Starting and growing an eCommerce business is rewarding when done right. While brick and mortar retail is steady, it’s hard to deny that people are increasingly loving online purchases. You don’t need a fortune teller to see that or know that more retailers will swoop into the market as well.

The chances of success are increasing every year as well. That’s because eCommerce is growing at 221%.

More competition also means more trends as everyone wants to go viral. If you want to go shine, you should be willing to put in the work, know the right marketing strategies, connect with customers and know the trends.

These are the emerging B2C eCommerce trends you should pay attention to.

1. Product Landing Pages That Are Highly Geared At Conversion

Product landing pages are different from the regular product pages. This is the regular product page.

Then this is a product landing page.

These type of product pages are emerging trends for B2C eCommerce that will change things as well. They have the potential to increase conversions because they tell a more extensive story about the product.

2. Voice Search Increases By 20-Fold

41% of American adult use voice search daily, and that’s going to grow more as we move through 2019 to 2022.

Voice shopping is projected to grow to $40 billion annually by 2022 which is a 20-fold increase from the $2 billion that we saw in 2018.

Humans are relying more on machines; it’s relatively easier to talk than type. You can get through this by optimizing for voice search voice search. One way to do that is move beyond the regular keyword placement to create conversational content that’s formatted in a way that voice machines understand.

3. Augmented Reality Takes Center Stage

Whenever a business wows a customer, for example with a different and truly engaging experience, or technology, that customer wouldn’t forget it.

Everything is pointing us towards AR. From movies to games and now retail. That’s one thing that will improve the customer experience for eCommerce over brick and mortar because customers get to understand how well the product will work in their lives.

As more customers like it, more brands want to try it. Ikea, L’oreal, Pepsi have done it, and customers loved it. People have admitted to wanting to pay more for a product they try out with AR.

4. Social Platforms Will continue To Creep Into eCommerce

Social platforms are expanding. That's why viral marketing is so important. The platforms are focusing on eCommerce in ways that can allow e-commerce brands to sell more.

Look at Facebook. Over the years, the platform has been increasingly moving into the online selling space. In 2018, they filed a patent application to allow users to use AI to place orders using messenger. That’s a lot. With this functionality, we can sell without needing to have a person control orders from facebook. That’s not to add the shop on Facebook functionality.

Instagram is focused on turning Stories into a selling platform. Online shop owners are catching on as well. It seems like its only Twitter that’s lacking behind the other two. They did kill the “buy button” thing about two years ago.

5. Try-Before-Buy Giving Brick-And-Mortar Stores A Run For Their Money

If there’s one place that brick and mortar have shone over eCommerce, it’s here. Customers that prefer to shop in physical stores do it for many reasons, including the ability to test out the product before they pay for it. This allows them to be sure that they are buying the right thing and they have peace of mind because in most cases, in-store attendants can assure them that they can return products if they don’t like them.

While returns are in eCommerce, they can be much more stressful plus some brands tend to hide it in TOCs. Allowing customers to try before they buy not only bridges the eCommerce-commerce gap but also leaves customers with a peace of mind.

This idea is a trend that’s catching on. Shoppers purchase a product but choose “pay later” at checkout. Then after they receive their item, they are able to log on to the store and pay if they are satisfied or return it if they are not. This is risky for businesses, and you need to understand your business model and customers before you try it out. Nevertheless, it’s one of those trends we have to watch out for.

6. Video Content In Places That They Haven’t Been Seen Before

Video increases conversion rates by 46%. Over the years, they’ve crept into product pages. That’s still catching on, but an emerging trend is using them in hero sections and live chat.

The regular thing for hero sections is images but slowing, videos and gifs are catching on even better. Customers hardly pay attention to the hero section with regular images because they expect it to be one promotional gibberish that they would rather not waste our time on. But you can change that with a video.

That captures attention even better, and you can speak directly to customers. This is one of the good trends.

7. Split Testing Will Continue To Be Relevant

Some of the biggest eCommerce stories are as a result of using great A/B testing tricks to transform sales. That will continue to be important regardless of which part of the world you are. Test everything to find out what works best for your customers based on real data.

The number one rule that I like to go by with split or A/B testing is - continue to test without assumptions. Never assume your customers will like product landing pages over regular ones. Just because it works for a similar store doesn’t mean it will work for you. Look at this example of a product page that is aesthetically better but didn’t do well with the audience.

So don’t assume, instead of test and test continually. Build on previous tests too. Use a few variables and implement the results of the tests on your site.

8. More Storefront Apps

One thing that is becoming a trend is mobile storefront apps. It could be because many eСommerce platforms offer it as one of the core features, so the barrier to app development is lower. Or, knowing that shoppers are accustomed to dedicated storefront apps on their mobile devices.

Whatever reason it is for this trend, one thing is sure. It’s not for the big marketplaces only. Even small businesses are using storefront apps to drive sales and customer loyalty, and many more are moving with this flow.

9. Marketing Automation

This is not really a new thing, but it's worth mentioning again. To succeed in eСommerce, you have to automate many processes - just like Amazon. Email marketing and user-generated content is something that can easily be automated through software and apps.

Conclusion

Many trends that boost sales and many pull them down. Split testing is great for every store, but video content and storefront apps may not be. Don’t be too quick to try out a trend because it is a trend. Only pick one if you are sure you can provide a better customer experience while using it. Understand your customers and use ideas that they can connect with.

Author: Darren DeMatas

Darren has an MBA in Internet Marketing, but hangs his hat on 10+ years of experience in the trenches. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn to learn ecommerce.

E-mail is darren.dematas@gmail.com

If you run an online business or thinking to start one, then your top two choices for online payment solutions are most likely PayPal and Amazon. With nearly 60% market share, PayPal is, of course, the industry leader, but Amazon Pay is right behind it. In this blog, I will compare both the solutions and try to give you some idea of what can be more suitable for you.

Price

There are no startup costs, monthly or termination fee for both Amazon and the standard version of PayPal. However, you may have to pay a monthly fee of $25- $35 for a premium version of PayPal like PayPal Payments Pro or Payflow Pro.

You are charged when a transaction is done on your site through the gateways. These transaction fees vary by country. Here is a brief detail of the transaction fees-

• PayPal - For business in the U.S., you pay 3.7% + $0.30 per transaction while outside the U.S. and Canada, the transaction fee is 3.9 % of the amount plus a fixed fee based on the currency. Also, you may have to pay more for the micropayments, transactions under $12, that are charged at 5% to 6% + a Fixed Fee based on the currency per transaction.
• Amazon - Amazon payment gateway charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction for domestic U.S. transactions, plus tax where applicable. They also charge for Cross-border transactions that are subject to an additional fee of 3.9%.

So, what does this mean? Well, I’ve calculated an example monthly fee for each service to give you an idea of which payment gateway is the most cost-effective. For my calculation, I am assuming your business is based in the US, and you are getting 50 transactions of $10 and $100 each in a month. So, the transaction fee you pay will be:

Now assuming you have 50 such transactions in a month for each amount, so the fee charged for $10 transactions (the total amount you receive is $500 per month) on PayPal will be $27.5, and on Amazon Pay will be $29.5. Whereas the fee you pay for $100 transactions (total amount $5000), on PayPal is $200, and Amazon Pay is $160.

We can say, PayPal is cheaper if you are dealing in low-ticket items or services while you can save more with Amazon Pay if you deal mostly in high ticket products. However, do remember that the cost calculated here is from a US perspective and may vary from country to country, so be sure to confirm and estimate the cost in your country before committing.

Features

1. Currencies Supported

PayPal is available in more than 200 countries and regions, and supports 25 currencies, while Amazon Pay is currently available only for merchants with a place of establishment in around 16 countries and supports nearly 12 major currencies.

2. Checkout Process

The standard option takes buyers through PayPal’s site which means you don’t have full control of the checkout process, while Amazon Pay has a more streamlined checkout experience where the customers never leave your website during the process. This feature is available only in the Pro versions of PayPal that also allows you to fully customize the checkout experience on your site, great for brand conscious businesses.

3. Payments

With PayPal, anyone with a credit card can pay even if they don’t have a Paypal account. While for Amazon payments, the customer should have an account with Amazon, which is not an issue, as most people have an Amazon account these days. As per a report, Amazon had 310 million active customer accounts in early 2016 and the number has grown significantly ever since.

When it comes to payment forms, Amazon accepts all major credit and debit cards. But with PayPal, major credit cards are accepted as well as bank accounts, eChecks, and PayPal balance.

