Why upgrade to Magento 1.9?

I was talking this week with a few prospects about why to upgrade to Enterprise 1.9 and I thought it would be worthwhile to cut through some of the marketing speak and give a few simple reasons.

1. It's faster: Magento has made significant performance enhancements in this release and since that is the single greatest complaint we hear about Magento, it's definitely worth doing. We have found that many companies have not taken advantage of all of the performance enhancements that they can do but in any case, 1.9 has features that will really increase page load times (with full page caching) and has other improvements that are under the covers but equally as important.

2. Search: A tighter integration with Solr and the ability to do search based navigation is really useful.

3. Marketing and Conversion: Better one to one marketing and communication, ability to have different prices for different groups and better utilization of private sales are all good reasons to upgrade.

4. PCI compliance: At some point all of our customers need to cross this bridge and the newest version with Payment Bridge gives you a path to achieve PCI compliance at not too high a cost. Basically for the cost of another server and some setup, you are PCI compliant through their Payment Bridge.

While it is impossible to give a price for conversion, if our customers haven't done anything crazy with the Magento core code, it generally takes between 20 and 60 hours to do the upgrade including testing and cutover. For those with lots of core customizations, we provide estimates but in most cases, it is definitely worth it to upgrade.

SEO for Ecommerce - Who can you trust?

If any company tried to follow all of the conflicting SEO practices that are advocated today, they would not only run out of time and money but they would end up creating things and taking them down every day. There are thousands of "experts" who will tell you what and how to do it and thousands of companies that will take your money.

Here are my top ecommerce specific online marketing rules that we make sure our client's follow and have achieved great results.

1. Plan a campaign and then measure it. Analytics are key to the success, especially because if you execute it well, you can actually measure the effectiveness of your online marketing $ down to the penny.

2. Focus on driving traffic first, conversions second. If no one ever sees your site, you will never sell anything and if you are even a mid-sized retailer, your corporate brand isn't going to drive that much traffic. Decide on your traffic driving strategy and spend on that.

3. Be really relevant. Make sure your pages, titles, urls and tags are designed to win the search phrases that are relevant to what people are actually searching for when they are using natural search to find the products you are selling.

4. Mine your network. Spend money on marketing through people who bought or like your product, or are connected to your buyers, before you go out and spend money on wholly new customers. You can do this through facebook and twitter but you can also do it through more traditional marketing channels like coupons and rewards programs for referrals through your current clients.

5. Focus on your high $, high margin products where you have the least competition. If your are just starting your online store, make sure that you are focusing on the products you can actually win and if you win them, will make you some money.

6. Backlink. Make sure to ask all of your suppliers and partners to link to your page and make sure your blogging and facebook campaigns link back to your site to build link juice.

7. Page speed. Make sure that at least your homepage runs fast. Check it with google webmaster tools against the industry average. Make sure you are in the top 50%.

8. Build key microsites. Make sure they are relevant to the product, category or sub category you are trying to win, make sure the content is relevant to the key phrases you want to focus on and then make sure it's easy for the consumer to buy from that site.

9. Blog, twitter... a lot and link it back to specific products, categories and landing pages.

10. Remember your purpose. It's not to provide information or to provide a social media experience to your users. It's to sell products at a reasonable profit so really take the time to set up each campaign well, tie it to good analytics and measure how well it works. I can't tell you how many (even large sites) spend money and have no idea what effect their marketing dollars have on their top and bottom lines.

Magento Imagine Conference

Please join us at the Magento Imagine conference, February 7-9 in Los Angeles. They have a great list of headline speakers along with several different tracks of sessions that focus on both technology and business.

We are going to be there learn, socialize with the Magento management team and talk to prospective customers about working with us to use Magento to realize their 2011 ecommerce goals.

For more information, please visit www.magentocommerce.com or email us directly at sales@ecommerceaccel.com and we can potentially provide some discounted tickets to potential customers.

How will the Oracle acquisition of ATG effect the market?

It's an interesting play for both Oracle and ATG. The market for ecommerce software is extremely fragmented. The small, on-demand players like Big Commerce, Volusion and Shopify are making headway at the lowest ends of the market for two reasons. First, they are cheap and easy to use and second, they can continue to move upstream in both price and functionality without cannibalizing their own business model. From the top end, companies like ATG, GSI and Demandware have always had a lot of trouble moving downstream because once there is a sunk cost in the development, they have a hard time maintaining their prices for their higher end clients while pretty much giving the same functionality away to lower end clients.

Where we have specialized is in this intersection between Enterprise customers and really flexible mash-ups of lower cost technologies that can provide powerful capabilities to Enterprise customers but have to be created and positioned in a way that they become digestible by a larger Enterprise customer.

We are seeing many of our potential large customers considering Magento for their front end web application but then having to do a lot of thinking about how to integrate that successfully with their back-end SAP systems or other legacy ERP or fulfillment systems. In addition, many have made investments in development platforms like Drupal over the last few years for their flexible, CMS based web presences but aren't quite sure how that will work with their ecommerce driven sites and things like Ubercart just don't pass the smell test.

The merger between Oracle and ATG will have the immediate effect of driving that solution even farther upstream. It will become more comprehensive but less nimble. Companies already on the Enterprise Oracle infrastructure or running on ATG will definitely benefit if the have those kind of integration issues but everyone else will probably hesitate. That solution becomes more complex, not less and at least in the short term, certainly less flexible.

We still believe that for most enterprises, the mash-up is the way to go and have developed programs and methodologies that make sure the best of breed point solutions can be integrated in a way that fits into a long-term, Enterprise IT plan while at the same time, if flexible and iterative in the deployment and feedback processes.

I don't think that the competition needs to really worry about a significantly wider adoption for the mid or even high mid market of the combined Oracle/ATG solution but larger enterprises who are already customers of either one and want to either expand into ecommerce or integrate supply chain into their ecommerce solution stand the chance of benefitting greatly.