Magento 1.7 Community edition and 1.12 Enterprise edition updates rolled out on 24^th April. People around the world were eagerly waiting for it. Let’s just see if it is up to theirexpectations or not. We’ll review and go through the new and exciting features that Magento 1.7 community Edition is going to offer us.

Mobile HTML5

Now it is easier than ever to create stores those are effortlessly optimized for mobile devices, whether it’s your phone, your table or your pocket pc. The interface is simple and elegant, developed using HTML5. Has amazing support from latest mobile technologies like Android and iPhone. Works fine with Mobile browsers. Check out the features below:

• Audio and video support is customized for different devices.
• Now searching is even more user friendly.
• Design of product detail page is cleaner now.
• Image processing has become better. Multi-touch pinch and scaling enhanced.
• Swiping among products has become easier.
• Zoom capabilities
• Cross-sell and up-sell capabilities
• Add products in shopping cart just through drag and drop

Auto-generation of Coupon Codes

You can generate unique codes those you can provide to your buyers as discount coupons which they can use to buy products from your store. It’s a great way of promotion. What’s more, you can distribute this code even offline or in email. After providing coupons you can easily manage its use through admin area and generate reports for your store management.

Layered Navigation Pricing Enhancement

They’ve created a new kind of algorithm to make the price-layered navigation better than it was in previous versions of Magento. There is nothing more frustrating than searching for one thing and getting another in result. Making this unavoidable feature as useful to your customers as possible can increase your conversion rate high and help you sell more. This new algorithm will help you display similar products in same price range and will give better control over search results which in turn will result into a happy customer as they can find what they want faster.

Customer Group Pricing

You do not want to set same price for everyone sometimes. This Group pricing tool will help you set varying prices for different customer groups like wholesalers and retailers. You can decide base as well tier prices for each group you create.

REST APIs Support

Two major capabilities that can make your store go to heights are security and easy access of data. The new REST API which uses three –legged OAuth 1.0a protocol will make this possible for you. Now you will be able to access Magento’s services easily and in a secure way using this API. You can access customer, products and other sales related information using HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. Request and response can be both in XML or JSON which are very popular and accepted forms to access and transfer data across the network.

This initial version of the REST API supports the following functions:

• Create and manage simple products
• Retrieve orders and orders related information
• Create and manage all the information about customer
• Retrieve or update inventory of catalog

European Union VAT-ID Validation

Now this is quite an amazing feature. You don’t need to set tax on specific products or orders. This feature will handle your online tax calculation process very easily. The specific tax rules are applied according to customer groups, based on their address (either shipping or billing) and VAT IDs. International business to business transaction was never simpler.

EU Cookie Restriction

EU had recently set out a directive about Privacy and Electronic Communications. In response to that we have enabled this facility to better seek compliance from site visitors. When a visitor lands on a page where cookies are needed, a message will show on top of the storefront that will let them know about the cookie policy. After that they can either accept it or decline depending on their choice.

Backup and Rollback

You can use new modules and specific customizations without the fear of losing your previous saved version of your store. The new backup and rollback feature is like a friend in your need. Using this facility you can perform a variety of backups. These backups come with options to rollback to your older versions whenever you want. It is also very useful when you want to upgrade to a newer version of Magento. It is strongly recommended that you do not use this feature in your production environment.

Three types of backup are supported:

• System Backup
• Database Backup
• Database and Media Backup

CAPTCHA

We all know about CAPTCHA. It’s one of the sure fire ways to figure out fake and spam users from the real ones. Now this security check is added in Magento out of the box. You don’t need to add it later using your own code. The auto-generated test will ensure that only legitimate users enter your site. This feature can be enables in both admin and customer login screens.

Built as a conventional product cart system, Magento has grown to a complete solution for online commerce. Not only products but many services are also being sold online. Two types of merchants are finding online commerce a bit of troublesome for themselves.

1)      Merchants who sell products with lot of customization and manual updates on each version of products. They will need a lot of information from the buyer about their final product before they can quote the price. For example room furniture consultants.

2)      Merchants who sell services in which they will have to interact with buyer to know their requirements before they quote. For example Magento developers.

In both these cases common thing is potential buyer first needs to contact the store admin to negotiate the requirements and know the price. When price of a product or service is not fixed and fluctuates on various factors, best option is to let your buyers contact you to know price. Unfortunately as a conventional ecommerce system Magento doesn’t support this.

Indies has solved this issue by developing two modules.

Indies has developed a Magento Call For Price Module. You can use this call for price module on your Magento store. If admin sets “Call For Price” True for a product, the visitor will see “Call for Price” button instead of price and add to cart button on product page.