4. Online Invoicing

For the businesses who find it hard to keep track of the invoices, PayPal allows the users to create online invoices with free built-in templates and email them to the customers. There are no fees for creating and sending invoices, no setup charges, no monthly fees, and no cancellation charges. You are only charged when you receive payment online. Amazon Pay doesn’t mention providing any such feature.

5. Security

Being trusted brands, both PayPal and Amazon take security seriously.

However, there are many instances when even the slightest suspicion leads to the locking of the PayPal account. Also, if you have a high number of chargebacks and customer complaints as a seller, PayPal may limit your account or may hold payments for up to 21 days in case there is a problem with your transaction.

This can even happen to sellers who deal in certain kinds of materials such as electronics, gift cards and event tickets which are subject to higher levels of fraud. Similarly, Amazon Pay might not work for you if you deal in any of the restricted items like weapons, tobacco products or counterfeits. So do your homework and check out the Amazon acceptable use policy and PayPal policy before you use any of them for your site.

Installation Process

PayPal payment gateway integration perhaps is the easiest to configure while Amazon Pay payment gateway integration may take a little programming knowledge unless you use good Amazon Pay Integration Plugins.

Support

If you have any questions that are not covered by the help page on Amazon, you need to first raise your query via a quick web form, the Amazon support team gets in touch with you via call, chat or email, whatever mode you prefer. PayPal also offers virtual assistant, as well as free phone support to the merchants.

Final Thoughts

Both payment platforms offer merchants an easy way to get paid and offer shoppers an easy way to send a payment. But, which payment gateway to choose? The answer is subjective. It depends on your business location and the markets you target around the globe. However, payment gateways aren’t mutually exclusive– you can always use more than one gateway to give your customers multiple payment options, which is more likely to get them over the line.

In fact, according to a study, 26% of US online shoppers have abandoned an order in past year solely due to a “too long/complicated checkout process” while 6% abandoned due to “lack of enough payment methods”. You can overcome both of these issues by using one or more payment gateways on your site.

Of course, this is just my opinion, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Which is your favorite payment gateway and why? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

Author: Yamini Baghel

Yamini is a writer and loves sharing her thoughts and tricks with the readers. Currently, she works as a copywriter at Seurata.com. Feel free to contact her!

Today almost every business has its presence in social media, and Instagram is not an exception. Of course, you are not an individual using Instagram. Some people can compare business with a sport, so in that case, Instagram is one of the games, where you are not a single player. Remember that it’s a competition with other participants and its own rules and random posts sent out whenever you want won't lead the business to success.

As every game demands, you have to build your own winning strategy. On Instagram, you need a solid digital marketing plan to build a strong community that delivers real results. Your content strategy should rely on important rules of Instagram, which should not be broken.

Let’s see what rules will help you to win.

Rule #1: Post content on schedule and with a regular frequency

Success on Instagram often boils down to how frequently you’re able to post content on the channel. If you maintain a good posting frequency you will get more engagement with your followers. Test out different posts at different times and figure out which timing and frequency work best at generating the highest engagement.

One of the earliest and biggest mistakes I made with Instagram is I never found out the times most of the following I built were active at. I posted every day but only at times when I happened to be most comfortable or free. This meant late evenings or early in the morning or some random time. For a long time, this resulted in muted response to videos and images I posted. As I gained experience I learned of the importance of posting content at times my followers were most engaged in.

How did I do this?

I posted content during different times of the day for a period and noted down times during which content got the highest engagement rates. Zeroing down on those times I was able to find time slots that always resulted in most people seeing the content I posted and my strategy took off.

I realize that doing this manually isn’t always possible. Also, doing this manually is a tiring and long drawn out process. However, a third-party tool called Grum helps you fix this. Even if you are away the tool takes care of posting content in its entirety. Besides Grum, there are a lot of tools of scheduled posting which you can use in your work.

It doesn’t matter if you’re on vacation or in the middle of your wedding. You can schedule content in advance and put those posts out in advance. With this, you will be able to post consistently and on time helping drive growth ahead and send out posts on a consistent basis.

Without a clear content schedule, you’ll be out of the game.

Rule #2: Use overarching content topics

For your business profile, the only goal should be to keep followers engaged. To that end post content with varying topics so they don’t get bored. For instance, if you’re a business in the productivity SaaS niche— talk about different things like health and productivity, Yoga, meditation, productivity tips and so on a rotational basis.

There’s also another tool that can help you with content, Crowdfire, for example. It lets you schedule posts in advance as well. It has relevant content you can search for and post automatically directly from their site. Along with this, you should be able to schedule content in advance.

You remember that we’re still in the game, right? Here you have not only competitors but teammates. You can use the help of other Instagram users. A special tool, called Repost, will give you the content when you need it. It was one of the first tools I started using for Instagram growth and still do. The free version is limited but yet enough to get some steam going.

With Repost, you can post content from any Instagrammer and also credit the original creator or poster of the content which you should do to avoid problems in the future. It’s a great tactic for those days when you don’t have original content to post and still want great content to go out.

Keep in mind that you’re not posting on Instagram to gain a lot of likes and shares. Of course, they do have their place. But ultimately what matters is the content should tie back to real revenue goals. They should be campaign oriented that has some significance to the overall health and growth of the campaign.

It needs to be very tangible either. You could create socially conscious campaigns to engender trust or post about fans receiving gifts to engender loyalty. Airbnb frequently posts photos of homes their guests have visited and stayed to generate both trust and loyalty that go a long way in driving meaningful revenue goals.

Instagram users are very demanding. Inappropriate or boring content will force them to show you a “red card”.

Rule #3: Stick to an engagement schedule and be consistent

Growth doesn’t come merely through organic discovery. Growth is achieved when you work with different strategies, discover the potential of each and keep applying the few strategies that fuel the highest levels of growth. Unwavering commitment to sticking to an engagement schedule is what keeps fueling things forward. One of these techniques involves engaging with other accounts. You should comment, like and share what similar accounts are posting and this will help you generate engagement to your own account.

A study from Simply Measured bears testament to this. The study found that the top brands on Instagram post at least once per week. Another report says that 60% of top brands use the same filter on Instagram every time with two filters being the most popular.

Why?

To create a visual consistency.

Any post from the brand reposted anywhere feels as if coming from the main brand. Followers too become attuned to the style and since they’re familiar with the content they will stop right on their tracks and engage with the post. Among these filters that were applied Lo-Fi remains the most popular filter and Valencia garners the most engagement on the platform.

Remember this—Instagram is quite popular today and this is only going to get bigger. When you try things for the first time you may not always taste success. As you progress adjust your approach, experiment and improve your campaign. Bring experienced marketers or brand builders to your team. Work until you get actual data and make decisions based on that data.

Your fans should be really involved in the game of your brand.

Rule #4: Invent and use branded hashtags

Next thing you could do is use a branded hashtag that’s relevant to your company and something that people will relate with. Nobody uses the company name as the branded hashtag but something else that’s quite at heart with the company values and what the brand espouses and represents as a whole. A branded hashtag is about everything the brand is about and encourages followers to share the hashtag with photos of their own to what they think is relevant to the hashtag. It’s a must-have for increased engagement. This helps you take your brand’s message to many more people.

A furniture brand could use different hashtags to denote the conditions in which their products can be used and depict the use of their products in picturesque settings.

To get the traffic it isn’t enough to post content, have influencers share your content and post on a schedule. You must ensure you do everything to use hashtags as well.

All Hashtag is a great tool that I’ve been using since the last two years to generate hashtags. It isn’t one tool but a combo of four tools. There’s a hashtag generator that lets you generate random or live hashtags and lets you choose best hashtags as well. Hashtag Analytics lets you analyze a hashtag and generates analytics data you may use for your marketing strategy.

Remember this—Never use hashtags just for the sake of using them. Visitors are quickly going to get offended if they don’t find what they came looking for. Engagement metrics would go down and this will result in lower reach in the future. It has to be relevant to the post you’re sharing and the business you’re running. You don’t want unqualified leads signing up or visiting your site. No traffic is better than irrelevant traffic.

Finally, it also lists top hashtags that are currently in vogue and lists the most popular ones from the list.

Always take into account such a tool as hashtags while playing.

The future of Instagram

Instagram has over 800 million active users. Teens and millennials are frolicking to the platform by the hordes.

Instagram is primarily a community of photo enthusiasts that’s slowly evolving into a community of video enthusiasts.

The community will continue to grow to attract both kinds of people. Since it has been acquired by Facebook as a business owner you don’t have a lot of time to make the most of the platform. Slowly but surely organic reach would be killed and you would have to pay for traffic. Start perfecting organic traffic strategies right now so that you may be able to ease into PPC ad spend when the time comes.

