Magento

Give your customers the excellent online shopping experience they’re looking for with Google Trusted Stores! Magento retailers are now able to integrate the Google Trusted Stores badge onto their eCommerce sites quickly and easily by downloading the extension from Magento Connect.

To earn the badge, stores must demonstrate fast, reliable shipping and responsive customer service. Scores in these dimensions will be displayed in a report card that visitors can see when they hover over the badge on a retailer's site. With these metrics, merchants can offer greater transparency to the online shopping experience.

Potential benefits of becoming a Google Trusted Store include increased online conversions and average order size, as seen by other retailers. Additionally, the Google Trusted Store badge can appear within ads on Google.com and in product listings in Google Shopping.

For more information about the free Google Trusted Stores program visit Magento Connect or visit the Google Trusted Stores website.

Magento is always looking for ways to improve our product offering for merchants around the world. That’s why we’re thrilled to tell you about the new features and new website that we created specifically for our UK based merchants. UK merchants can now feel right at home on a site that is designed specifically for them and with a platform that can accommodate their unique business needs.

The new UK site features localised content. The platform has also been modified to reflect current UK tax laws and shipping regulations. And Magento Go now complies with the new UK cookie law.

Additional Features to Meet UK Merchants Needs Compliance with UK Cookie Law M2E pre-enabled Royal Mail shipping VAT on shipping an entire order Volume-based pricing Improved PayPal experience, including Express Checkout'

And with plans ranging from £9.99 to £79.99, Magento Go is a viable solution for any small or emerging business.

If you are a UK based merchant who is already using Go and would like to access our new UK features, simply contact us. At your request, we’ll help you enable the features at no additional cost.

Looking to start a new store, or just want to test-drive some of the new features? We recommend that you sign up for our 30-day free trial on our new site to begin growing your business your way in the UK.

After only 14 months of growing our Industry Partner Program, we are now 100 technology partners strong! Not only have we grown in pure numbers, but Magento Industry Partners represent a breath of industries within the eCommerce space.

Magento’s Industry Partners provide valuable integrations and extensions that help merchants build smart, engaging, and effective online stores. Our partners help merchants grow their business and keep their customers happy and always coming back for more.

Congratulations to our 100th partner Baazarvoice, a leader in social/product reviews with two Magento Enterprise customers already!

Find out more about the Industry Partner program and its value to technology companies. Apply to be part of our Industry Partner Program!

Platinum Industry Partner, 500friends, is giving away big cash prizes to the site with the most creative use of their social loyalty platform, LoyaltyPlus.

This summer, our Platinum Industry Partner, 500friends, is challenging you to design the most creative implementation of LoyaltyPlus and deliver the best loyalty program experience.

The winner of the Win/Win Challenge will receive their choice of $25,000 in cash or One Million airline miles. A lucky Early Bird winner will be chosen and awarded $10,000. And if you refer the winner, you will take home $2,000.

In addition, the best Magento implementation using LoyaltyPlus will win $10,000!

"The Win/Win Challenge is another reason for retailers to take full advantage of LoyaltyPlus' broad feature set to deliver the most innovative and effective loyalty programs possible," said Justin Yoshimura, CEO of 500friends. "It gives our clients the opportunity to reward their customers while also rewarding themselves."

For complete information and rules, and to enter the Win/Win Challenge, visit http://www.500friends.com/winwin.

*Important Dates: In order to be eligible for the Grand Prize and the Magento Prize, your LoyaltyPlus implementation must be live by August 15, 2012. A panel of industry experts will judge all submissions, and the Grand Prize winner will be selected by popular vote leading up to a big announcement at the Shop.org Annual Summit on September 10, 2012. Good luck!

We’re pleased to announce the latest Magento releases: Magento Enterprise 1.12 and Community 1.7. The recent enhancements to our powerful eCommerce offerings help merchants provide a more personalized shopping experience for their customers.

Benefits include easier order placement, mobile optimization and multiple wish lists. These enhancements give merchants greater potential to boost consumer engagement, increase conversions and transaction size, and foster brand loyalty.

All merchants, including those running B2B businesses, can take advantage of improved customer segmentation and ordering capabilities. While those operating in Europe can use our new features to stay compliant with EU regulations.

Of course, our latest releases have lots in store for developers too, including a new API, and backup and rollback systems.

Read on to learn about the key features in our new releases and how they can benefit you.