This can be set based on specific user groups as well, hence certain users will see price and others will see call for price.

Once the negotiation is over and a price is set for the product or service to be rendered, buyer can pay the amount from site only, using Magento Custom Price Module. Here price will not be available for the product but buyer will enter the price himself and will checkout.

Many Magento store owners are finding this package very helpful to their business because of few major reasons.

1. Potential buyers now contact them to know the price. So merchants have chances to explain their USP and price.
2. Merchants can contact the buyers later as well for any new solutions.
3. It is proven that personal interaction is far better than a web page and chances of converting a visitor to buyer is more in this.
4. Once buyer and seller is agreed on the price, payment can be done online only on same store. This creates authenticity.

The most influencing aspect of a business besides the quality of a product is the price. Profit or loss depends on it. If you keep the color of your product black or blue it doesn’t affect the selling much. But if the price is too high or too low then it’s going to create ripples. People tend to get emotional when it involves money. It is very important therefore to pay great attention when deciding your pricing strategy.  Here is a brief note on basic things you should know about price of a product and how to create your store policies for product prices to get maximum sales.

Determine the value of the product

What is the value of a product? You may say the cost of the product that was bear by the manufacturer. Actually the value of any product or service is solely decided by the price customers and prospects are willing to pay for it. How do you determine what exact amount anyone will be willing to pay for your products? There are many ways to set proper prices to any products. There are a few things you need to keep in mind when pricing your products or services.

The price should not be too high or too low. It should be exact. If it is too high people won’t buy. It is too low you won’t get profit. How to determine which is the exact price? It depends of many factors like, the reputation of your business, the reputation of your product or service, the price of your competitors. People always compare prices. So it depends on the ongoing price in the market. Price also depends on how much the targeted customers are willing to pay. How high price the market of your product can take.

Sometimes it may happen that you need to keep the price of you product either too high or too low. It happens in special circumstance only. For example if you have spent a fortune in innovating something than initially you can keep prices very high to bring in the money you spent. Also it is better to do it before the competition enters the market. You can keep the price very low when you want to attract more customers initially when you are starting a new business or when you want to clear the stock. In short the two extremities depend totally on your current business needs. But they are for special occasions only. For rest of the time you need to determine the proper price.

Pricing is subjective. You should always research your target market and set prices according to your targeted customers. Once you know what they are willing to pay it’s easy to decide the final price.

Attract the customers to buy it

Now you did all the homework and set a price on your product. All you need to do is let everyone know about your business. More importantly let them know that there is a better and more affordable (if that’s the case) product in the market. There are many crucial factors that play important role in attracting more customers to your market. To name a few,

• The price of your product in comparison to your competition.
• The perceived value of your product or service.
• Extra benefits you customers will get if they buy from you.
• Reliability and convenience.
• How fast they get it.

We just upgraded our Magento website from Magento 1.6.1 community edition to the latest version 1.6.2 and we found some issues but we also figured out how to solve them. We are going to take record of the every possible issues upgrading magento from version 1.6.1 to 1.6.2. We will update this post with new issues and solutions. If you got any error while upgrading from magento, let us know by commenting your issue. We will try to solve it as soon as possible. So bookmark this post for future reference.

Follow the steps for upgrading your Magento:

1) Backup database and source
2) Then upgrade Magento from Magento Connect to find most recent upgrade.
3) After successful upgrade, we found one error on indexing process
4) Error is cannot initialize indexing process.
5) After some tracing  found error in database error  description given below

We detected the following issues:

Issue 1:

SQLSTATE [23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1452 Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign key constraint fails (`catalog_category_product_index`, CONSTRAINT `FK_CATALOG_CATEGORY_PROD_IDX_CATEGORY_ENTITY FOREIGN KEY (` category_id `) REFERENCES` catalog_category_entity`(` `entity_id)

Solution:
It is because the category is not appropriate in the table “catalog_category_entity”

To solve the problem with fire SQL query in phpMyAdmin:

SELECT cp.category_id
FROM catalog_category_product cp
LEFT JOIN catalog_category_entity c ON cp.category_id = c.entity_id
WHERE ISNULL( c.entity_id );

After this you’ll get some IDs. Delete these IDs from the “catalog_category_product” table.

Issue 2:

Product Data Flat index unknown error process: a foreign key constraint fails (. Usr_xxxxx_1 “ `# sql-xxxxx`, CONSTRAINT `FK_CAT_PRD_FLAT_1_ENTT_ID_CAT_PRD_ENTT_ENTT_ID` FOREIGN KEY (`entity_id`) REFERENCES `catalog_product_entity` (`entity_id`) ON DELETE CA) ‘

Solution:
To solve the problem with fire SQL query in phpMyAdmin:

SELECT pf1.entity_id
FROM catalog_product_flat_1 pf1
LEFT JOIN catalog_product_entity p ON pf1.entity_id = p.entity_id
WHERE ISNULL( p.entity_id );

After firing this query it will return all id that are not matched and given error for constrains so delete it.

