necessary, upgrade your sign-up form. Consider the plan on where you are going to collect emails.
Give an advantage. You can add something profitable for a customer to make him leave you the email. It could be a discount, some bonus or useful material, and other interesting things you can come up with. But this benefit should be honest and profitable.
Use these emails to premarket your Cyber Monday campaign. As far as we know, there is a large problem of Cyber Monday: you can’t predict the right time for your promotional newsletter because everybody starts to send such campaigns that day. So, it’s better to prepare your customers for shopping and give them a reason to visit your online store on Cyber Monday before it starts.
Now we are working on the “white paper” on Cyber Monday and preparation for any holiday in the online stores. Subscribe to our newsletter, and we promise to send it to you when it is ready.
Task 3. Add Shopping Opportunities on Social Media
Increase the frequency of your social media posting. Start your promotional campaign on social networks and announce your products and discounts more often. This way you attract the larger audience.
Build your social media content ahead of time. We should be ready for daily and weekly posting on social media. And it’s great to have a step-by-step plan. Do you remember? We did it last week and created a calendar with a plan. And we should have all the things done and prepared, and just post the content on the planned dates.
Canva is a good helper in creating graphical content for social networks. It offers a large number of opportunities for work with images and allows you to create the posts exactly according to the social network format.
Add custom landing pages to your social media profile. And start to promote them. A landing page is a good way to encourage sales. It gathers your customers in one place and helps them to shop online or get their benefits quickly and easy.
A holiday-themed custom design attracts the visitors and turns on their emotions. So we recommend you to pay special attention to the design and UX of your holiday landing pages.
We want to help you create your content plan. Click on the image below, and you’ll get the access to the file. You can copy it and use.
Make your website and content mobile-friendly. Nearly 80% of social media time is spent on mobile devices. If you know what I mean:) If your website works right on mobile devices, and social media campaigns are also comfortable there, you get more chances to get more orders.
Check your website for mobile-friendliness with Google SpeedInsights, and focus on such things as the color and size of fonts, the color of backgrounds, the size of call-to-action buttons and other important details of your web pages. Test your campaigns before launch.
Prepare for Cyber Monday Week 1: Warm-Up
We continue to prepare for Cyber Monday, and our first week starts with the warm-up. We have already know that Cyber Monday is a real competition, and we should be ready for this. If you missed our previous article, you can look at our plan for Cyber Monday.
Cyber Monday will be in 3 weeks. So we should go a bit quicker, and do all the following assignments for several days:
Task 1. Set Up Your Holiday Analytics
Set up your analytics right. In this case, Google Analytics will be a useful tool for you. We mean that you should set your goals in Google Analytics correctly, decide what parameters are the most important for you to track. They could be the number of orders, website visitors, the sources of traffic, demographic, and others. Here you can find the ultimate Google’s guide on how to set goals.
Take the previous year statistics. It is very important because you have some data for analysis from the last year and can make up your mind on what thing worked and what actions need improvement. Also, it’s necessary to have some starting point, in order to evaluate the future results and track the efficiency.Consider multi-channel tracking and analytics. As far as we know, we should use all the channels we can in order to broaden our audience. That’s why tracking traffic and conversion from social networks, email marketing campaigns, advertisements, and landing pages via Google Analytics is a great idea.
Task 2. Evaluate Your Inventory
Check your inventory stock. It is necessary in order to be sure you can accommodate to increase in sales. The inventory includes costs for shipping, packing of products, staff salary, website support, etc.
Prioritize the product promotion. We should decide where we’ll promote our products, and what channels and products should be at the top of our promotional campaign.
Now we are working on the “white paper” on Cyber Monday and preparation for any holiday in the online stores. Subscribe to our newsletter, and we promise to send it to you when it is ready.
Task 3. Prepare Your Website
Don’t hide the main categories. When we talk about holidays on the website, we should show the holiday categories first of all.