	Mobile HTML5 Quickly and easily create a storefront optimized for mobile devices so customers can shop even when they’re on the go. This mobile interface uses HTML5 technology and supports iPhone, Android and Mobile Opera browsers. It includes out-of-the-box features such as: Device-specific media capabilities for audio and video User-friendly search and results display Clean display of product detail pages Pinch, multi-touch and scaling images Easy swipe between product images Zoom capabilities Cross-sell and up-sell capabilities Drag-and-drop of products to the shopping cart
	Visitor Segmentation Tap into a whole new customer segment – unknown site visitors. Whether they’re new visitors or returning customers who have not logged in, you’ll now be able to identify and target them with special promotions to convert browsers into buyers.
	Expanded Rule-based Product Relations Our rule-based product-relations functionality allows merchants to target specific customer segments with product recommendations. Pinpoint specific customers with up-sells, cross-sells and related products to create a more relevant shopping experience.
	Auto-generation of Coupon Codes Generate a set of unique coupon codes for each promotion you run and export the list of codes for offline distribution, email, newsletters and more. Easily manage and monitor coupon usage and generate detailed reports.
	Multiple Wish Lists Customers can save products to multiple wish lists and copy or move items from list to list. They can make their wish lists public so they’re searchable by anyone. And merchants can review them to learn about their customers’ wants and needs.
	Layered Navigation Pricing Enhancement We’ve introduced a new set of algorithms for price-layered navigation that provides much greater flexibility. Now you can display a range of prices that is based on having a similar number of products within each range, giving you better control of your customers’ search results, and helping your customers find what they’re looking for faster.
	Customer Group Pricing One price doesn’t always fit all. This tool allows you to create different price points for different customer groups, such as wholesalers and retailers. You can determine both base price and tiered price levels.
	Add to Cart by SKU Streamline the ordering process, especially for B2B customers, by enabling them to enter a list of SKUs without having to go into product pages. This simplifies large orders, recurring orders and ordering based on offline catalogs.
	REST APIs Support The new Magento REST API uses three-legged OAuth 1.0a protocol to allow applications to safely access Magento services. What this means for you? You can manage customers, customer addresses, sales orders, inventories and products using HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). Data requests and responses can be in XML or JSON format. This initial version of the REST API supports the following functions: Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete a simple product Retrieve a list of orders and specific order information Update/Retrieve catalog inventory Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete complete customer information
	European Union VAT-ID Validation This feature facilitates the tax collection process for online businesses in the EU and greatly simplifies international B2B transactions by automatically applying the correct tax rules. Taxes can be calculated and charged according to VAT customer groups, based on customer shipping or billing addresses and VAT IDs.
	EU Cookie Restriction Our response to the recent EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive? A new cookie notification feature that simplifies the compliance process. Once enabled, a message at the top of the storefront informs site visitors about the cookie policy and prompts them to accept or decline.
	CMS Page Hierarchy Enhancements Managing your CMS hierarchy tree just got easier. Now you can add CMS pages to the navigation menu without custom development. You can also create, copy or delete different CMS hierarchy trees for each website and store view individually or en masse..
	Backup and Rollback Manage and schedule a variety of backup operations with the option to rollback the changes to reverse any modifications. This feature is particularly useful when testing new modules or customizations, or when upgrading to a new version of Magento. You can review specific customizations and their impact on the new code. (We do not recommend using this feature in your production environment.) Three types of backup are supported: System Backup Database Backup Database and Media Backup
	Payment Bridge 1.1 Updates Magento Secure Payment Bridge, our PA-DSS certified payment application, adds multiple new payment methods. In addition to our existing supported gateways – PayPal, Authorize.net and Payflow Pro – we are introducing support for the following new gateways: Psi Gate RBS Worldpay Database and Media Backup Braintree First Data Card Gate Plus DIBS eWay Direct Ogone Directlink Paybox Payone Sage Pay CCAvenue Supported by services provided by Braintree or Authorize.net, customers can also securely save their credit card information for future transactions in a “My Credit Cards” section in “My Account.” And with support from Kount, you can integrate fraud-screening services with your payment methods (requires separate agreement with Kount).
	CAPTCHA Now you can enable CAPTCHA functionality on your site to help prevent automated software from attempting fake logins. This auto-generated test ensures that the login is being attempted by a person and can be enabled in both the admin and customer login areas.

Ready to take your business to the next level? Contact us and we’ll help you get started.

If you’re already a Magento Enterprise customer, you can immediately access the new 1.12 release in the My Account section. And developers can access the new Community edition by clicking here.

We hope you enjoy these new features and look forward to helping you achieve greater eCommerce success.

