Minerva Shipping Extension
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/pickup-at-event-multiple-flatrates.html
- FREE – This extension offers your customers the option to collect their order at your store (or other collection points)

Web Forms
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/webforms-community-edition.html
- FREE – A nifty form creator complete with Captcha allowing you to build your own contact forms and embed it anywhere on your website.
In my case I had a little Product Enquiry form put into all product pages.

Bank Payment
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/bankpayment.html
- FREE – Allows your customers the option to pay by Bank Transfer/EFT, the checkout process is complete and custom is given bank account details to complete payment.

Fooman Speedster
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/fooman-speedster.html
- FREE-  Must have extension that gives your Magento store a speed boost. It compresses and caches your JS and CSS code.

Seamless Delete Order
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/seamless-delete-order.html
- FREE- For some odd reason (staff security i guess) Magento does not allow you to easily delete orders. I’d recommend this extension to use in a test enviroment and delete all your sample orders. In a Live store, rather cancel the order and keep a record of it somewhere instead of deleting it altogether.

Fooman Jirafe
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/jirafe-analytics-free-extension-4173.html
- FREE – A fantastic little realtime analytics extension. While not as indepth as Google Analytics, it gives you some quick and valuable information such as keywords, referrals, conversion info and more.

Ebizmarts Mailchimp Integration
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/ebizmarts-mailchimp-sync-official-full-mailchimp-integration.html
- FREE – a must have extension to integrate your magento store with your Mailchimp email list and order tracking

Global PDF
http://www.maisondulogiciel.com/english/magento/global-pdf.html
- 90euro – This extension allows you to create a PDF catalog of your store.  You can edit existing pdf’s for your shipping, invoicing and so on. We use it primarily to generate a printable catalog of our products. Their support is rudimentary at best but documentation is precise and detailed. More then enough to get going.

Quick Add Product
http://www.maisondulogiciel.com/english/magento/quick-product-creation.html
- 60euro -  The default version of this extension allows you to create products quicker then the normal Magento “step by step” method. Unfortunately it lacked the ability to include an image and category.  I have since modified this to include those missing features and further modifying it to do a few custom actions. More on this in another blog post.

Magento Payment Gateway -
*I have not used this but most likely plan on using it in coming weeks.*
http://www.customscripts.co.za/
- R600 (about $70) – A  Magento MyGate payment gateway script. They also offer various other gateway extensions.

This is by no means a definitive Magento list however  I can assure you i have tried, tested and successfully implemented these in my stores.

I would suggest browsing the Magento Connect repository for hundreds of free and premium themes that you can download or purchase, I decided to go  with www.HelloThemes.com

They offer an awesome range of themes, all of which are professionally designed, polished, seo optimized and up to date with current design trends.  Undecided on what theme to choose (they all looked so good!) I purchased a 1 year Theme Club license for $99.  Essentially giving me access to ALL  their past themes and at least 2 new themes a month for the next year. Bargain!

Like any reputable Theme seller they offer detailed installation documentation, setup video’s, support forums and more. Off course you could opt for a completely custom developed design and theme but expect to spend on this. Depending on the designer, and their talent one should budget a minimum of $600, and ideally shoot for upwards of $1500 for some really good designs.

Lastly I needed to modify their themes to suit my needs.  Work like this is normally to small for a company to take on and I resort to freelancers.   Sites like Freelancer.com and Maglance.com are great for finding freelancers willing to take on small jobs.

Often I advise companies to treat an online store like a physical store. In a brick & mortar store one can spend thousands of rands on fixtures,  point-of-sale signage, lighting, flooring etc. Using the same reasoning, surely you should be spending on making your online store look professional and polished.   The notion of “online store” being cheap and free needs to be dispelled. Sure start-up costs and overheads might be lower then a brick & mortar store, but overheads are there and one should be spending some cash to keep things running smoothly.

With the above being said, I try to go live as soon as possible. Afterall if your ecommerce store is not live and selling, then it is running at a loss.  Be reasonable and realistic, do as much as you can to get things going, the rest you can tackle after you go live and tweak as you go along.

Next post: some of the extensions I use and recommend.

First things first. Find a Webhost!

There are hundreds of bloggers ranting about how unstable Magento is and how resource heavy it is.  Yes Magento is a resource hog, but if your  hosting is setup correctly, there is little chance of your store crashing.

Ideally a dedicated server is great, but this comes a price and with a startup store, funds are limited.  I’d recommend and am currently using a Shared Hosting platform, however I’ve ensured the webhost is familiar with Magento and the necessary requirements. In fact most, if not all Magento specialist stores off it as a “one click” application. Saving you the trouble of uploading and manually installing it.

Where does one find such a host?  Look at www.MagentoEcommerce.com – the official Magento website and my new favorite website.