Author bio: George started Kamayo and other blogs to share in-depth advice on startup marketing, SEO and keyword research with insights gained from 8 years of working with all sizes of companies.

Today our team feels proud in half with relief: after 10 months of hard work, we officially release nopCommerce 4.20.

Here you’ll find the description for the major changes in 4.20 (the full list of them is available in release notes). In a few words: nopCommerce now supports UNIX-based systems and is much more user-friendly. Besides that, it's much faster now.

Linux and Docker support

Yes, that’s right: now you can run nopCommerce on Linux. After the final transition to .NET Core in 4.10, we still had several problems to solve before starting to support UNIX-compatible systems. They were connected to the path entry difference in Windows and Linux file systems, completely different methods of getting access to files and folders, and the fact that UNIX-compatible systems are case sensitive. The adaptation process took almost 200 hours - and now we’re ready to present the result of these efforts.

Due to this change nopCommerce 4.20 will also provide Docker support. It contains Docker file to create a nopCommerce container, which allows to save your time and use this tool out of the box.

Performance improvements

nopCommerce 4.20 is way much faster and stable, even when operating with hundreds of items wish lists and shopping carts. We fixed the bug connected to using EF Core 2.1 which caused critical performance issue in 4.10. In the new version there is also the option of using minified HTML (configurable). As a result demo site built on 4.20 has got 99/100 for mobile and 100/100 for desktop devices in Google Page Speed tools.

Better UI/UX in the admin area

The re-design of the admin area made it more user-friendly. Plenty of tabs were replaced by folding panels: now all the info is compact and easy to reach. The main changes have regarded general settings and product details pages. nopCommerce 4.20 moved to DataTables from outdated Kendo UI Grid. Besides that, you would notice a lot of minor improvements, regrouping, and reordering of some input fields.

Install/uninstall multiple plugins

Using the newest version of nopCommerce allows you to save time by install/uninstall multiple plugins. All uninstalled plugins now wouldn’t be loaded in the memory providing better performance and predictability of the system.

GDPR: User change history

nopCommerce 4.20 provides an automated feature allowing to give clients information on changes they made to their profile (in conformity with Art. 19 GDPR).

Thanks for all who participated in our bug bounty program and helped us with the final enhancements.

Hope you will find all these changes really useful. We will be glad to get your feedback at our forum.

• View release notes
• Download nopCommerce 4.20

In the previous post, we spoke about what’s new in nopCommerce 4.20 from the developers’ view. But we also didn't forget about those who spend most of the time working with a created site - store owners and admins.

Managing 4.20 store is easier and more convenient than ever before in nopCommerce. Here are the main advantages of building it on the latest version of the platform:

1. Create the store that would be rank well in Google

The speed of pages loading is one of the key aspects of ranking by search engine systems, and the stores made on nopCommerce 4.20 work really fast. The pages load rapidly even when users have hundreds of items in their shopping carts. Here are the results for our demo site made on 4.20:

2. Use more advanced GDPR tools

nopCommerce platform has already had the function for exporting personal data on the customer’s profile page in accordance with GDPR. 4.20 version gives store owners more advanced tools, which will automatically log all the changes with the client’s profile in conformity with Art. 19 GDPR.

3. Easy edit with the new folding panels

Forget bulky tabs - in nopCommerce 4.20 they are replaced by compact folding panels. You’ll find the main changes at the common settings page and at the product pages. A new design provides quick editing of all the information and all the settings you need.

4. Filter shopping carts and wishlists to understand customers’ needs better

Due to this feature, you will be able to filter shopping carts and wishlists by the period of time, product and the billing country. It will help to understand seasonal and local trends and offer to your customers the products they’re most interested in.

5. Set a store favicon from the admin area

In 4.20, if you want to change a store favicon, there will be no need to seek the right folder on hosting for uploading it. You can manage it right from the admin area in several mouse clicks.

Test all the said yourself - visit our store demo for 4.20.

Find out more about store themes and plugins at our marketplace.

Get the tools for sending relevant e-mails to your customers, automate taxes calculations and make the payments in your store easier and more reliable. nopCommerce 4.20 provides the store owners with all these opportunities with its out-of-the-box plugins. Know more from this review.

SendinBlue - the all-in-one email marketing platform founded in 2012. Over 80.000 customers already work with this platform, ranging from SMEs to multinationals such as BMW, ASICS, Michelin and Mazda.
“With SendinBlue, make sure each client receives the right message at the right moment”

SendinBlue plugin features and advantages:

• intuitive drag and drop editor to create your newsletters;
• automatically synchronization of your contacts;
• reliable SMTP to send your transactional emails (order confirmations, password resets, etc.);
• SMS campaigns;
• powerful and easy to set up Marketing Automation. This feature allows, for example, to automatically send abandoned cart emails with the articles including photo, prices, etc.

Square enables sellers to accept payments wherever they want to do business - online, in person at their brick and mortar or on the road. Anywhere your business may take you, Square is there to help support your needs to make the process seamless and transparent.
“Between the limitless customization available with nopCommerce sites and the straight-forward payment integration to help facilitate your sales, all eCommerce organizations have the opportunity to up-level their business utilizing the Square plugin.”

Square plugin features and advantages:

• transparent pricing: 2.9% + $.30 for online transactions;
• free custom rate reviews for merchants who do over 250K in processing annually;
• ongoing fraud protection to keep your business secure;
• delivering next-day settlement and dispute management for sellers across the US, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Japan;
• business services to help sellers manage locations, access financing and engage with rich insights;
• PCI compliance;
• 24/7 technical support.

Qualpay is a modern REST API based payments platform with enterprise-level features, paired with a merchant account, that is easily adaptable to the unique needs of businesses.
“We help businesses lower their credit card processing costs through interchange optimization. In 24 hours we can provide a cost savings analysis that typically saves a business over 30% off their processing costs.”

Qualpay plugin features and advantages:

• hosted payment forms;
• advanced reconciliation reporting for easy monitoring of business performance;
• recurrent and subscription transactions;
• no need to deal with each vendor separately, thanks to a fully-integrated payments platform;
• with Qualpay you would not handle any of your customer’s sensitive payment information, so your burden to comply with the PCI DSS is greatly reduced.

Avalara helps businesses of all sizes achieve compliance with transactional taxes, including sales and use, VAT, excise, communications, and other tax types. The company delivers comprehensive, automated, cloud-based solutions that are designed to be fast, accurate, and easy to use. Avalara’s Compliance Cloud™ platform helps customers manage complicated and burdensome tax compliance obligations imposed by state, local, and other taxing authorities throughout the world.
Avalara offers more than 500 hundred pre-built connectors into leading accounting, ERP, eCommerce and other business applications making the integration of tax and compliance solutions easy for customers. Each year, the company processes billions of indirect tax transactions for customers and users, files more than a million tax returns and other compliance documents.

Avalara AvaTax plugin features and advantages:

• real-time tax rate calculations for all 12,000 U.S. taxing jurisdictions and beyond;
• guaranteed protection against obsolete data, or outdated tax laws;
• one tax schedule instead of hundreds or thousands;
• automated solutions for all your tax compliance needs.

Find out more details about the latest version of nopCommerce stores. Read about the main changes in 4.20 and visit our store demo.

Developing nopCommerce we always pay attention to high performance rate for future sites on our platform. By today nopCommerce powers large stores that work extremely good, and our own store demo gets 100/100 at Google PageSpeed.

To gain the same result for your store you need to make sure that all the settings were made in a proper way. In this performance guide, we will show you how. Below you will find the set of practices with proven efficiency that our team formed in the last few years.

In brief, working on performance improvement consists of several aspects: proper nopCommerce settings, checking the customization that was done, choosing the right hosting and some other moments. Let’s consider them in turn.

nopCommerce settings

Here are the settings at nopCommerce platform itself that have a big impact on sites’ performance.

1. Performance setting

Go to admin area > Configuration > Settings > Catalog setting and check the following settings in the “Performance” panel. It’s highly recommended to tick them. But please read its description (hints) first. In some cases, it’s not possible to enable them because it will switch off some functionality.

• Ignore ACL rules
• Ignore "limit per store" rules
• Ignore discounts
• Ignore featured products
• Cache product prices

2. Bundling and minification

We also recommend that you enable the minification and bundling for javascript and styles files, this will allow the pages of the site to load faster. You may do this on the admin area > Configuration > Settings > General settings page in the “Minification” panel.

• HTML minification (allows to minify and compress HTML pages to increase the download speed).
• JavaScript bundling and minification (allows to combine several JavaScript files into a single one).
• CSS bundling and minification (similarly, allows to combine several CSS files into one file; do not enable this setting if you’re running nopCommerce in IIS virtual directory).
• Use response compression (it will replace the default gzip).

3. Localization settings

Go to admin area > Configuration > Settings > General settings and see “Localization settings” panel. It has several really important checkboxes. When they are enabled, the application start will be slower, but then all pages could be opened much faster:

• Load all locale resources on startup.
• Load all localized properties on startup (for the cases when you have two or more languages enabled. This requires more memory, and not recommended when you have a large catalog or several thousand entities).
• Load all search engine friendly names on startup (also requires more memory and not recommended to enable with large catalogs or several thousand entities, because it may slow down running your site).

4. Maintenance

nopCommerce has “Maintenance” page in admin area with quite useful functionality (System > Maintenance). Run it periodically to delete obsolete information from the database and the file system:

• Deleting guest customers (choose the period for deleting old records regarding guest customers out of the database).
• Deleting abandoned shopping carts (delete abandoned shopping carts created before a certain period of time).
• Deleting old exported files (choose the desired period to keep the file system up to date).
• Re-index database tables (it modifies existing tables by removing the indexes of goods that no longer available).

5. Other settings

• Always use the latest version of nopCommerce. If you cannot upgrade to the latest version for some reasons, then manually apply all performance changes that nopCommerce team implemented since the release date.
• Fix all warnings in admin area > System > Warnings.
• If it doesn’t help, then temporarily delete all third-party plugins. Just to test it out and compare performance. Sometimes third-party developers release plugins that do not work properly.
• Set "WWW prefix requirement" to the "Pages should have WWW prefix"; this will reduce the overhead of redirects on the website. You can do it in Configuration > Settings > General settings.
• For the versions of nopCommerce before 4.10, it is recommended to store the images at the file system. Go to Configuration > Settings > Media settings and choose this option at the top of the page.
• Check if you have unused entities in the settings. First of all, you should pay attention to entities such as currencies, languages, stores. You have to remove all unnecessary items because each of them can slow down your store.
• Also, delete all unused plugins and themes.
• Ensure that the following schedule tasks are enabled - “Clear log”, “Delete guests”, “Clear cache”, “Keep alive”.
• Disable “Store last visited page” and “Store IP addresses” settings in Configuration > Settings > Customer settings.
• Always monitor your log (System > Log) and ensure that you don’t have any errors.

Customization

In case of customization and extending the default nopCommerce functionality, you need to ensure that the changes you have made do not affect performance. According to our practice, quite often you can find the code that was written non-optimal.

This section will be useful for developers mostly.

• First of all, you need to analyze all the changes that were made. We at nopCommerce always start from finding them out with WinMerge. We analyze the changes and then improve the code if possible.
• Based on our experience, the most common mistakes of third-party developers are connected to work with databases. E.g. some SQL request is too slow or executed too frequently. In this case, it is recommended to identify such problems and then make caching in nopCommerce itself (check out ICacheManager interface).
• Also, nopCommerce has in-built profiler that might help to find out which request exactly causes slow down. You can activate it in All settings (advanced) > storeinformationsettings.displayminiprofilerinpublicstore

Besides that, a lot of reliable and ready-to-use practices of performance improvement were already written. We recommend to start from the following ones and read them in details:

• ASP.NET Core Performance Best Practices by the team of ASP.NET developers;
• Performance Diagnostic Tools;
• Monitoring SQL Performance. There are a lot of guides about it, and this is very important.
• We’d recommend to read about performance tuning in SQL Server - for example, from here.
• Perform load testing is also important to ensure there are no critical issues in code that slow pages downloading. For testing Microsoft services you can use in-built tools - know more about it from here. Also, for your work you can use one of free load testing services, like https://loader.io/.

Other recommendations

In this section, several aspects are described, that are not related to nopCommerce directly but also very important:

• Configure and use a content delivery network (CDN). The geographically distributed network of proxy servers and data centers will provide quick pages loading for users in different countries.
• Use HTTP/2. This version of network protocol decreases latency to improve page load speed in web browsers.
• Use content optimization tools to make sure that the site is loading fast no matter what type of device the user is surfing from.
• Optimize cache header so to the browsers correctly cache the resources of a site to minimize the need for new requests.

To automatically set up all of these tools you can use one of the cloud network platforms. The choice is up to you, of course; our recommendation is Cloudflare - it is one of the world’s largest cloud platform trusted by IBM, Reuters, and Digital Ocean. Many of such services also provide website protection against DDoS and other attacks - at least, Cloudflare does.

Other several important recommendations:

• Make sure that all the software at your server (Windows, MS SQL Server, etc) is updated to the latest versions and has all the latest security patches;
• Set up nopCommerce and the database at the same server (MS SQL Server) if possible - it would increase performance due to more quickly SQL queries processing.
• Make backups regularly.

Hosting and your server

The wrong chosen hosting or tariff plan can negate all the previous efforts to increase the performance. To be sure it will not happen to your store, you can use the hosting from our recommended list.

Here are the most important criteria when choosing the hosting:

• Support for needed technologies and scripts
• 24/7 server and technical support
• Uptime (look for a company that provides 99,9% uptime)
• Regular backups
• Protection against DDoS attacks
• Ability to move up from shared to semi-dedicated, or dedicated servers easily as your business grows

Also, when choosing the hosting or the server, it is extremely important to make sure that you have a good HDD (preferably SATA) and enough RAM.

After implementing these instructions, your store should start to work much faster. Nevertheless, if it does not happen for some reason, you may order the audit of your site as the part of our premium support services, or search for the solving of the problem at our forum.

If you have something to complete this guide with, please write it in comments.

Outdoor Designer Store built on nopCommerce platform successfully works since 2015. It allows landscape designers to manage their jobs, collaborate with the clients, contact their suppliers, and share ideas. The customers can hire a professional to make the work done.

nopCommerce solution partner, CoSource company, tells about the working process on this project.

In 2014, the future founder of the Outdoor Designer Store Nick Hadji hired a landscaping company to design his outdoor area. In order to style an outdoor setting, a landscaper would typically need to order off multiple suppliers (pots, furniture, heating, etc). The current workflow was a very cumbersome, and error-prone process for the following reasons:

• Tracking what customers liked and disliked across multiple websites
• Paying multiple suppliers
• Co-ordinating deliveries from multiple suppliers

Late 2015 Nick Hadji approached CoSource, to build a platform to solve these challenges. Thus the Outdoor Designer Store (ODS) was born.

Challenge

In developing ODS, CoSource faced a number of key challenges:

• Designers should be able to upload and sell their products via the platform
• Moodboard feature to allow designers to share products and ideas with potential customers
• The ordering workflow a lot different from the normal eCommerce process flow
• Payments should be split between multiple parties (suppliers/designers/ODS)
• Suppliers Dashboard needed to confirm stock and process orders
• Reverse Worksheets to allow designers to host a page on their website

CoSource used nopCommerce as the framework to build the solution on top of as it offered the following benefits:

• nopCommerce architecture follows well-known software patterns and best security practices
• Pluggable architecture made it easy to develop custom functionality
• Supports multi-vendors, which allows having multiple suppliers without a lot of custom coding

The three main users of the platform are designers (landscapers), suppliers and customers.

Solution

To solve these challenges, several existing plugins were used, but the core of the application was implemented with custom plugins and event listeners created by CoSource to enhance and adapt the nopCommerce functionality to meet the needs.

In order to have products on the platform, there was developed the CoSource.Nop.UniversalImporter plugin to import items from a variety of product data feeds.

Designers needed to update their profile, upload their own products and sell them via the platform, manage their orders (event listeners), customers and worksheet history, payments and commissions (so appeared Ods.Nop.LandscaperBrandDiscount plugin).

Designers and clients also needed a space to show their ideas for an outdoor area (Ods.Nop.Core plugin)

Different users of the platform require different implementations and views during the project lifecycle:

• Designers (landscapers) in charge of planning and design several projects
• Suppliers with their own dashboard, stock management and payments (Ods.Nop.Core / Ods.Nop.Payments.Bpoint)
• Customers with their own space to express their ideas for their outdoor area and keep track of the project (Ods.Nop.Core)

Designers Portal

The designers’ portal allows the designers to do the following:

• Update their profile
• View their orders, customers, and worksheet history
• Upload their own products and sell them via the platform
• List other recommended products from other websites
• Upload images (create an image library) to use on the moodboard

The moodboard function allows designers to share product and styling ideas with potential customers. Any products that are used on the mood-board can automatically be imported into the worksheet.

The customer journey

The journey starts with a designer creating a worksheet, which represents a job, for a customer.