Testing. Testing. Are you there? Good. Now that we’ve got your attention, we want to tell you about the new Magento Test Automation Framework, or TAF for short.

This software package is ideal for running repeated functional tests against a normally installed Magento application. And if you’re a developer or QA specialist, you’re in for a treat. You can quickly develop all kinds of tests for the current Magento version without having to tediously build an automation infrastructure.

Besides running repeated tests, Magento TAF can also be used to create tests and write test automation scripts. Test automation scripts created within the framework can be used for testing most Magento functionality. And we’re constantly updating the Selenium-based framework to cover even more tests and meet users’ broad needs.

In this latest release of the framework, we’ve introduced a robust set of new tests and capabilities:

	1000 Functional Tests We’ve created a comprehensive Smoke Test Suite that evaluates the full range of functionality of the Magento Community Edition. This suite covers all test cases that are run during Magento nightly builds and tested by our development team. And it’s designed specifically for developers to use and expand upon.
	Error Screenshot Capture Test failure errors happen. And when they do, Magento TAF captures and stores screenshots of any open pages in .png and html formats in the tmp/screenshot folder. If a JavaScript error occurs, the screenshot is captured and stored in the .png format. And Markup errors are captured and stored in the html format. The failed test name contains the class name, test name and a timestamp, this way it’s easy to retrieve the screenshot. And the full path to the screenshot is stored in a log next to the error message so it can be accessed directly.
	Unlimited UI Testing With Magento TAF, you can test as many UI areas as you’d like. This comes in especially handy when testing several store views or stores utilizing different designs. Each store – or store view – can have a unique UI map but operate with the original set of tests. This removes nesting and naming restrictions for UI map folders and allows users to organize them as they wish. The UI areas can be determined in the local.yml file for each url to be used by Magento TAF. Based on user-defined urls, Magento TAF automatically detects which set of UI maps should be used and loads the relevant descriptors for the current page. With this enhancement, the tester doesn’t have to worry about switching between UI areas within the test body. Users can declare separate UI maps for non-Magento side services specific to their store and write tests in the same way they’re written for Magento services.

See the Installation Guide under “Example of config.yml File” for an example of a UI map area declaration. Please note, before your first run, search for the ‘YOUR CREDENTIALS’ string within the data folder and update that value with your account credentials.

Magento TAF’s newest features help take the task out of testing. And, even though it just came down the product pipeline, it’s already been adopted and put to good use by many developers. In fact, we have to give a virtual fist pump to Kristof Ringleff from Fooman and Nick Jones (punkstar) from Meanbee for all their contributions.

To download the Magento TAF, go to the Magento Test Automation Framework section at the bottom of this page:

If you’d like to read the complete repository, installation and configuration guidelines, check them out at:

Can it really be that the disruptive platform we launched just 4 years ago has become the market leader?

According to a recent survey of the Alexa Top 1 Million sites, the answer is a resounding “yes!”

UK developer Tom Robertshaw just released the latest edition of his quarterly eCommerce survey. The survey looks at all sites in the Alexa 1 Million that are doing eCommerce, then analyzes those sites to identify which platform is being used.

Once again, Magento topped the field. In fact, the survey found that 20% of all eCommerce sites in the Alexa 1 Million were using Magento – a higher share than any other eCommerce platform. Robertshaw continues to invest time in improving the survey’s methodology, providing an even clearer picture of which platforms are leading and which are lagging.

Our thanks to Tom Robertshaw for creating this valuable tool. And most of all, we thank all the merchants, developers, partners and community members whose rapid adoption of our platform has taken Magento to the top of the eCommerce world.

Lax World is a company that sells gear and goods to lacrosse devotees nationwide. Originally a successful chain of brick-and-mortar stores, Lax World expanded into eCommerce a few years ago, with strong initial results.

In fact, it became clear to Lax World that their existing platform couldn’t keep up with their growth. That’s when their Solution Partner, Groove Commerce, recommended Magento Enterprise as the perfect platform for building a new online store that would reach the entire range of lacrosse enthusiasts.

Lax World was committed to delivering a unique shopping experience to each major customer segment. Groove Commerce embraced this challenge: taking advantage of Magento Enterprise’s flexibility, they built a site that presents different product options, recommendations, and branding based on player position, gender, and even purchasing power.

Now Lax World has a site that makes it easy for every lacrosse fan, athlete, or supporter to find (and buy) just what they’re looking for: since launching the new site, Lax World has experienced a 15% increase in sales and a 20% lift in average order value for first time users. That’s a winning game plan in any sport!

Have a Magento success story you’d like to share? Contact success@magento.com.