We acknowledge that this gonna be a perfect occasion for Magento merchants to boost their commercial deals and brand visibility with extra traffics. More than ever, it is compulsory that their ecommerce website be stable, eye-catching and user-friendly. Therefore, for the whole upcoming Holy Week; we offer incredible incentives to all our Magento services, which includes free ones and significant discounts. Specifically listed below:

• Promotion Period:

- From March Sunday 25th to Easter Day April 1st

• Promotion Details:

-Free Site Checking & Auditing  

-Discount 15% for Site Development Services

-Discount 20% when Migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2

This incredible promotion is applied to all customer contacting BSSGeek within the stated period to choose each or every of our services. This massive deal will only last for 1 week, do not miss out this Easter egg-cellence!

BSSGeek is a Magento Solution Partner that provide all services to help build, maintain and optimize your eCommerce store. If you need any help with Magento services or want to build a Magento e-store from scratch, feel free to contact us. 

1. Administrative Admin Panel Interface

With all necessary data to control actions on live site re-divided into proper sections of clear objectives such as Sales, Product, Marketing...where you can find information easily.

The admin account display contains research, notification and settings buttons at the right corner for merchants to conveniently update all activities, new orders coming or completed actions. They can also customize account’s information and choose to view changes from store view right after editing.

2. Dashboard View

On the Dashboard page, business owners can have an overview of current business results through general data including Lifetime Sales, Average Order, Quantity, and Revenue, as well as some highlights like Best Sellers, New Customers.

3. Sales Information Section

This section in Magento 2 is not so much different to that in Magento 1.x with same sub-categories: Sales; Invoice; Shipments and Billing Agreements.

4. Product Information Section

In Magento 2, merchants can view product grid at their discretion simply by add or remove any information columns they want from the available list in settings, without having technical developers help with it.

Furthermore, the entire “Add New Product” process display is rearranged with the main information and additional sections below that allow you to upload new products faster and easier. On Magento 2, you can also link videos to your products.

5. Customer Information Section

Similar to the customizable Products Grid, you can also freely add or remove columns in customer information section. Thus, viewing different fields of customers’ data will just like a piece of cake. The feature is extremely helpful for shipping, contacting or even market strategic analysis

6. Marketing Expanded Functions

Understanding the importance of Marketing to ecommerce, Magento 2 aggregates all functions from Promotions, Communications, SEO, and User Content into 1 main category, optimizing these tools’ application.

7. New Content Management

This new interface allows more actions to build a nice looking theme and attractive content for an online store. Responsiveness and compatibility between elements could surely be self-setup well with this section.  

8. Synthetic Stores Section

Within the Stores section, merchants can set common policies related to pricing and currency for all products at one time.

9. Settings Section

In this last but most powerful section, you can choose to edit the permission of the admin link, using technical tools and integrate new extension.

You will also find here the useful tool is Data Migration - which helps business to transfer data from Magento 1 to Magento 2 quickly with no data loss. Read more about detailed instruction for using Data Migration here.

Why not migrate to Magento 2, when you can manage your business more easily and efficiently like this?

1. Promotion & Discount

Discounts and promotions are the most effective way to attract visitors to your site as well as increase the total invoice value to your store. Price is a key element in marketing that influences customers’ purchasing decision; therefore, strategy to offer an incentive price could be a wise movement that companies should consider; of course with pre-analysis to ensure profitability. There are several types of discounts that you may choose:

• Percentage Discount

• Quantity discounts

• Free Shipping

These forms of discount can be configured to be active directly on the product information page, or come with terms that beneficial to merchants such as “when signing up email”, “when referring to others to buy product”, or “with social interaction”. 

2. Visual Design

To impress customers with the holiday sales event, it is essential to have a relevant and nice visual with images and banners (of women, flowers, gifts etc). This design plan should focus on targeted audience. For example, on International Women's Day, potential clients would be men, fathers, husbands, children, and boyfriends who are willing to pay for a gift to their loved women. The call-to-action button with an eye-catching design, location, highlights the details of the privileges to gain the quickest attention from the customer.

