I have recently started building an E-commerce website the Sports Store i work for, using Magento Community. The website is due to go live in a couple of weeks. I had a few queries regarding it: -As the site has a massive amount of products (5000 products), the way i have been entering product data is creating a CSV spreadsheet and importing them al at once. Obviously this is very time consuming, so i just wanted to know if there is any other way to enter products, or any shortcuts without cutting into quality of the content? - Related query is- is it wise to start off with so many products live? Would a better strategy to be to start off with the minimum and grow gradually- i feel that offering so many products straight away can be a bit overwhelming to consumers - Do you have any general comments or tips about using the Magento platform? Prior to this we were using a bespoke platform that was awful in practice, so I am confident that Magento will be better- but also like to know the limitations and strengths prior to live date. I look forward to hearing the feedback on Magento- whether it is positive or negative. MY own feeling is that it is a good platform- i possibly would have went for the Enterprise option, but due to budget constraints, Community was the only option (We tried Magento Go as a starting point and it was painfully slow- both in the back end and for consumers).
Magento is the best choice for your shop. For product import you may choose some good extensions available Couple of suggestions: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/fast-products-import.html http://blog.maximusbusiness.com/2012/11/magento-bulk-product-importing-tips/ Hope it helps.
A few thoughts, you may want to look at http://m2epro.com/ to branch out. One step checkout mods are huge and you will find this works a bit better than the native import http://sourceforge.net/projects/magmi/ make sure to track down the image import mod. Once you have that set up you can wing things a bit and also update the entire shop on the fly but only adding new or updating things etc. You have made the right choice here, enterprise version is not required. You will want a few mods for marketing or comparative shopping stuff http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/who-bought-this-also-bought.html hope that helps a bit, Nigel
Thanks for the follow. I just had another thought. http://fishpig.co.uk/wordpress-integration.html So, in a nutshell. I try to think way out of the box. Rather than think you are selling a product, you can view things as selling an experience, lifestyle or something relevant. I would need to know a bit more about the brick and mortar shop to drill that down. With that said, not only can you run wordpress for content related matters you can also use shortcodes to put products into blog posts etc. This is great for landing pages, A/B testing various campaigns, sales etc. I typically suggest this as well http://www.idevdirect.com/idevaffiliate.php platinum edition has urls like site.com/1.php when you hit the site from an affiliate link it turns back into a normal url like .com/ so its quite clean. Just thinking out loud, Nigel
Thanks for the links guys- Im working my way through them at the moment. The product import plugin seems very useful. This information so far is extremely helpful- thanks for it! I have to say that I have liked the Magento Platform so far, the site I have created (which hasnt gone live yet) seems to be very easy to edit (for me) and use (for the consumer). That being said, Do you know of any drawbacks to the Magento Platform? Any weaknesses worth noting? I just think it would be best for me to be aware of these weaknesses so I can prepare for them better once the site goes live.
The more products the slower it gets. I would put a server guy on it or if you have a VPS you can follow some fairly simple guides http://magento2x.com/speed-up-magento/ you basically have ram and disk i/o to deal with. If you can get hosting with an SSD drive it becomes way faster as well. Magento wont cache a range of things natively so its not a bad idea to check into something like this as well http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/pagecache-powered-by-varnish.html that however requires a bit of work but nginx, varnish etc. are all good alternatives to straight apache. Or something standard http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/full-page-cache-multi-level-5450.html you will also want to hop into the admin panel and turn on flat catalog for products and categories. system -> configuration and then select Catalog -> Front End Nigel