Magento

Imagine eCommerce 2012 is officially off to a great start! Merchants, developers, partners and all members of the Magento ecosystem swarmed the M Resort today in Las Vegas, all eager and excited to see what we have in store over the next few days.

Today’s pre-event activities started off strong with Developer Certification and the Magento Technology Partner Program. While the partner event was taking place, we also held the Developer BarCamp & Networking Event up on the 16th floor of the hotel. BarCamp was a unique opportunity for developers to learn about various technical Magento topics in 25 minute, rapid fire presentations. There were more than 40 presentations in total, with 300+ attendees. A few of the most popular topics included ‘Magento 2, View Layer Evolution’, ‘Magento 2, Converting Your Code’ and ‘X.commerce Fabric and Sandbox’. These presentations were run by members of the Magento and X.commerce technical teams as well as various developers from the community. The night continued with an exclusive partner reception followed by an opening night networking event outside at the pool.

Tomorrow’s activities start bright and early with the general sessions and keynotes kicking off at 9:00am. Breakout sessions for the technology and business tracks start at 11:00am and for the partner track, sessions will begin at 11:50am. After lunch we have more breakout sessions as well as general sessions & keynotes starting at 4:00pm with some intriguing topics including ‘Big Data is Worthless, It’s About Big Answers’ given by Stephen Messer and ‘The Art of Storytelling & The New Monetization Models of Hollywood’ with Tim Kring. If you’re here with us, you won’t want to miss these presentations! Also, tag #MagentoImagine on Twitter or Instagram and your pictures will show up on our very fun Twitter Wall!

If you’re following the event from home, be sure to stay tuned to our LIVE page. This page will give you a nice play by play of what is going on at the event including the most up to date Twitter feed, pics from our Twitter Wall and the most recent blog posts.

Pre-event activities for the 2012 Imagine eCommerce conference have officially begun in sunny Las Vegas! Excitement is in the air as 1,300 attendees are mingling, meeting up with their friends and colleagues while soaking it all in. From Spain to Vietnam to Latvia, we have friends coming from all over the world, from 45 countries. The conference hotel, the M Resort, has been taken over and occupied by all things orange; it's now internally known as the "Magento Resort." Partners, developers and merchants together at last - it's like a big family reunion!

You can feel the excitement – from the staff working on the keynote prep, to the people walking around the hotel, or lounging and chatting by the pool and even Bob Schwartz, who has declared himself the concierge of the event, is working hard on his Elvis presentation.

So stay tuned and glued into all things Imagine! You can check us out on the Imagine eCommerce Conference Blog, and on Twitter by following @magentoimagine and hashtag #magentoimagine. You can also see live pictures of the event, generated in real-time by our attendees, at wall.imagineecommerce.com.………..

It's such a great feeling to be here, and It's gonna be fun AND memorable!!

1,300 Magento merchants, developers and solutions partners have gathered from around the world at the fabulous M Resort in sunny (and very hot) Las Vegas, NV for the Imagine 2012 conference.

Attendees are looking forward to three days of great content, incredible networking, and a whole lot of fun. Today’s event kicked-off developer BarCamp – a series of rapid-fire presentations on Magento and X.commerce, with all content driven by attendees. BarCamp is being held in the resort’s beautiful LUX bar on the 16th floor with fantastic views of the Las Vegas strip.

Tonight’s event features a welcome reception at the "Daydream pool."

If you want to follow the conference from home, we have some exciting ways to keep you engaged. In addition to the Imagine eCommerce Conference Blog, you can also follow along on Twitter by following @magentoimagine and hashtag #magentoimagine. You can also see live pictures of the event, generated in real-time by attendees, at wall.imagineecommerce.com.

We are pleased to let you know that the final course in the series, Managing Your Magento Store - Part 3: Operations, is now available in the On-Demand, Video format. In this new one hour course, you are introduced to topics such as order management, fulfillment and customer service.

If you haven’t already taken advantage of the first two parts of our three part series on the Magento Admin panel to help optimize the management of your store, now is your chance to get the series in its entirety for Free for a limited time.

Important Note: During the registration process, please enter the same student email address as you currently use when logging into your Magento Account to access the courses. This will ensure that your courses are consolidated in the same account.

May 3, 2012 I 10:00AM PDT

Webinar: How to Use Email Marketing More Effectively

Email marketing improves traffic to your Magento Go store and helps to increase sales from your existing customer base. But more importantly, it builds and maintains long-term relationships with your customers, which are essential to any successful business. With proper subjects and relevant messages, email marketing can effectively support your marketing efforts with little to no budget. In our next webinar with Go Pro partner, aheadWorks, you'll learn how to use email marketing to grow your business. Here are the details of this presentation:

Date: May 3, 2012 10:00AM PDT

Presenters: Anastasia Harlamova, Senior Marketing Manager, aheadWorks and Alyssa Gothelf, Online Marketing Manager, Magento

In this webinar, attendees will learn:

• Best practices for subject lines
• Setting up the "From" and "Reply To" fields
• 10 tips for improving the open rate of your next newsletter
• How to avoid spam filters

Register now

Dan and Dave have a built a business and a community around magic. Their online store serves as an interactive lifestyle hub for magicians worldwide, not only offering instructional media and accessories, but a place where magic enthusiasts can share and learn the tricks of the trade.