Optimize your website for mobile. Now 80% users come to the websites via mobile devices and want to shop online from any part of the world. Don’t lose such a large audience. If you want to know whether your website is mobile friendly, you can check it with Google test, using Google SpeedInsights. It will show the points you have for the mobile version. If the row of points is red, you need to improve something.
Map your promotional points. Create your plan of promotion: what campaigns, actions, and posts you will launch and what day. Then create a table and fill it with your plan. You can also use the calendar (for example, Google calendar or iCalendar), which is the most comfortable for you, and map there your points. This way you’ll forget nothing.
We prepared the sheet for you, where you can do all the action considered above. Click on the image below and get the access to it. You can copy this sheet and fill it with your values.
Maintain the database of coupon codes. We should be sure that all of them are in the right place. So try to predict any scenario and test each of them.
Prepare for Cyber Monday: The Ultimate Guide
November has already started its walk, and that means only in 1 month we’ll have Cyber Monday. It is a great opportunity for the business owners to promote their brand and increase their sales drastically.
What is Cyber Monday?
Cyber Monday comes after Black Friday as a great opportunity for the online stores. It’s a perfect day for growing your sales online because people still continue to buy products at the online shops via their office computers.
This guide is based on the case study and results of the experts who gave the report on a webinar organized by Magento®.
What We Plan to Do?
We are going to follow a 4-week plan of preparation for Cyber Monday on November 27th. You’ll get the cycle of articles, which will help you to prepare for any kind of holiday and event. Each of these articles will describe one step of our plan. Like before the sports competition, we’ll do several activities:
1. Warm-up. As a result of warm-up, you will be able to:
see the moments that need improvement;
count the supposed revenue from the successful campaign;
estimate the necessary resources and needed budget.
finally, prepare your online store for Cyber Monday;
plan all promotional campaigns for Cyber Monday;
test everything and be sure that your campaigns work right.
then we’ll meet Cyber Monday and our victory on November 27th.
A bonus for winter holidays: you’ll learn how to get all benefits before and after the winter holidays in December and January and summarize the results.
Why is Cyber Monday So Important?
As the statistic says, if the campaign is successful, we can get the following results between November 1st and December 31st:
up to 6% of holiday revenue in December;
up to 70% increase in sales from November 20th to November 27th.
And you should also know that 40% of shoppers start their holiday shopping by Halloween. Following the statistics, we can create the calculation formula of supposed revenue.
Let’s imagine that:
we have 5000 visitors on your website a week;
our conversion rate is 5%;
our average check is 100$ a week.
Let’s calculate our supposed revenue (SRev) from the week before Cyber Monday.
SRev = average weekly revenue 70% growth in week before Cyber Monday revenue
Average weekly revenue: 5000 * 5% *100$ = 25000$ 70% growth in week before Cyber Monday revenue: 25000$ * 70% = 17500$ SRev: 25000$ 17500$ = 42500$
So, you can put your values to this formula and calculate your supposed revenue. If you prepare for the Cyber Monday correctly, you’ll get the high revenue.
And we’ll help you to be ready.
By the way, now we are working on the “white paper” on Cyber Monday and preparation for any holiday in the online stores. Subscribe to our newsletter, and we promise to send it to you when it is ready.
The Problems of Cyber Monday
Firstly, we should focus on the things that work and things that don’t work. The main task is to be aware of the common problems and find the solution for them.
Here are the main problems of Cyber Monday:
Slow and crashing websites. When the number of your online store visitors increases in many times, the servers could be overloaded.
That’s why we should check the peak website load and page loading speed. In general, good speed is 1-2 seconds per page, not more. And page loading speed affects the conversion. So, pay a special attention to these moments and improve them if you need. The following tools can help you to test your website and know the page loading speed: Pingdom, Website Grader, Google PageSpeed insights.
