Magento has emerged as a giant amongst all the eCommerce platforms available on the market today. To give you a small example, the user guide for the latest enterprise version is more than 540 pages long. Thus, it can be possible that you haven’t leveraged some of the options that the latest version of Magento has. Many eCommerce merchants think they need to approach a developer and pay them for achieving certain tasks, but it is possible for most merchants running Magento to achieve certain tasks themselves. Some of these tasks are mentioned as below:
By default, when Magento displays a product, it puts the ‘Add to Cart’ button beneath the topmost columns that traditionally contain the product information. In this traditional case, the add to cart is at the very bottom under layers of product information. You can tweak this situation and cause the ‘Call to Action’ as well as the ‘Add to Cart’ button displayed more prominently rather than appearing way below the product information that may cause customers to become weary of ever approaching the call to action button.
If this project is in the hands of a developer, he or she will readily dive into the layout code and templates. However, a catalog page appearance can be modified from the admin as well. For example, an attribute called the “Display Product Options In” can be tweaked and set to “Product Info Column” instead of the default value “Block After Info Column”. This should create the alternative layout that we have described in the previous paragraph.
Additionally, the system configuration area of the admin (system > configuration) contains several settings that you can tailor from the main menu. In this area, the catalog section contains a group of settings called Frontend. Here, you can modify the details of your category pages such as the number of products per page. With the help of the layered navigation settings, you can show the count of matching products next to values in your filterable attributes.
You can even go in for per-product or per-category customizations. Here, every product and category edit page in the admin has a design/custom design tab, where you can change the number of columns on the page, or even apply an entirely different theme to the remainder of the site. For the even more adventurous, they can utilize the same tab that contains a Custom Layout Update field. This field can be utilized to insert Magento’s XML syntax for more dramatic modifications.
Many Magento eCommerce developers and merchants believe that translation is unique to sites that support multiple languages. However, you can utilize the ‘Translate Inline’ feature of Magento, which can be found in the Developer section of System Configuration. If you enable this feature, you turn your site into a point-and-click interface, so that you can find the exact text you want to translate and simply type in its replacement. In all ways, you need to try out translating inline for yourself. However, if you find that the system behaves a bit fiddly, then again Magneto’s translation files are exceedingly straightforward to use. This process involves the use of CSV files and development knowledge is not required at all.
In many instances, a website’s emails do not get the necessary attention from the designers as it is in the case of the browser storefront. In many cases, the emails your customers receive are created as an afterthought, if they are really an afterthought at all. You should consider that emails are an extension to your website’s branding efforts. Hence, a sharp as well as a well thought out design is necessary, so that customers are capable of easily absorbing the relevant details at a glance.
Furthermore, you really need to have some knowledge of HTML so that you can format some brilliant looking emails. While the make-up of Magento’s email templates can be a bit technical, the setting up the platform is relatively simple for easy customization. You can navigate to System > Transactional emails from the main admin to add a new template, so that you can take up the customization from there.
Here you are presented a blank slate, where the interface requires that you choose a default system template on which you can base yours. You can choose from the list in the Template Drop Down and then Load Template. You will see various tokens along with subject and main content fields. As long as you leave these tokens in place, you will be able to modify the text as well as HTML as much as you would like to.
This feature is available only in the Enterprise feature. Sometimes, you need to monitor the activity of the people whom you have given responsibility to manage your website’s configuration as well as content. This is because problems are going to occur sometimes. This feature comes handy at best when you have a team of multiple people managing your store, hence the admin actions log can be a valuable tool. Sometimes, a particular log can include cryptic details, however, these details can be useful for a keen eye and can be useful to track down offending changes so that your system and store are in safe hands ultimately.
Some of these tools may be obvious to you, whereas obscure to others. Therefore, it’s truly great if you are using these tools. However, if you are not aware of them, then do spend some time poking around the Magento admin and discover some of the more useful as well as interesting settings that you haven’t discovered yet. And in case of any professional assistance requirements, do contact us.
You may also like to read about Nine Great Plug-Ins To Optimize Your Magento Website
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Shivi Rao is a content marketer with Krish. She has worked in various industries spanning technology, science, rural marketing, startups & unicorns, eCommerce business, and digital marketing, believing that content is the foundation to facilitate the visibility of any organization and ensuring her words do the same. In her free time, you can either find her lifting weights in the gym or feeding the strays.
7 October, 2022 The Holiday season is one of the busiest shopping seasons throughout the year. In 2021, the months of October and November witnessed a jump of 11% YoY and accounted for $211.41 billion in online retail. From Black Friday to Cyber Monday and Halloween to New Year, these two months are a gold mine for online retailers if all falls in place as per plans.
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