The designer firstly would create a curated list of products for the customer to review. The customer would then login into the system, and would review the products marking them as either approved, undecided, or don't like.

This process would go back and forth between the customer and designer until a final list of products was approved.

Once the worksheet has been finalized, the customer would pay for the products. The challenge here was the products were from multiple suppliers, who not only had different rates of commission for the designers and ODS, but also different levels of commission by product category.

Suppliers Dashboard

The suppliers’ dashboard was developed to allow suppliers to confirm stock, and process orders. The centralized view allows them to keep on top of all the orders placed by customers and designers.

Reverse Worksheets

Reverse worksheets allow designers to host a page on their website, to grant their customers access to the Outdoor Designer Store. The advantage for the designer is that it gives them the ability to earn passive income, as they receive a commission for each order a customer places.

Results

By today the platform has over 300 registered users on the system and has been featured in several magazines, press releases, and industry events. Because of its flexible architecture nopCommerce allowed to continuously build new features into the platform while having the foundation to scale to meet future demand.

Established in 2005, CoSource has a wealth of experience creating custom eCommerce solutions, ranging from small business websites to complex eCommerce applications that integrate into third-party systems.

How to make sure that your company gets the best rates for credit card payments and not missing any profits? Jon Gilbert, a representative of our technology partner Qualpay, shares three important tips he usually provides businesses with.

We’ve all been there; a promotional cable advertisement is received in the mail that is far more competitive than the rates we currently pay. At first, we wave it off, but curiosity gets the best of us, and as we read through our last few monthly statements, we realize the rates we’re receiving no longer resemble what we signed up for.

Over time, the same thing can happen to you with your payment processing expenses. You may find that fees from your vendors have changed, increased or multiplied as time passes from the date you signed up. For now, let's focus on just credit card fees and not all the additional costs from other payment vendors.

In the order of importance, here are three tips I always provide businesses to ensure they are enjoying the best rates for their credit card payments. It’s important to note that the opportunities outlined only apply if your acquirer, sometimes referred to as a processor, offer an interchange-plus pricing option. In a simplified pricing model (i.e. 2.9% + $0.30), the opportunity for the savings defined below would benefit your processor rather than you.

First, make sure you have access to updated payment technology to reduce and clear up any downgrades

For each card brand that you accept, there is a price range set by the card brands, Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover, which varies depending on how the card information is collected, the card type used, the data collected at the point of purchase and processed with the transaction, as well as the time between the authorization and capture. These price ranges established by each of the card brands are collectively referred to as interchange. We reference the least cost interchange rate a card type can qualify for as the “target Interchange”. As mentioned already, there are qualifying criteria required to realize the target interchange. The combination of card data, type, etc., and interchange qualification levels translates into a dizzying number of unique interchange price categories. Why should you care? The interchange price directly impacts the cost of processing credit cards. Being aware of the outlined relationships and their impact on expense makes focusing on how to achieve the target interchange a key to managing processing expenses.

In a little more detail, to achieve the target interchange price for a payment transaction, the card brands require that any data processed with the transaction is aligned to the method in which a transaction is initiated, whether the card was physically present and the card information was collected via swipe, dip, or keyed. Required information may also include the CVV (Card Verification Value), the first line of the cardholder’s address and zip for Address Verification Service (AVS) as well as purchase level details such as the items being purchased, the purchase order number, and tax rate. Even the MCC (Merchant Classification Code) assigned to you by the underwriter of your merchant account, will drive target interchange. A primary driver of interchange cost is the first touch and collection of credit card data, usually your checkout solution or payment gateway. When the correct data is not passed with a transaction, the transaction will downgrade to another (more expensive) interchange level or category. It is very easy for the endpoint solution to be out of sync with changes made by the card brands, new interchange incentive programs, and the rules to follow in order to minimize costs. Outside of interchange costs, there are other expenses that may be incurred based on how the transaction is processed. One example is the misuse of authorization fee, which requires any outstanding authorization not used to be released via an authorization reversal. Make sure, if you are shipping or delivering goods and services sometime after the credit card authorization is collected, that the vendor you use, supports this feature.

Requesting an interchange analysis from your current provider may shed light on the opportunity for potential savings via target interchange qualification.

More importantly, ask the question as to how you can qualify your transactions for the target interchange price. Some companies perform really well in configuring and coordinating the technology needed to minimize your company’s credit card expenses. Don’t miss out on cool tools or the ability to pass along the data needed to reduce costs through better-qualified transactions.

Older technology and the endpoint solution used, may not understand the card type used and not prompt for or pass for instance a purchase order number, just one data point required to achieve the target interchange on purchase and business cards. If you are not sending this data, the target interchange for a Business-2-Business (B2B) transaction is missed.

Why is this important? Well, 90% of your credit card acceptance expense is made up of interchange and card assessments, while approximately 10% of the cost is attributed to processor expense.

In many cases, the expense due to downgraded transactions can dwarf any other processing expense. Interchange pricing is typically quoted in basis points. Let’s take the example of business and purchasing cards, and for every qualifying B2B transaction you accept, you could be paying up to 75 basis points in downgrade fees. This creates an opportunity to save thousands of dollars depending on your card type mix and interchange qualification level.

There are endpoint solutions, payment gateways and integrated payments providers available in the market that use updated technology, and have an understanding of the interchange price categories to identify and pass the qualifying bits of data needed to ensure that your card acceptance expense is optimized. These types of companies can dramatically reduce the fees associated with interchange downgrades and overall payment processing expense.

Second, make sure your company is set up correctly with each card brand

Certain industries qualify for attractive target interchange categories, as the card brands wish to incentivize growth in specific industries, including Nonprofits and Service industries. Properly configuring your account to take advantage of these incentives can save a considerable amount of money in card acceptance expense. For instance, Nonprofit organizations qualify for target interchange pricing roughly .30% less than a typical eCommerce business. This equals 30 cents on every hundred dollars processed and can quickly add up! You may be surprised to learn American Express also offers incentivized rates for certain industries as well. Ask questions, find out if you qualify for any incentive programs and confirm you’re correctly configured for your business type and card acceptance.

Finally, negotiate with the acquirer

The final element is the acquirer’s, remember sometimes referred to as a processor, pricing proposal. Basis points, monthly fees, and transaction costs make up the last 10% of the card acceptance expense. When reviewing your proposal, look for fees such as “club”, “portal” or “security“ (outside of PCI) as these may represent hidden costs that add up quickly. Review your gateway and checkout statements as well. These costs may be billed separately and could represent a layer of expense that can be eliminated by using an integrated payments provider, saving you at least 5 to 10 cents on every transaction.

Completing a pricing review that includes the tips above, is a great start to managing your card acceptance expense. Click here to schedule a free statement review or to start a testing Qualpay.

Qualpay is one of the out-of-the-box plugins in nopCommerce 4.20. Find out the details about its features and other out-of-the-box plugins from this blog post.

Yes, that’s right. The annual nopCommerce Days conference is back, and this time it is held in Mumbai, India, on October 10-11. Come and let's get acquainted in person!

The conference will bring together developers, heads of web agencies, representatives of leading tech companies and online stores.

What’s in a program

The conference program with 6 keynote and 20 breakout sessions will be maximum intensive. Carefully selected topics, devoted to development on nopCommerce and the latest development trends, will give you lots of useful information for successful work.

Among the speakers are representatives from Microsoft, from nopCommerce development and marketing team, and the experts from the world-famous companies that will be announced soon.

Exhibition & Networking

In a specially designated area for exhibition and networking, visitors will make new connections, exchange experience and spend a good time in the company of like-minded people upon a cup of coffee. During the exhibition leading tech companies will show their latest achievements, and major web agencies will share the examples of successful work.

Find business partners for large-scale projects, new leads for your company or a contractor to make or customize your online store.

For foreign guests

Attending our conference in India is a great occasion to discover this exotic and charming country. Specially for foreign visitors, our local co-organizer will hold a tour of the most impressive places in Mumbai. You will know everything in detail very soon, from one of the upcoming newsletters. (If you’re not subscribed yet, you can do it at the official site of the event).

Closer the event - higher the prices

Now you can buy an early bird ticket at a special price - $70. The closer the event, the higher the ticket prices. The first price increase will occur on August 19.

Date and venue

October 10-11

18.99 Latitude, Oasis Complex, Kamala Mills Lower Parel Mumbai

Tickets and Details: days19.nopcommerce.com

See you at nopCommerce Days 2019!

It’s time for a big change! We invite everyone to participate in nopCommerce documentation improvement. Read below how to contribute and what bonuses you will get in return.

New documentation system in brief

Now the documentation will be stored on Github (https://github.com/nopSolutions/nopCommerce-Docs) and everyone can participate in its improvement. The texts with all the edits will be beautifully displayed at docs.nopcommerce.com.

We based our approach on how the documentation for ASP.NET Core is conducted since our platform is based on this framework.

What was wrong with the old system

Since nopCommerce documentation was led by nopCommerce team and the limited circle of users, it could not be updated very quickly because this is a rather time-consuming task. As a result, some articles turned out to be irrelevant in the process of time.

The second point is that the documentation might not contain some sections important for the practical developer’s work on a specific project. We believe there are community members who could help us with writing them.

Main areas of work

The primary task is to make an up-to-date and complete version of English documentation, and while we work with it only. After it is ready, in a few months according to our plans, we will launch a similar system for documentation translations.

You can make changes yourself or suggest which existing articles can be improved and which articles are missing now (for more details, see the “Contribution process” section below).

There still will be two main sections in documentation - Developers guide and User guide. The directions of work on them will differ a little bit.

User guide describes the functions of the administration panel, and thus the needed articles already exist. But we need to improve them:

• make an update for nopCommerce 4.20 (such as adding new fields, description for the new features, and screenshots updating);
• include more examples;
• adapt to the users' work scenarios. It means we need to shift the focus from a consistent description of the fields and sections in admin panel to the features they are responsible for.
  For example, in the Gift cards section, we need to describe more clearly the scenario of using a gift card from the store owner and consumer side and to explain the difference between virtual and physical gift cards. In the current view, the users will probably understand it in the end but they will need to waste a lot of time on it.
  In the Attributes section, we need to explain what different attributes are responsible for and how the user can manage products with their help. We are sure there are many more sections that might be improved.

The goal is to make the documentation more user-friendly and as clear as possible for a person who starts working with nopCommerce for the first time.

In Developers guide, besides the need to update articles for the latest version of nopCommerce, some topics might be missing. For example, a guide on installing nopCommerce on Linux and related issues (read further to know how to create new articles in the documentation).

Contributors' rewards: what you will get

1. Mention as a contributor with the link to your Github profile on the documentation site.
2. Documentation contributor icon shown on your nopCommerce profile. Assigned after 20 received significant pull-requests (read the details in the next section). After reaching this amount, send your candidature for consideration with the link to GitHub profile using out contacts form.
3. MVP status for 3 community members who made the most valuable contribution to documentation.
4. Six tickets to nopCommerce Days conference. Three of them will be given to new MVPs, and three more - to three other active contributors.
5. Cool souvenirs from nopCommerce to active participants. We’ll hand them at the conference if you arrive, or send by mail if not.

The results will be summarized after the work on the English version of documentation is finished.

Contribution process

Formal requirements regarding the rules for structuring articles and storing pictures are described in the Contributing section. Here you will also find a guide on how to create new documentation articles.

We offer to work with documentation through the pull-request system. Select this option after making your edits. We will review it and after approval, the changes will be pulled to the documentation site.

If you have an idea about which articles are missing, or what large-scale changes can be made to the documentation, but you are not ready to implement it, you can post it in the Issues section.

All issues will be marked with the following labels, and it’s very important to pay attention to it:

• “developer-guide”/ “user-guide” - indicates which section in the documentation this issue should refer to;
• “editorial” - the changes in the existing article needed;
• “new-topic” - a new article creation needed;
• “discussion” - the need for the creation of a new article or making changes in the existing one is under discussion, and you can participate in it. Please do not start work on the issue until this label is removed.

For all the questions and suggestions: forum post

To edit the documentation: https://github.com/nopSolutions/nopCommerce-Docs

Contribution guide: https://github.com/nopSolutions/nopCommerce-Docs/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

Documentation site: docs.nopcommerce.com/

We invite everyone to join us and participate in this large-scale upgrade.

“For small businesses, both nopCommerce and Magento are good options. But when someone says, he needs customizations and integrations, or have the plans to expand the business, we strongly suggest nopCommerce,” - explains Raisul Kabir, co-founder & CEO of Brain Station 23. Read further to know the reasons why.

Since Magento is a well-known eCommerce solution, clients often come to us with a request to build a store on it. In this case, we try to understand the clients’ requirements for the project. We interview them and then suggest the best platform. Here’s kind of my rule of thumb:

• If you want to make something big, something strong and long-game, with lots of integrations, then nopCommerce is for you.
• If you want to make a humble, small thing and have no intention of making it big later, then Magento might be good for you. In such situations we don’t spend efforts to convince the client, we simply do not take such projects.

We are nopStation (a project of Brain Station 23 Ltd) one of the top 5 gold partners of nopCommerce and I’m sharing our story how we decide our projects.

Why we choose nopCommerce for big projects?

You may want to have a humble start, but you know you have the intention to make it really big, then we strongly suggest nopCommerce. Because nopCommerce is a lot easier to customize to the highest extent compared to Magento. To put things in perspective, let me give some examples.

• Clear architecture - nopCommerce has around 5,383 files while Magento has around 97,625 files as of August 2019. It’s very heavy and very complex.
• Less number of tables - nopCommerce has 117 tables while Magento has 391 tables. So, it becomes quite difficult for the development team to keep track of everything. Things are too modularized and too much complicated.
• Out of the box faster - Since Magento works on PHP, interpreting language, out of the box it’s little bit slower than nopCommerce, as it works on C#, as DLL running in memory (PHP out of the box works like, the files stay in filesystem, then every time when called, it goes to memory, processes and goes back to file system, so little bit slower. C#, on the other hand, is compiled into less number of files, on the first call loads in memory, delivers and then stays in memory until the pool is stopped. So, subsequent calls become a lot faster).

For small projects: nopCommerce or Magento?

Since Magento has been used by so many people a lot of things are already there. Someone can run a small Magento site in a day, very beautiful and advanced.

Both nopCommerce and Magento have a lot of plugins in the marketplace. Though Magento is ahead of nopCommerce in the number of integrations with local services. Therefore, when starting a small local store, it is necessary to determine in advance which integrations will be needed and their availability on the marketplace.

But with Magento, the store owner may face some difficulties with further integrations and customizations because of its complex architecture mentioned above.

It’s not like we in Brain Station don’t build websites on Magento. We do Magento work if the client already has a large site on Magento and needs customization, then we have Magento experts in our team to do that. But for the new projects, generally, we don’t suggest it, because we know it’s very cumbersome. Like, Pickaboo mobile app was done by us and when we went to do that, we were horrified by the way the integrations are done and we see that from outside it looks OK, but from inside all the calculations are done very redundant way and extremely difficult to manage. So, lots of difficult bugs start getting produced.

So, for small businesses, nopCommerce and Magento are both good options. But when someone says, he needs customizations and integrations, or have the plans to expand the business, we strongly suggest nopCommerce.

With this, we have been able to deliver a lot of eCommerce sites, as a couple of top eCommerce sites of Bangladesh are made by us in nopCommerce, they are priyoshop.com, othoba.com, and many others.

To learn more about the differences between nopCommerce and Magento and the specific features of the platforms read this review.

Stroka Business Group has already moved 12 sites from AspDotNetStorefront to NopCommerce and has 3 more in the migration stage. Read below in the first-person narrative about how the migration process usually goes and why store owners should not be afraid of it.

Stroka Business Group with the headquarters in Slovenia brings fast and effective IT solutions to organizations for 25 years. 54 experts successfully work with customers in the areas of business, web and mobile solutions, system integration, and have a strong development and programming team of experts and their own development department.

Why the migration became needed

We at Stroka Business Group used AspDotNetStorefront (ASPDNSF) to build the stores from 2007 to 2014. At the time when we started to use it, there were no much open-source platforms on .NET that supported integrations with CRM and ERP systems. But then the owner of the platform changed, and the problems came.

The most important reason for migration was the price of ASPDNSF license, which ended up exceeding more than $1.500 for each individual e-shop (as for 2014, now it starts from $5.500 - approx. ed.). The second reason was the marketplace. ASPDNSF didn’t have such a rich and widespread offer of plugins and themes on its marketplace.

The third reason was that after our research we decided to establish our eCommerce strategy on nopCommerce platform due to .NET technology. As a company, we are building our growth on Microsoft technologies which gained us the opportunity to become Microsoft partner of the Year 2013, 2017 and 2018 in Slovenia. After internal testing, we found out that NopCommerce is a very stable platform.

But the main reason was our Slovenian market which is very small, and we had a lot of different competitors, which were winning with the price. So, we had to find a solution which is acceptable for customers and on the other hand also very stable and with great further potential.