Not having channel-by-channel and overall measuring marketing plan. If we want to get results and take control of everything, the goals should be measurable and result fixed. We should create a step-by-step plan for our going to the victory.
Decide what channels you will use for promotion (social networks, email marketing, advertising, landing pages) and set up the goals in Google Analytics.
Not planned budget. If we are going to create a marketing campaign, we should know how many resources we need and the main steps.
Estimate the necessary number of resources you can spend on each channel.
Unprofitable discounts. It really happens. When everybody offers discounts, they lose their value.
So we need to come up with something new in order to stand out from the crowd.
Timing. Again, when everybody starts to send promotional email newsletters on Monday, you can’t predict the best time for the successful email campaign.
Launch your marketing campaigns a week before Cyber Monday and offer profitable discounts and coupons, which people we’ll be able to use on Cyber Monday shopping. Start to prepare your customers.
So, we offer you the following. First of all, consider these problems and try to find the solutions for them. Create a sheet and fill it with ideas.
Click on the image below, and you’ll get the access to the sheet we prepared for you. You can copy it and fill with your data. Stay with us, and the next time we’ll do the warm-up. Hurry up – it’s 3 weeks between Now and Cyber Monday. The time is on.
Ready, steady, go!
P.S. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter and get the Cyber Monday “white paper” for free after its release.
Case study: Migrating to Magento 2 for E-Store
Everybody knows that Magento® released a new version, which has already become the wished platform for the website owners who like to follow trends and keep pace with time.
WEB4PRO team completed the project based on Magento 2. So we did something we can be proud of.
We had a task to perform migration to Magento 2 for the jewelry online store based on Magento. The most works were done on the back-end. And it took us nearly a month to complete the task.
Migration to Magento 2: How It Was
First of all, we migrated all online store data to Magento 2. Also, there were several custom modules that needed to be moved to Magento 2. So we converted them, and it allowed the store owner to get all his custom solution safely.
The next thing we did was the extending of Ajax adding to cart. The solution was in creating the block which shows the product added to the cart after the user adds it.
Also, we customize the search on the store and adapted the layout to the design.
State API and Configuration API in Drupal 8
Very often we need to write some data into the variable, which we can replace at any moment of use. There are two such functions in Drupal 7: variable_get() and variable_set(). In Drupal 8 we have State API and Configuration API for these purposes. In this article, you’ll familiarize with their use and also tell the difference between them.
State API
State API should be used bypassing configuration only when your goals of use meet the following requirements:
This API will be used for storage of some system information;
You are not going to transfer the setup data from server to server because the data won’t be saved in case of exporting configuration;
These data won’t be edited by the user through the interface.
A good example of State API use is storing the timestamp of the last cron operation run.
State API: Writing Values
For entry, we should use a pair: a key and a value.
Drupal::state()->set('key','value');
For multiple entries we use the following code:
// $values - array with the couple of key and value. $values = ['key1'=>'value1','key2'=>'value2'];Drupal::state()->setMultiple($values);
State API: Getting Data
Getting one value with a key.
$val =Drupal::state()->get('key');
Getting several values:
$keys = ['key','key2'];$pairs =Drupal::state()->getMultiple($keys).// $values - array with the couple of key and value. $values = ['key1'=>'value1','key2'=>'value2'];Drupal::state()->setMultiple($values);
State API: Deleting Data
Deletig is accessible only with one value:
Drupal::state()->delete('key');
When you use Configuration API, setup data will be saved. If you export the website configuration, you’ll find name.settings.yml file with the following content key value.
Configuration API
Configuration API: Creating the Configuration Object
Now if you export the website configuration, you’ll find name.settings.yml file with the following content key value.
Hope that this quick tip was useful for you! if you don’t want to spend your time on all these works, just let us know and we’ll do all necessary works on Drupal development for you. Leave your contacts in “Ask Questions” form below, and we’ll get acquainted for an interesting discussion. Wish you good luck and friendship with Drupal.
