Magento - An Innovative Solution for E-commerce Store

In today’s competitive era, industries want to create an engaging environment to attract customers towards them whether it is B2B or B2C. E-commerce is a new way to empower your business or brand on the digital platform and Magento 2.0 offers a quick and cost-effective solution with unbelievable experience of online shopping. Here we are discussing few features of Magento for enterprise solution: 

Flexible and open source architecture:

It endows with enrich performance, scalability and great features for conversion rate boost up. The open source platform offers innovative solutions and great flexibility for developers and global e-commerce partners. A modular code based solution allows easy customization, faster turnaround and flexible deployment for the environment of a private or public cloud. It contains efficient and extensive API’s for scalable third party solution and capacity of building easier variations for your e-commerce solution. It also includes a wide range of extension like turnkey to enhance your store affordably.

Engaging experience of shopping:

The new feature of responsive themes creates an engaging environment and offers a personal touch solution for anytime shopping. It allows you to share your brand or products rigorously through incorporated videos and easier customization. It improves the rate of conversion by offering easier customization with minimal steps and informative checkouts. The new feature of one-click account creation offers convenience to customers as it saves profiles for future purchase as well.  

Revolutionary merchant experience:

It offers revolutionary merchant experience by enabling new design for admin panel that helps to streamline day to day tasks very efficiently without extending your team size. The touch-friendly feature helps to improve your business tool by optimizing your operations and you can keep track of sales record or updates easily. You can add a new product effortlessly in admin panel with a step by step guide provided in the tool to make business faster than ever before.

High-grade performance: 

The tool is pre-integrated with Apache Varnish that cache content of web pages and optimizes images for better loading performance. Magento 2.0 offers standalone master database along with several slave databases for enterprise-grade performance and scalability.

Secure payment mode: 

It is integrated with secure payment gateways like Braintree, Authorize.net, CyberSource, WorldPay and Paypal with an improved version of security to chase PCI compliance at the easiest level. 

Easy to maintain and upgrade: 

Its modern modular architecture helps to diminish cost and complexity of website maintenance and can easily incorporate newly introduced functionality on quarterly basis to achieve enhanced sales experience.  

So, why are you waiting? Just explore your business sky high with the help of Magento 2.0. If you need any help, please feel free to write me at heerendrap@gmail.com

Whether PHP or ASP.net Userfriendly for Web Applications?

Both technologies are used in large web applications and large successful websites. Therefore, both languages are great to handle any large eCommerce store. But the resource and deployment is easier on PHP compare to ASP.net. Please review below considerable points for the comparison between 2 programming languages/platforms.

There are few factors to be considered that will prove to select programming language over the other.

Scalability & Ease of Maintenance

It has nothing to do with PHP or ASP.NET, it completely depends upon

i. Programmer’s experience
ii. Programming practices
iii. Following the programming guidelines & standard (e.g. if it is well commented, followed MVC, etc.)
iv. And programming framework used for the development.

Performance & Speed

This subject has been in hot discussion for the long time and people participated in the debate, have been particular to promote one of the technologies instead of informing the audience.

There are many factors to count when you really want to measure the speed of any web application, thus I don’t see any noticeable reason for any programming language over the speed and performance of the web applications. But other related things make effects in the speed & performance. Below is the analysis of some common and uncommon scenarios in this regard

Scenario 1: This is very common of any website, the website would be to access and query the database and output the result on the web server and then to the web browser. So on this scenario, all programming are doing their part fairly as they communicate and interface with database server and web servers properly. So the speed of the technology doesn’t to do anything with it but the speed of this process depends on the database server, web server, client’s web browser / computer and bandwidth.

When it comes to compare most used databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL and Oracle all are fighting for speed and performance. We regularly see new features and performance revised by the data server in every latest upgrade. Therefore, all databases have great performances if the developer uses optimized SQL queries when needed and can use advanced features such as caching etc.

Based on the research, the communication and interfacing between PHP and MySQL are faster than ASP.net and MSSQL but that is not highly noticeable.

Scenario 2: It is again to communicate to access the file and find images to send them to the web server. Where programming languages don’t have a lot to do as it depends on the type of operating System, file type/size which has the liability of communicating with the programming language.

 Most veteran says, the Linux OS and ext4 (file system) performs better than Windows OS and NTFS (file system).

Scenario 3: It is not a common scenario. ASP.net is written in C# (called C sharp) it is saying that C# is faster than PHP. Thus, if a web page needs to execute a 2,000,000 loops execution of a calculation, C# will win over PHP. However it doesn’t happen very often, the most loop execution of a calculation could be in 100s or in 1000s but not in 2,000,000s.

Some additional factors can also have an effect on the performance, but that nothing to do with programming languages:
i. Programmer’s ability to optimize the code.
ii. Programmer’s ability to write advanced and optimized database queries.
iii. Functionality required.