But their marvelous site didn’t just happen by magic. In fact, Dan and Dave had been constantly frustrated by the limitations of their original eCommerce site—so much so that they decided to build the new one from scratch.

They began by brainstorming with Magento Solution Partner, Digital Operative, who recommended Magento as the perfect platform for their ambitious plans. Magento offered the reliability and scalability to make their frustrations disappear, along with the flexibility to implement their ideas for expansion. Digital Operative gave Dan and Dave functionality they wanted by integrating a number of third-party applications with their Magento site. The creation of a "streaming" Magento product type to allow Dan and Dave to sell online videos, tiered pricing, a reward points system and a sliding carousel for product photos and trailers on each product page to put what’s important in front of the customer all help contribute to what makes the new site an interactive, user-friendly shopping experience.

Rich with interactivity, innovative functions, and informative design, Dan and Dave have seen dramatic results across the board. They are much happier with a site that, as they say, “just works,” yet has state-of-the-art eCommerce features contributing to the growth of their business. At the same time, the new magic site offers a user-friendly place to spark the enthusiasm of a flourishing community of amateur and professional magicians.

Visit dananddave.com for a touch of Magento magic.

Thousands of companies – including many of the world’s biggest brands – are using Magento Enterprise to grow their online businesses. Wondering how Magento Enterprise can help your business?

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

April 11, 2012 I 10:00AM PDT

Webinar: Best Practices for Landing Pages that Convert

Landing pages should be built to convert. The design of a landing page is extremely important as is monitoring a landing page’s effectiveness through proper analytical tools. Google Analytics offers a wide range of features and reporting options which, when used correctly, can reveal weak points in landing pages and also help to determine the right solutions to enhance your site's conversion rate. In our next webinar with Go Pro partner, QuartSoft, you'll learn all about landing pages and how to build them correctly. Here are the details of this presentation:

Date: April 11, 2012 10:00AM PDT

Presenters: Makhniboroda Andrey, Chief Designer, QuartSoft, Anna Moseva, SEO Department Analyst, Promodo and Alyssa Gothelf, Online Marketing Manager, Magento

In this webinar, attendees will learn:

• The positive influence of professional design on landing page effectiveness
• 10 tips for the layout of a landing page
• Integrating Google Analytics
• Defining and tracking goals and conversions
• The top 10 most important metrics within Google Analytics

Register now

We’re happy to report that Magento Industry Partners are jumping on the Developer Certification bandwagon. Today’s profile focuses on Sweet Tooth, a partner that is an “early adopter” when it comes to having their developers earn Magento Developer Certification. Bill Curtis, Sweet Tooth’s Director of Platform and Engineering, sat down with us to talk about Sweet Tooth, Magento, and the importance of certification.

Magento: Let’s start with some history on Sweet Tooth. How did the business begin?

Sweet Tooth: We started out as a Magento custom development firm when Magento was still in beta. We were – and still are – impressed by the flexibility of Magento and the potential that it offered a developer such as us.

Since then, we’ve shifted away from custom development to focus on our product “Sweet Tooth.” We’ve done so well that we are now 100% devoted to development of Sweet Tooth.

What are the one or two key factors behind your success with Magento?

I’d say that there are two reasons why we’ve done so well with Magento: the community and our knowledge of Magento architecture.

We really believe in the Magento community, so we focus a lot of our resources on supporting our customers. The Magento community is so well connected that one happy customer often leads to three more. The response has been great.

We also invest a lot of resources into Magento training for our support and development staff. Being able to quickly diagnose issues means that we can decrease the time our customers are waiting for a support solution. And our developers have a better understand how Magento works, we have far less bugs that our support team will have to deal with later.

Altogether, we get a better customer experience and lower support & development costs by being properly trained on Magento.

Why did you decide to have your developers take the Magento Developer Certification exam?

We decided to have our developers take this exam because it gives us a way to validate their knowledge. We’ve always thought of ourselves as being good with Magento code, so when we first heard that there would be a Magento Developer Certification exam, we were excited to take it. We wanted to prove to ourselves, and others, that we were among the best.

How many Magento Certified Developers do you current have onboard? How will having these certified developers help your business?

We currently have two developers that are Magento Certified, but moving forwards we will require all our core development staff to be Magento Certified.

The Magento Developer Certification exam gives us a way to accurately test developers on the knowledge that they will need to use every day. For us, it is a great way to validate and distinguish the quality of our development skills.

What else would you like our readers to know about your company?

When we made the decision to focus solely on Sweet Tooth, rather than custom development, we had a Magento community forum group that consisted of merchants who were interested in a customer loyalty extension…so Sweet Tooth was developed using the great ideas and ambition of the Magento Community. We want to say a heartfelt “Thank You” to Magento and the whole Magento community for being so great!

To find out more about how Sweet Tooth can help you build a better eCommerce business with Magento, visit their listing page on our website.

Developers: find out how you can join the growing ranks of Magento Certified Developers: