We love the internet and quite often have something interesting to say about it. Our blog is somewhere for us to share and discuss our thoughts and all things internet. Feel free to share your thoughts with us by commenting (positive or negative) on any of the posts below.
For the last few days we have been banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out why when we tried to add configurable products from a Magento enterprise 1.11 store to Google Shopping using Magento’s core Google Shopping extension, they were all showing as out of stock in Google. After a great deal of digging and testing we finally got to the bottom of it and it appears to a bug in the extension.
The file: app/code/core/Mage/GoogleShopping/Model/Attribute/Availability.php uses the ‘isSalable’ function to determine whether a product is in or out of stock. If a value of 1 returned it sets the availability to ‘in stock’ and if it is null, it sets it as ‘out of stock’. This function works perfectly well normally but for some reason, when run within this extension, it always returns a null value for configurable products. We didn’t delve into why that is. Therefore, to get round this we decided to use a different function.
This now checks to see if the item is in stock and does return a 1 if the item is in stock. This does not check whether the item is enabled, just whether it is in stock but this is good enough for us.
Hopefully if you have been banging your head against a wall as well, this will help.
Getting a number 1 organic ranking on a generic phrase or word such as ’shoes’ is gold-dust to an e-commerce site but that is what has been achieved with office.co.uk. Through a lot of SEO and technical effort office.co.uk is now ranked number 1 on Google for a number of generic phrases such as ’shoes’, ‘high heels’ and ‘ankle boots’. The site also achieves top 3 results with other phrases such as ‘womens shoes’ and ‘mens shoes’.
This result is testament to not only the SEO efforts that have been put in place but also the speed and accessibility of the site. The traffic that this result generates along with an impressive conversion rate translates into very significant revenues for Office.
If you want to find out more about, just get in touch.
Posted on: November 16th, 2011 by Branwell Moffat Tags: Ecommerce, Google, SEO Posted in WE SAY |
For the past few months we have been working in partnership with 2 entrepreneurs to develop KnowHowMart - the online marketplace for expert knowledge. KnowHowMart allows any of us with expertise in the job we do to sell our advice (over the phone) to those seeking advice. It is quick and easy to sign up as an expert or to add a specific requirement. KnowHowMart then cleverly matches those seeking advice to those that can offer it. Why not give it a go yourself.
Posted on: November 11th, 2011 by Branwell Moffat Posted in LAUNCHES |
Our latest Magento Enterprise site has gone live! Blueinc are a major high street retailer offering good value urban streetwear to Men and Women. As a big retailer (over 100 stores nationwide) they wanted a company that could take their web business to the next level and chose Foresite. The site is built using Magento Enterprise and is integrated with Fact Finder, a third-party search merchandising service that allows Blueinc to merchandise their stock effectively. We are pretty pleased with the results. Blueinc have full content management control over all content and banners which gives them a good level of independance from us.
Today saw the launch of the new Office shoes web site. The new site introduces a host of new features and enhancements as well as a fresh new design. By moving to a design that is 1024 pixels wide, more products can be shown on a single page which gives Office more opportunities to merchandise each page.
As well as adding new features such as a new dynamic mini-basket, jumbo drop-down navigation and roll-over product zoom, the entire catalogue browsing experience has been over-hauled. The entire catalogue now uses Adobe Omniture Search Merchandising to allow Office to gain full and intricate control over the merchandising of every area of the product catalogue. Each page also contains a dynamic faceted navigation to allow users to easily filter the products.
We are very pleased with the results of this new site and feel that the new features and design will greatly improve the user experience.
This is the first of our weekly Magento how to articles. Each week we will post an article explaining how to fix a common problem within Magento. This week’s article shows you how to fix common complication errors.
After installing a new module in Magento and logging into the admin section you are faced with the following error “Fatal error: Class ‘Namespace_Module_Helper_Data’ not found in /app/Mage.php on line 520” (image below) (Namespace is the namespace of your module and Module is the module name.).
You might have tried to delete the cache in the ‘/var/cache’ folder, but are still getting the error message. The reason for this might be that your Magento version has been compiled from the admin section. To solve the issue open the ‘/includes/config.php’ in your Magento installation and look for the following line:
If you find the line, comment it out by putting a ‘#’ in front of it, save and go back to the admin section. If everything has gone as it should, you should be able to see your new module in the back-end. Now, the compilation is disabled in your back-end. To enable it again, go to System->Tools->Compilation and ‘Run the Compilation Process’ (Fig. 1.2).
Go back to the ‘/includes/config.php’ and uncomment the line we previously commented, the compilation should be enabled again.
Today it was announced that eBay has agreed to buy Magento, the leading e-commerce platform. eBay was the first outside investor in Magento and therefore has been a fairly long-term partner. However, this move seems to be the beginning of a new long-term strategy for eBay. As part of the aquisition announcement, they have also announced that they plan to build a new cloud-based e-commerce platform called X.Commerce which merges technologies from Magento, eBay and Paypal.
Details are rather patchy at the moment, but this seems like it could be an exciting move. In a few short years Magento have acheived something that no other e-commerce platform has and that is to create a world-wide community of enthusiastic and dedicated developers who share and collaborate and have built thousands of 3rd party extensions which are available within the Magento Connect marketplace. It seems that ebay wants to build upon this with X.Commerce.
I’m sure over the coming weeks more information will become available but I hope that Magento continues to develop and enhance their existing platform as they have promised.
Today saw the release of ‘Newsletter Groups’, Foresite’s first publicly available Magento extension on the Magento Connect website. In the next 6 months, we plan to develop a number of high-quality Magento extensions and release them to the community. many of them will be free but some will be paid for.
The Newsletter Groups extension allows merchants to add functionality that enables users to subscribe to multiple newsletter groups and even segment within one group.
Today saw the lauch of a website selling a revolutionary anti-snoring product – Asonor! The product has been a huge hit in Denmark and has been brought to the UK by European Medical Instruments Ltd. The website was built by Foresite using the Magento e-commerce platform. Although the product can only currently be purchased by UK customers, a French version of the site will be launching soon.
The site integrates with a number of 3rd party applications and services to provide post-code address lookup, fulfillmet, credit card transactions, CRM and accounting.
The site is hosted in a Rackspace cloud server environment which has been fully optimised for Magento. This allows the site to run at an optimal performance level as well as providing a scaleable hosting environment.
February saw the launch of www.artisanduchocolat.com, our latest Magento site. Artisan Du Chocolat sell high-end luxury chocolates and have a number of stores within the UK.
The site features an innovative ‘pick and mix’ tool that allows users to drag and drop their chosen choclates from their famous couture collection into a box of 20.
This initial launch will be closely follwed by a fully localised Japanese version of the site.
February saw the launch of 