3. Related Product Suggestions 

The function of upsell, cross-sell or suggest related products helps Magento store owners to trigger customer unintended needs (eg: a person just want to buy a shirt may want to look through the shoes mixed in cross-sell product images), increasing interaction on site, and may turn into real sales conversion. Understanding the tips when setting up upsell, cross-sell and related products will help you boost sales successfully.

4. Special Promotional Incentives: Added Services, Gifts,...

For online purchases as gifts, the most concern is to not be able to add personal messages. If merchants offer customers extra small incentives such as gift wrapping or greeting cards; it will definitely be a plus for creating competitive advantages when it comes to attracting customers looking to buy a gift for their beloveds. In addition, a free gift attached to the purchase (card, handkerchief, lotion etc) can be a great way to provide added value to customers, especially females. If used strategically, this promotion method can even help to clear out inventory.

5. Create Gift Cards

Gift Cards have been always a popular gift on many occasions since it is often hard for senders to choose exactly what the recipient like. Also, it is especially beneficial to business firms to encourage customers to return for later purchase with gift card money. Different types of gift cards with different denominations, customized design and wishes inserted like “Happy Women Day” will be a perfect gift choice for this year's International Women Day.

To help merchants create gift card as a kind of products, BSS also has Magento 2 Gift Card extension, which allows you to customize gift cards with flexible codes and upload to sell it online. See it now!

6. Marketing on Multi-Channels

If you want to boost sales and visitors from any channel, do promotion strategy on a single one. But if you want to make promotions on a given occasion, do promote on all channels with a specific campaign. Those various channels can be website, Fanpage, email or message. You can apply percentage discount on the website, “Buy-1-get-1” for Fanpage orders and send bonus code via Email Marketing.

7. Clarified Stocking Information

The last notice for merchants is also the most frequent problem with ecommerce during peak seasons: Stocking Information.  They should be aware to always update the full information of products in stock, inventory checking, as well as set up 24/24 support to commerce on peak occasions. As the transaction traffic is much more than usual, answer all inquiries. This would help to maintain and even improve customers’ UX with your site. In order for that, enforcing human resources, as well as using modern controlling technology like ERP would be absolutely vital.

There are several tips you can perform right on your e-store to improve customers engagement and ultimately rocket sale results. Especially on special occasions like this approaching International Women's Day, when men are more generous with their purse, do not miss this opportunity!

Hope that you find this information useful! If you need any help with Magento services or want to build a Magento e-store from scratch, feel free to contact us.

On 20th February 2018, the plan of Google to eliminate the differences between Android Pay and Google Wallet has come into practice, with the unification of the 2 services under the same platform with the new brand name: Google Pay. 

The new app will still provide same functions. Basically, you can conduct any online transactions made with your Google account through Google Pay like Youtube, Chrome, Instacart. The new home tab of Google Pay will direct every transaction into 1 account. Meanwhile, the card tab is like a catalog that provides payment cards, discount offers, loyalty rewards and gift cards.
Google Wallet's main function of sending and requesting money, may soon be available to use in the next few months. Google Pay is actually an update from Android Pay, so customers that have used the service before will not need to worry, as all their financial information will be transferred automatedly.

Therefore, if an online app or website wants to set up Google Pay directly, developers need to integrate Google API that supported by Google. The easiest way to connect Google API is through 3rd payment gateways that already support it such as Adyen; EBANX. Braintree, Paysafe, Stripe, Vantiv, and WorldPay

Alert on The Rapid Growth of eWallet in eCommerce!

The creation of Google Pay shows Google’s actions to seriously expand their ecosystem in e-commerce, adopting Apple and Amazon's movements. It also gives us a clearer view of how e-wallet is developing increasingly faster and bigger than ever. Since it first appeared in the market, e-wallet has proven its technological superiority and advancement.

An e-wallet stores a customer’s personal data and funds for later use to purchase products online. To get this free service, customers just need to submit information once, with no requires of complicated financial content forms. Additionally, e-wallet combination with mobile-wallet has simplified the payment process more, which customers can use money directly on their phone.