Fire this SQL query as well:

SELECT cp.product_id
FROM `catalog_category_product` cp
LEFT JOIN catalog_product_entity p ON cp.product_id = p.entity_id
WHERE ISNULL( p.entity_id );

Firing this query will return all ids which need to delete from “catalog_category_product” the table.

UPDATE (7th April 2012):

Here is a series of SQL queries which might help you to solve Indexing errors:

delete from `catalog_category_product` WHERE product_id not in(select entity_id from catalog_product_entity)
delete from `catalog_category_product` WHERE category_id not in(select entity_id from catalog_category_entity)
delete from ` catalog_product_website` WHERE product_id not in(select entity_id from catalog_product_entity)
delete from ` catalog_product_entity_media_gallery` WHERE entity_id not in(select entity_id from catalog_product_entity)
delete from ` catalog_product_index_eav_idx` WHERE entity_id not in(select entity_id from catalog_product_entity)
delete from ` catalog_product_index_eav` WHERE entity_id not in(select entity_id from catalog_product_entity)
delete from ` catalog_product_link` WHERE product_id not in(select entity_id from catalog_product_entity)
delete from ` catalog_product_relation` WHERE parent_id not in(select entity_id from catalog_product_entity)

We hope that this may help you with your problems you faced while upgrading Magento from 1.6.1 to 1.6.2 or tell us if you find another problems while upgrading. We will love to help you out.

Your comments will be appreciated.

One Year Completed for one of the most important update for Google Algorithm “Panda”. Google Panda was designed to penalized the low quality and copied articles and to make Google Search top positions free from this type of website with content farms. Panda 1.0 was affected from 24th February 2011 and Panda updated its versions regularly at the interval of few weeks and Panda 3.2 is the latest.

This Infographic explains the evolution of the Google Panda till this day and how to recover if you’re penalized by the Google Panda. It also shows when exactly the every Google Panda update released.

Indies’ all SEO clients’ websites have survived the Google Panda because we were already optimizing all our clients’ websites following the Google’s Organic SEO Rules. We didn’t only survive the Google Panda but the Panda also loved us. Our every website’s Traffic got increased when the Panda came. Stay tuned with this blog in which we are going to reveal our strategies. Every SEO techniques will give your blog or website boost to reach at the top with help of our very own Google Panda!

From centuries, good writers are being paid for their fresh content by publishers of books, newspapers or magazines. But now the digital era has changed that as well. Create your blog or website, read, research and write every day. And let Google adsense, yahoo advertisements and other affiliate services do the rest.
Yes these services place the advertisements onto your site or blog and you can get paid for every click on the advertisements done by your readers. Publishers around the globe have been earning few hundred to multiple thousands of dollars every month by writing and publishing advertisements. And many of them earned millions.

There are two ways to increase revenue from your content rich website or blog. Either you increase your visitors. And another is do something to increase the number of clicks done by your visitors. The first is done by strategy of search engine optimization while second can be achieved by following some simple rules. Here they are.

1) Make your advertisement block be blend in your website. When you are creating an ad block, adsense creation panel offers you to customize the ad block. Use it nicely. Choose the same background color your site has, with same text and link colors with identical fonts. If the site has a white background remove the border around the ad block should be null. This way your advertisement block will look like a part of your website and will increase chances of clicks.

2) People have very few seconds on any webpage, and we have a challenge to grab their attention on “Action oriented” part of our website. Whether it’s added to card button or an advertisement. Put it in a location where the visitor can see it immediately. On the top of the site is best.

3) Blend your advertisement with the content of the site. If there is long content on the page, put the advertisement between the content. Use text advertisements. Users will be in confusion about the advertisement and chances of the clicks get higher.

4) Google adsense offers good ad statistics. Use them to know the visitor behavior and optimize the site and advertisement to have maximum output.

5) Google adsense offers creating 200 channels. Use them. Create different channels for pages and evaluate the best performance channels.

6) Use multiple blocks of advertisements in various form. Use text advertisement, video and image advertisements in various size and shapes suitable to various parts of the site.

7) Write keyword focused content. This increases chances of getting more related ads from google which has more cost per click (CPC)
Getting more revenues from adsense is about smart ideas and patience. Follow the simple steps stated above and get good results. Happy advertising…