Cost

PHP, MySQL server, PostgreSQL server, Apache Server and Linux OS all are open source and are free with their upgrades. Therefore, there is no licensing cost PHP even an additional standby server can be maintained as a backup or can run multiple servers to balance the load.

Further, LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP) is very much popular among hosting companies and its popularity result in a lower monthly hosting cost compared to windows hosting.

ASP.net and IIS are free if you buy Windows OS. Otherwise, there is an additional licensing cost for a Microsoft Windows Server, MSSQL server and for future upgrades too. So it can be even more expensive if the site becomes famous and needs to run on the multiple servers to balance the load, standby or server clustering etc.

Support and Resources

Since LAMP is an open source, there are lots of dedicated and friendly developers across the globe that continuously make enhancement and upgrades and provide support to open source community. Hence, PHP and LAMP resources are easily available for any support.

ASP.net depends on the developers who work at Microsoft for making improvements and updates. So, the contributors are in very less number to solve the ASP.net challenges.

Time & Deploy

It requires a heavy amount of code to complete any complex features and functionality with ASP.net compared to PHP, which adds more time in the development.

Additionally, PHP is interpreted at the server, so when modifying any functionality, can be reviewed without any additional steps. On the other hand, ASP.net requires compiling every time the code changed. Hence in result it is time-consuming when modifying your own code.

Platform

PHP runs on any platform e.g. Linux, UNIX, Mac OSX, and Windows hence it is platform independent. While, ASP.net is platform dependent since it only runs on Windows platform.

M-Commerce trends are shaping across the globe

Smartphones are one of the forthcoming striking equipment for shopping, searching and other social activities, according to the reports of State of mobile-commerce in 2015. Findings were based on the number of transactions gathered early this year from digital retail and travel firms that uses the marketing solutions. Resources considered the activities of consumers who used desktop PCs, smartphones, phablets, tablets for either browsing or shopping.

The report shows a sharp increase in all mCommerce activities. For e.g. mobile purchase represented more than 23% of the entire online transactions worldwide.

Now the retailers are making a smartphone a priority, the report disclosed, with the result that over 45% of their transactions now comes via that channel. Overall, the websites of worldwide retailers, which are optimized for mCommerce posted a conversion rate of 3.2%, compared with 1.5% for non-optimized websites. In-app advertising has also played a major role to smartphone online shopping. Therefore, mobile apps generated over 45% of their revenues, and 42% of last-minute travel booking happens via smartphone or tablets.

Mobile phones are the devices of choice for the online shoppers, accounting 45% of all m-commerce transactions. iOS devices are making it more interesting while covering over 50% of all transactions.

Multi-channel shopping is also becoming more common nowadays. The report said that 40% of digital purchases involved at 2 or more platforms or devices. Use of multiple devices did not mean that the customers were abandoning their known retailers. In 52% of cases, shoppers simply used several devices to consult the same retailer more than twice before buying anything. Even if a consumer searched and enquired the through desktop or laptop, but actually 23% of them bought on handheld devices.

The industry sectors with the greatest proportions of m-commerce include fashion, luxury, travel and sport – wherein one of out of 5 transactions was made via a smartphone during first 2 quarter of 2015.

Online survey estimates that nearly 35% of online consumers worldwide ages 14 or older will at least place 1 order in 2015.The smartphone will keep on to claim a significant growth in online transactions. According to resources, mobile will lead up to 40% of all e-commerce transactions worldwide by the end of 2015.

Mobile App Development Trends 2015

The mobile app development industry is flourishing and continuing to grow year and year. We saw that how the mobile app market trends are maturing towards wearable devices and

m-Commerce. It is observed that the hugely increased focus on app analytics and on mobile app store optimization along with mobile app marketing. We noticed few things in Mobile Apps Development these days and the trends are

Wearable Tech

We are grateful to Apple and Android watches, the wearable technology remained one of the most discussed topics in the tech and electronics industry till now. Therefore, apps for wearable devices have been designed mostly focused on fitness, healthcare industry and to manage the calendar activity. The wearable devices are reaching to the enterprises to enhance the productivity and efficiency graph of it. The conclusion states that the Mobile App Development will be moving towards wearable device application for enterprise and other various industries.

M-Commerce, Banking and Mobile Payments

According to studies, 25% of retail e-Commerce trade in 2015 is done on the smartphones or tablets. Various analyst and industry believe that this optimistic trend will continue over the next 3 – 4 years and even the consumer ratio will increase towards m-Commerce. Along with banking industry, Apple and Google has also launched their wallet (Apple Pay) apps wherein user can add money to their wallet and these e-wallets can be used to pay your utility bills online, e- shopping, etc. In 2015, we observed, using a smartphone to pay and purchase without debit or credit card has become more common with these e-wallets. It allows mobile developers to develop the mobile apps that can accept the payment without debit/credit cards.