Early market entries participants of ewallet are giant retailers Alipay (Alibaba) and PayPal (eBay). Later, banks and financial institutions with Visa Checkout and MasterPass joined the market; then multinational technology corporations with Apple Pay, Amazon Payments, Samsung Pay, and now is Google Pay. Despite short experiences in payments fields, those corporations have a significant advantage of huge customer base from their electronic ecosystems. As they integrate their technology into daily payments, the opportunities to optimize revenue will be more. Especially when Google Pay comes from Google ecosystem with 1 billion users, and those from 2 billion monthly-active Android devices.

The release of Google Pay in early 2018 has strongly confirmed the increasing popularity of e-wallet, especially in the field of e-commerce. With its convenience, this method has simplified the transaction procedures and brought about significant improvements in sales for e-commerce websites. If you own an e-commerce website based on Magento platform, the integration of payment gateways that support Google Pay and other types of e-wallet is a wise strategy right now; especially when Magento, as an open source, allows ecommerce merchants to freely customize features and integrate necessary extensions. You can get direct support to integrate Google Pay to Magento or any payment gateways that support this method here.

Hope that you find this information useful! If you need any help with Magento services or want to build a Magento e-store from scratch, feel free to contact us.

What you should do firstly is to check again your Magento backend to see if you are on the right URL links, then check if you have entered username and password correctly. Still not reach the Magento admin site but redirected to the same page display while frontend pages, git and database all seem to run well? Then you might take a look at some brief explanation for this inconvenient issue and some instruction to deal with this issue.

There are 2 main possible reasons for this problem: 

1. Web browser’s cache has not been removed:

Instead of showing you the finest version of the backend, the browser may load the stored version of the link which might have troubles previously. Similarly, it might appear on the screen that: "Invalid Form Key. Please refresh the page."

→ How to solve: You need to delete cache from your magento_root/var/cache and remove cookies from your browser by using a private browser. Also, you can press responsive key combination to force reload on your operating system, which includes:

• Windows: Ctrl + F5
• Mac/IOS: Command + R
• Linux: Ctrl + F5

If it is still not working, it may be because the cache not had been set up properly in web/cookie/cookie_domain and web/cookie/cookie_path values in core_config_data table. Then for this, you could use: rm -rf var/cache/ to remove cache. However, for Magento 2, you should use php bin/magento cache:flush to avoid delete all the folder /var.  Here are examples for both versions:

• Magento 1.x

• Magento 2.x:

2. The host that you are accessing through your computer, called localhost, has created the wrong cookies: 

Magento checks if the hostname is a real domain name, and if it isn’t, it automatedly fails to create the right cookies. That means when Magento calls session_start() - the session identifier cookie never gets created. As a result, information cannot be passed from page to page.

The login procedure is actually successful but the next request doesn't know about it, hence user is redirected back to the login screen.

→ How to solve:

• Firstly, you have to edit your hosts file for this: Change the IP-address to http://127.0.0.1/ to access Magento.

• If the solution above doesn’t work, follow the steps below to disable the wrong cookies:

Step 1: With those who are using Magento 1x, go to app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Session/Abstract/Varien.php file in your Magento directory.

Step 2: Find the code:

session_set_cookie_params

$cookieParams = array(

        'lifetime' => $cookie->getLifetime(),

        'path' => $cookie->getPath(),

        'domain'   => $cookie->getConfigDomain(),

        'secure'   => $cookie->isSecure(),

        'httponly' => $cookie->getHttponly()

    );

and replace this by:

session_set_cookie_params

$cookieParams = array(

        'lifetime' => $cookie->getLifetime(),

        'path' => $cookie->getPath(),

        // 'domain'   => $cookie->getConfigDomain(),

        // 'secure'   => $cookie->isSecure(),

        // 'httponly' => $cookie->getHttponly()

    );

Step 3: Save the file. Now you will also have to clear the cookies by using a private browser or reload key combination to let the browser update the edited version. Then try loginning to your admin again.

One last reminder is that you should not bookmark the admin URLs with wrong form keys or leave them open in a tab. It can bring the issue back. Always remember to bookmark the clean Admin panel URL for later convenience. Although it seems to be a very annoying problem when you are unable to login your Magento Admin link at backend, it could be tackled in few minutes just like a piece of cake!

Otherwise, you can get direct support to fix the problem here.

Hope that you find this information useful! If you need any help with Magento services or want to build a Magento e-store from scratch, feel free to contact us.