Useful Magento tips everyone should know
Magento is widely known as one of the leading eCommerce systems available. The feature-rich platforms allows business owners to easily grow & manage their online businesses. With so many options built within Magento, here are a few tips to help you discover the power of Magento that can prove to be useful and time-savers.
How to Change Your Magento Admin Session to Lifetime
Have you ever found yourself editing a product's description for a long period of time and find out that you've been timed out by the server after you click save? This happens because your Admin Session log-in time is set to a low interval. Here is an easy way to fix this annoyance.
Start Here: System > Config > Admin > Security > Session Lifetime.
Once there, set the value above 3600 seconds in order to ensure you don't get logged-out of the Admin ever sixty minutes.
Magento Static Blocks
Static Blocks are a good source for manipulating different types of data blocks and simplifying content updates. If you have a lot of content in the CMS/Static Blocks, you may nest several static blocks into a single block with the use of widgets which can be used on a Category or Product page.
Magento Ratings
An administrator can add more of a rating criteria for the products advertised on yor site. This allows customers to review your products based upon, speed of service, customer services, quality, etc.
Go to: Catalog > Reviews and Ratings > Manage Rating > and enable the ratings option.
Magento Tier Pricing
Tier Pricing allows you to price each product individually and assign set rates/costs for those who oder in bulk-rate. This useful promotional tool allows you to easily offer incentives to those who purchase in high volume using Tier Pricing in Magento.
Example: Purchase one product for $10.00. Buy five to ten at $8 each. Buy 11 or more for $6 per unit.
Setup Tier Pricing: Magento Manager > Catalog > Manage Products
Then create a new product for purchase or select an existing product and add it to Tier Pricing (Click price > Add Tier > Enter, QTY to start Tier Pricing. Next, enter the new price per unit that will take effect once the specified quantity is selected to qualify for Tier Pricing benefits.
Customer Group Pricing
Customer Group Pricing allows you to select different pricing for different groups of customers. For example, you can set up special rates for retail customers, VIP, Wholesale, and your staff. Thankfully, there are no template modifications, layout changes, or other revisions necessary that may run the risk of breaking your Magento design. Customers in different groups simply see their personal group pricing. You can also enable the setting to hide product prices for visitors who aren't logged in, while simultaneously urging customers to log-in in order to view your prices.
Product Alerts Notification
The Product Alerts section helps customers become aware about products. For instance, visitors can sign up to get email notifications when an out of stock product is re-stocked, or when a product goes on sale.
To set this up, go to the Product Alerts section to configure the following
"Allow Alert When Product Price Changes" when set to "Yes" it displays a link on all product pages to allow customers to sign up for price change alerts.
"Allow Alert When Product Comes Back in Stock" when set to "Yes" enables customers to sign up for email alerts which notifys them when a product is re-stocked.