How did customers react to the migration proposal

As some shops were already 3-4 years old, the customers who wanted to stay in a leading position with their shops needed to go into the renovation. We explained to the customers that we are using a new platform which has a lot of benefits for them and that we will build their new site on this new technology. When we presented the customers the pricing model and they got the information that the ASPDNSF license needs to be refreshed, they were all for migration.

Migration from AspDotNetStorefront to NopCommerce: how the process goes

Migration from one eCommerce platform to another could cause a lot of problems if you are not doing it in the right order. During migration, we need to carefully consider all the data: products, sales, customers and of course SEO which could cause a loss of page in the search rank.

Our migration process is split into six major steps:

• Category migration (Name, Description)
• Manufacturer migration (Name, Description)
• Product migration
  - Product data (Name, Description, Prices, Specifications, etc)
  - Product images
  - Product SEO migration
• Customer migration
  - Customer info (Name, First name, Email)
- Customer addresses

• Orders and order items
• Static content (Topics)

Most of the migration is done with SQL migration from the old eCommerce database to the new nopCommerce database. The static content such as pages gets transferred manually.

Each migration process is individual but the common scenario looks like this:

Category migration

1. Category data

2. New category URLs

Includes a special procedure to insert URL / slug for new categories

For manufacturer migration, the process is mostly the same.

Product migration

Product data migration is done just like a category migration except for the product images. Product images cannot be migrated within the SQL.

For image migration, we made a special console application. This application could migrate products, categories and manufacturer images. The application reads the old image directory, then finds the appropriate product and saves the image into the new database and saves the files into the new image directory.

Code example - to get picture filename:

Code example - to save picture to DB:

During the migration process, we also need to consider SEO migration. SEO is very important as it prevents page rank loss. For this purpose, we developed a NopCommerce plugin which can handle old eCommerce URLs.

The plugin is made with a new registered route and a controller which handles old URLs and make the 301 redirect to a new product, category or manufacturer.

Route:

Customer migration

Customer info inside NopCommerce database is placed in several database tables (Customer, CustomerPassword, Customer_CustomerRole_Mapping, CustomerAddresses, and Address). If you want to migrate all customer info you need to place data in all of these tables.

Usually, customer passwords can not be migrated, due to different password encryption so we leave it blank and customer needs to set up password manually.

Customer migration script

Orders migration

Orders can also be migrated from older to new eCommerce site but usually it takes a lot of time to migrate all the data. We need to take into consideration which order info is necessary to be shown in the new web store. Usually, we leave orders in the old web store just for admins.

Generally, the migration process can take up to 3 days and the clients are happy with their new stores. In the future, we plan to transfer all the stores by Stroka Business Group to nopCommerce.

Language packs are still free to download and easy to implement in any nopCommerce store. But since now they are available on nopCommerce translations page. There is no need to search for them in the marketplace. Working on translations has now become much more convenient, too, and does not require so much time from a single person.

A new approach for working with language packs

Language packs will be now translated via Crowdin and anyone can join the translations. Your contribution may be small (for 1 word only) or really large-scale - it’s up to you. Carefully chosen proofreaders will check the correctness of the edits. They are native speakers who have experience of work with nopCommerce.

Why the changes became needed? Earlier, in order to put an archive with a language pack on the marketplace, one person should translate the entire language pack as a whole (~ 6000 lines). It was a laborious process taking a lot of time.

With the new approach, several people can work on one language pack at once to save time. Moreover, it will be much easier to make small corrections and improvements in the existing packs.

How to join nopCommerce translations

We invite all active community members to join translations. You are welcome to improve the already existing packs or create new ones if the desired language is not listed. The process itself is very simple:

1. Register an account on Crowdin and go to nopCommerce project: https://crowdin.com/project/nopcommerce
2. Select a language to translate. If desired language is not listed, please contact us

3. Select the file for translating. For each version of nopCommerce, starting from 3.90, there is a separate folder. Every folder contains several files with language resources in English.

   Duplicated resources repeat together with the existing translations from version to version. This is done in order to avoid excess work on the translation of the same lines. So, if you translate a line in the file language_pack.xml in nopCommerce-3.90 folder, this translation will be duplicated for the folders nopCommerce-4.00, nopCommerce-4.10, etc. Therefore, it is advisable to translate from the older versions to the new ones.

4. Now you can start translating. If you are new to Crowdin it might be useful to read their instructions on how to use the online editor.
5. In a short time, the suggested translation will be reviewed and approved by one of our proofreaders. After that, the edits will be applied to the language pack.

The translated language packs are available for downloading from this page.

Proofreaders needed

For most of the languages, the proofreaders are already assigned. The help is still needed with these languages:

• Urdu
• Sinhalese
• Romanian
• Swedish
• Thai
• Vietnamese
• Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)

If you are a native speaker and ready to become a proofreader please contact us to discuss your bonuses.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please write them in the comments after this forum post.

There is less time left before the conference, and its program has already been completed. Here is a quick overview of what you will be able to learn at the conference. And if you haven't bought a ticket yet, it's time to do it.

The speeches from nopCommerce team

Conference attendees will be the first to know the details about the future 4.30 version from the opening speech by Andrei Mazulnitsyn and Liana Mandzhieva. The CEO of nopCommerce will talk about the development roadmap, while Liana will cover the marketing strategy.

The rest two speeches from nopCommerce team will be interesting for developers mostly. Alexey Anohin is going to tell about the best practices for nopCommerce customization that will allow you to easily upgrade nopCommerce to the latest versions, maximally use platform functionality, and keep high performance.

Dmitriy Kulagin will show how to start to develop nopCommerce to Linux, which became available in the latest version, and what tools nopCommerce team uses for this. In addition, he will share tips on how to improve system performance by using the built-in store opportunities.

Effective work with nopCommerce & Best practices

Several speeches will be dedicated to plugin development for nopCommerce. Sandeep Chaudhary will tell about nopCommerce widget plugin development in simple steps with best practices to follow. Bruce Leggett will demonstrate how to write a plugin that sends a text message notification for certain events without touching the nopCommerce codebase to allow easier upgrades.

Business Intelligence (BI) is a solution that collects, analyzes, and presents business information and big data. nopStation has recently implemented BI on a nopCommerce based solution, and Nafiz Khan will share this journey with the audience.

Sukhvinder Pal Singh will share his opinion on what it takes to create a microservices-based architecture for nopCommerce and about the challenges on this way. Hiten Soni is going to share tips on how to set up nopCommerce on Azure.

Several speeches will be based on case studies. Mohammad Mizanur Rahman will share a few case studies where his company could serve eCommerce site with extremely high traffic hosted in cloud (AWS) in optimized cost by 50%. Umesh Patel will show the case study of Speedindustry.com and will demonstrate the way to increase performance by stopping the spammers to the site.

Visitors will also learn about the latest recommendations from Google, as well as how they can be implemented in nopCommerce, from the speech of Alex Tretyakov. The topic will be interesting to the store's owners and software developers alike.

The speeches from world-known tech companies

Among nopCommerce Days speakers are representatives from Microsoft, Elastic, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. They will teach how to start using machine learning in your .NET apps, how to deliver an intuitive search experience and how to monetize open-source software.

Exhibition & Networking

In a specially designated area for exhibition and networking, visitors will make new connections, exchange experience and spend a good time in the company of like-minded people upon a cup of coffee. During the exhibition leading tech companies will show their latest achievements, and major web agencies will share the examples of successful work.

“Networking is the best part about this conference where you share and listen your / others ideas and knowledge” - says Atul Rungta, CEO of nopAdvance. His words are confirmed by another participant of the event, nopExtensions: “The very first thing to attend nopCommerce Days conference and that clicked in our mind is “NETWORKING”, with delegates of world-famous companies and make transactions of loads of useful information for successful projects”.

The detailed program & tickets: days19.nopcommerce.com

Megamall.ge sells electronics and household appliances since 2015. Now it’s one of the leading eCommerce sites in Georgia with convenient payment methods and user-friendly interface.

It was moved to nopCommerce with redesign work done by Wandio team. You have the opportunity to compare “before” and “after” state of the store yourself. Just read below.

Wandio is nopCommerce silver solution partner based in Georgia. The specialization of this software outsourcing company includes building large eCommerce and payment solutions, CMS systems, ERP/CRM, HR/Recruitment applications, intranets and alike.

Today Megamall is no longer under Wandio support. After the development and testing process, source code and database have been handed over to the client for supporting the system and developing new features.