In-App advertising and purchasing

According to new study from multiple research firms, the in-app advertising industry has formed by leap and bounce and total spend in-app advertising on mobile devices has reached to approximate $7.1 billion till now. Mobile Ad networks are not limited to only banners ad but integrating and experimenting with a variety of ad formats. Hence, we can say that mobile app advertising and in-app purchase is now a primary focus of monetization.

Outsource mobile app development to India

The count of the Smartphone has been increased by leaps and bounce across the globe. Therefore, it becomes necessary to have an app across popular platforms such as Android, iOS, and Windows etc. for all the businesses which have phenomenal footfall on their websites. However, you can also pick the mobile app development if you are an entrepreneur or startup and want to lead the industry online.

In order to develop a mobile app, India has been an outsourcing hub for any kind of website design, development projects for many years. However, India has also stepped into the space of mobile app development and emerged as the favorite outsourcing place for all size of companies and entrepreneurs.

There are few things which cannot be avoided during the selection of your outsourcing partner for your Mobile Apps Development, Please check them below:

• Do your homework on potential outsource partner

Nowadays, there are millions of companies, who do mobile apps development. Therefore, before selecting your outsourcing partner, do your research about companies. Search for their reviews and if you find it satisfactory. Now, you should contact them and ask them for their successful projects, case studies, and client’s contact details for reference.

Talk to their clients and ask them if the service provider was cool and on the requirement during the project. Also, if the project was delivered successfully within the timeframe and without any if & but.

Please make a note the cheapest service provider doesn’t mean he is the best provider. If you choose to work with the cheapest provider he may not be able to understand your full requirement and won the project first and then may come up with a request for some extra bucks.

• Explain your requirement to your outsource partner

When you want to outsource your mobile app, make sure that you explained every corner of the app to your outsource partner. So, the service provider understands the requirement very well and develop the same what you’ve been looking for. In order to share the requirement, do not forget to share:

• How the app supposed to work?
• What industry do you want to cater?
• How the app should look alike?

If you succeed in explaining your developer all these points and more information if that solves the purpose. We’ll assure your outsource mobile app development company will make you happy with the outcome.

Develop a website leveraging WordPress CMS

There are 3 important things to start a website for your business. First an attractive user-friendly design with some great graphics experience, second the design must be converted to a W3C validated HTML5, CSS3 with responsive web pages and the third step is to implement the HTML in an efficient functional code with dynamic CMS. All steps look incomplete without each other and excelling in all is essential to develop a good website.

If you are not a programmer yourself, the open source society has rewarded us with WordPress, an open source website content management system tool. WordPress is a highly recommended and widely used content management system for non-programmer community to design their own website. When it comes to creating a custom design in WordPress is not that easy, but if you may follow below steps to convert your PSD to WordPress template.


Valid PSD to HTML Conversion

After preparing a PSD design of your website, the first step comes to PSD to HTML conversion of your design toward building your website. During the HTML conversion, there are 2 stages first is to slice the design and then write the CSS & JS in a separate file and HTML in another file.

The design layout will be sliced into multiple design files having their own design component of the overall design. This is important because the design cannot be coded in a single image file; now write the CSS wherein you need to define all font style, background, header tags and other important design aspects.

All small designs which sliced earlier will be embedded again with the help of CSS and HTML. The buttons and backgrounds will also be embedded in the form of CSS. JavaScrip/JQuery will help you to embed required transitions on the page to make your page effective. On the other hand, you already have the index.html, where it is to embed the style.css and JS files in order to complete the PSD to HTML Conversion.

During this process, you need to make sure the HTML/CSS is written to the W3C standard which is very much important to make your web page Search Engine Friendly. It means if your page is W3C validated, using robust, semantic, commented code will help search engine’s crawler or robot to index the important contents and pages in respective search engines for eg. Google, Yahoo! and Bing etc.

WordPress implementation

Now, you are done with PSD to HTML conversion and you must have 4 files with you i.e. style.css, index.html, images folder and .js files; which need to be implemented in WordPress to complete the PSD to WordPress development.

You need to explore the wp-admin and need to place the HTML, CSS, JavaScript files along with sliced images on the server as per WordPress structure. Now, your simple WordPress site is ready to rock the World Wide Web.

In addition, WordPress also provides thousands of free and paid plugins which you can also implement on your website to make your website more productive and dynamic. Some of the plugins are very useful for SEO performance of the site. Additionally, if you want to build a custom WordPress site with custom functionality you can always find professional PSD to WordPress Development firms across the globe and can avail the services.

Thanks for your time!