Moving from CS-Cart to nopCommerce

Megamall has been conducting retail and online sales of electronics and household appliances since 2015. Before moving to nopCommerce platform they have been using CS-Cart provided and localized by local vendor for almost 4 years. As one of the leading online stores Megamall was regularly working on enriching their platform capabilities by adding new features. As almost 4 years have passed since the implementation, platform’s design was outdated, feature enrichment was taking too much time and standard modules available on the CS-Cart store were not supported. Facing these problems the company decided to fully refresh the website and take it to the next level.

Wandio team took on a challenge to build a platform for Megamall with all the modern features already included - quick and easy navigation, various filtering and sorting options, various modules for suggestions and most importantly quick and simple checkout page.

Making a new design

Using the tools provided in nopCommerce, Wandio developed a solution that perfectly answered the client’s needs. To achieve the best result was done the following:

Old To New

• First step was creating a new, fresh and mobile-friendly design.
• The way checkout page works was changed. Now it has no wizard, everything is on a single page.
• The functionality of requesting a phone call was added.
• All search results are now inside suggestions while searching making it faster to find what you are looking for.
• Migrated over 10k products from the old version of the website (engine - CS-Cart).
• Created redirect file to match old URLs with new ones, not to lose organic traffic after the update.

Homepage

• On Homepage, custom blocks showing products from specific category were added. Each block has tab switcher making it easier to navigate between trending, new products, and products with discounts.
• Modules added where website administrator can choose what products to show, also with the ability to add banner instead of products, or product and banner together.
• “Show hot offers” is activated depending on the period, it has a timer and validity for a certain amount of time managed by administrator.

Menu

• Created a Mega Menu - a menu that website administrator can customize by adding different links and images. It can not only display items from categories but also include custom filtered lists like phones by price range for example.
• Created custom all categories​ menu,​with images for categories.

Product Details

• Changed the way product attributes worked e.g. when the user chooses a different color of iphone it changes the way attributes are shown on the product details page.
• Added video support on product details together with images.
• Added 3D photo support on the product details page.
• Added gifts support on a single product. In product details product has gifts tab, where admin can place available gifts and the users can choose the gift they prefer. Each product has a gift icon on a thumbnail image too.
• Added bundling functionality. For each product, the administrator can add bundle configuration. In product details users can choose bundled products and get discounts, e.g. buy an iPhone with case and get -15% on the case.

New payment methods & customization

In Georgia it is very common to purchase products using online installment loans, so Wandio implemented different ways of purchasing. On checkout, the customer chooses which provider to use: Direct Pay using a card or installment from different banks. For payment processing UFC.ge​processing centre and TBC Bank were implemented. The last one is the largest bank in Georgia.

Customization process included:

• Creating a custom module of similar products for the product details page. The module displays items based on similarity and is automatically pre-calculated each night by a scheduled task.
• Creating a separate module to update product prices and quantities from partnering websites (for certain product group).
• Registration functionality for individuals and legal entities was customized. Authorization using mobile number added, with SMS sending for confirmation.
• Customized product list and categories (implemented advanced filters with functionality and performance improvements.)
• Changing the way specification attributes work. Now admin can configure specifications for the category and each subcategory or product inherits these specifications.

Today Megamall.ge is one of the leading eCommerce web sites in Georgia with convenient payment methods and user-friendly interface.

To see more successful projects on nopCommerce please visit the case studies section.

Our team came back from India, where on October 10-11 we held the nopCommerce Days conference. Catch the collection of the best moments from the event.

We were so glad to see everyone here, and we hope you enjoyed the speeches and networking. We thank the conference co-organizer nopAdvance, all the sponsors, speakers, exhibitors and attendees.

See you next year - on nopCommerce Days 2020!

The photos are provided by nopCommerce team, nopAdvance, Zeta-5, and Satyanam Info Solutions.

Thanks to the popularity of WordPress, WooCommerce - the free eCommerce plugin for WordPress - is also a popular store building solution. Since this solution is a plugin and not a full-fledged eCommerce platform, it is obvious that it has much more modest functionality.

The question, in fact, boils down to whether WooCommerce features are enough for your store to function properly. In this article, we will try to answer it.

With WooCommerce, you can create a simple, pleasant store in one of the following situations: 1. If the store is one of the site’s functions, which is not the main one, but it’s important to work with content at the core. In this case, the main product will be WordPress, and the eCommerce component will be additional; 2. If you have a small catalog of products. Otherwise, WooCommerce will most likely not be the best choice, and here's why.

Performance

As with nopCommerce, WooCommerce allows users to add a limitless number of products to their store. However, that’s where the comparisons stop as issues with performance arise.

WooCommerce out-of-the-box is not suitable for working with large catalogs due to performance issues. So, if you have more than the conventional 500 products in the catalog, it would require a lot of investment and resources to optimize the WooCommerce store, with no guaranteed result.

To get the inside scoop, we interviewed Diego Reyes, an eCommerce Specialist from Odegi eCommerce, about his experience of working with WooCommerce. Over the past 12 years, Odegi agency has worked with a large number of platforms in eCommerce development.

As discussed with Diego, his company is supporting the site of a large Canadian chandelier manufacturer. The site is built on WordPress, utilizes WooCommerce, and boasts about 10,000 products in their catalog.

The client already had this site when they came to Odegi, but they were experiencing major challenges with performance. And it was not only because of the large number of products itself. According to Diego, “part of the problem with WooCommerce is that it does not come with a lot of functionality built into its system. As a result, you have to build or purchase multiple plugins to get the site to work. The challenge with using more plugins is that it affects performance in a negative way and you need to invest more resources to optimize the store for speed during initial setup & when upgrading your store”.

nopCommerce shops are feature-rich out-of-the-box. They work fast and scale much better - compared not only to WooCommerce but also to “hardcore” competitors like Magento. Our store demo gets 100/100 at Google PageSpeed Insights, the most popular service for testing site speed. Check it yourself: run a speed test now.

It is important to look at things in perspective: while you have few products in the catalog and do not need wide functionality, WooCommerce stores may work quite fast. But such a store is not one of the easily scalable solutions. As the catalog grows and the number of visitors increases, the site will begin to experience problems, which you will not face with nopCommerce.

Out-of-the-box functionality

WooCommerce out-of-the-box does not have many popular features, let alone the more specialized ones. Here, for example, are what you need to install through extensions (plugins) from the WooCommerce marketplace and what do not come out-of-the-box:

• there is no built-in Google Analytics
• no multi-currency
• no built-in sorting by brand
• no built-in processing Returns and Warranty Requests
• no gift cards
• no multistore and no multi-vendor

In nopCommerce, all this functionality comes out-of-the-box (check it out in the demo store).

So, what is wrong with plugins?

• Plugin Costs - If you decide to go with WooCommerce you will need to purchase plugins to get the functionality you need. And the pricing for these plugins can range from free to hundreds of dollars.
• Quality & Support Issues - When you have different programmers writing different codes for different plugins, there are different standards of quality that go into them. As a result, they won’t always work well together and if issues do come up you will need to coordinate with various vendors to fix issues.
• Performance Issues - As previously indicated, the more plugins you add to the site, the slower it will get.
• Security Issues - Not to be ignored, WordPress plugins are one of the most significant sources of platform vulnerabilities. As of September 2019, according to the WPScan Vulnerability database, almost a quarter of all vulnerabilities are related to plugins.

Although there are no products without at least some vulnerabilities, ASP.NET Core, the platform on which nopCommerce is developed, already provides a built-in level of security at the platform level. In PHP projects - such as WordPress and WooCommerce - it is necessary to design a protection system from scratch, often using plugin libraries just to maintain a relative level of security.

Launching and maintenance of the store: comparing the costs

When working with both nopCommerce and WooCommerce, you will have to pay for hosting, a domain name and an SSL certificate (in the case of WooCommerce, you pay WordPress for it). If you do not have at least basic technical knowledge, then you will have to hire a programmer to set up the store on WooCommerce - but if you do have basic technical knowledge, then you will also be able to install nopCommerce on your own. Furthermore, you have to pay for most of the functionality in WooCommerce, whereas nopCommerce’s functionality comes out-of-the-box for free.

Perhaps the only aspect where WooCommerce may turn out to be more profitable for small businesses is making regular changes to the site (it’s not about downloading products to the catalog or replacing the contents of banners, but rather adding a new block to the site, for example). In WooCommerce, some of these changes can be made by the store administrator. In nopCommerce, you would probably have to contact the programmer for this task (which would inevitably happen with the stores on any other eCommerce platform).

If the online store is a related activity for you, and the main one is blogging and content management, then perhaps WooCommerce will be a good choice for you in terms of cost of service.

If you are primarily interested in the functionality of the online store and your future plan is to expand its scale, then it is better to start with nopCommerce right away so that in the future you do not have to pay extra for migrating from WooCommerce.