Navigate your way to their Solution & Industry Partners, also look at the Magento Wiki

The two companies listed under South Africa did not inspire much confidence. I chose to go with Nexcess, an American based hosting company with servers in USA and the UK, additionally  they are an official Magento Enterprise Partner. This was the deal clincher for me.

While not as cheap as your typical $9.95 Dreamhost package, these cost a little more but offer a stack of Magento optimized features and more  importantly their Magento certification means they can assist when things go pear shaped. At the end of the day you need to decide how important and serious your ecommerce project is. Spend a little extra and save in the long run with stability, speed and security.

I opted for the USA Based Magento Package, and hosting multiple stores i went with their SIP-200 Package for $79.95/month. I suppose for a single store you could go with their $29 solution.

Their service is nothing short of exceptional,  pre-sales questions and general setup questions where resolved inside of an hour or at times after a few minutes. All the other hosting bells and whistles are included (control panel, email, etc) In our case we use Google Apps to manage our email, Nexcess support staff setup the correct DNS & configurations in less then 10 minutes.

I  highly recommended Nexcess.net

When it comes to Magento hosting in South Africa, unfortunately I have not come across South African hosting companies who are geared up to host Magento or offer Magento optimized servers and hardware.

Currently i have 2 public Magento stores (ie. TerrificTrophies & BLKcherry) running on the Nexcess SIP-200 package. Each site has approximately 120 products.  Our combined bandwidth usage is approximately 20gigs a month and the stores combined receive about 12 000 unique visitors a month.  So far we have had zero downtime and speeds (for an internationally hosted website) is pretty impressive.

For larger stores (upwards of 1000 products and receiving 100k+ visitors a month) logic would dictate one to utilize a dedicated server and consider content delivery networks or some sort of clustered server solution to manage your traffic.

Next post will deal with store front design and themes.

As it stands right now, 2 of my stores are running on Magento Community Edition (CE for short) – these are,

www.TerrificTrophies.co.za – a niche store specializing in trophies and medals.

www.BLKcherry.co.za – our furniture experimental store retailing outdoor furniture and lounge suites.

Before choosing Magento CE the first decision was “Why Choose Magento?” in other words, what makes Magento better then other open source shopping carts.

The usual features are standard on all shopping cart software. Categories, product listings, checkout system, etc.

Two important factors for me were:

1.  community.Magento has a thriving community, granted some parts of their forum is dead. However one can find a wealth of information on their forums, and on several independent blogs. Additionally there are hundreds if not thousands of agencies and freelancers who specialize in Magento development.
2. extensions. aka Plugins, modules or add-ons. Features that one can add to enhance your store. From PDF catalog generations, to analytics to social media sharing. There is nearly a plugin for every need out there. Off course one can always hire a Magento developer to build up any customized extensions.

Sure there are other reasons such as popularity, reviews, SEO usability, and looking at other leading ecommerce stores but to me these were my deciding factors.

After looking at the above, i narrowed by choice to:

• Magento Community Edition
• Prestashop
• Opencart

I’d like to mention OScommerce but personally i think its about as useful as Windows98.

Opencart & Prestashop looked great but Magento CE just looked that much better. More polished, much more features and what seems to be a more popular choice. Opencart & Prestashop seem to be much more lighter on resources and can work on just about any hosting environment. It also seems to have a much easier learning curve.
All that aside, I’m quite happy with my choice of Magento for our stores and future stores.

I’d like to point out that I prefer a dedicated ecommerce solution, I’ve chosen not to look at “bolt on” solutions such as WP-Ecommerce (WordPress plugin) and Virtuemart (joomla add on).
I have used Wp-Ecommerce in the past with mediocre results. I suppose these would work for really small stores (less then 50 products). Right tool for the job I say.
Wordpress and (to some extent) Joomla is nothing short of amazing and I have done dozens of websites using WordPress, however for ecommerce it just falls short in my opinion.

Magento CE is not the holy grail of ecommerce. Yes it may be free and Open Source but it is not cheap. Expect to spend countless hours simply learning the features of running a store. In the last 3 or 4 months I have probably spent about 100+ hours simply exploring the interface, configurations, catalog system, installing add-on extensions and modifying themes. More importantly, expect to spend a wad of cash on customizing your store. I suppose one  could spend hours trying to hack it but often I prefer to simply outsource mundane coding work or have modules created that are beyond my skill set.

I think most Magento store owners and developers will agree, Magento CE has a very steep learning curve but the rewards are there when you have a profit generating online store.

With my existing 2 stores, our primary goal is to have an easy to navigate catalog that is seo-friendly, easily up-datable and all prices visible. A product xml feed is necessary to list your goods with price comparison sites.

Looking at BLKcherry.co.za – being a furniture store, almost all customers prefer to visit the showroom and go through the whole tactile shopping experience, TerrificTrophies.co.za on the other hand, most customers prefer to email or call us and discuss their order and arrange for customizations such as engraving, gel badging and so on.

Essentially the shopping cart feature is rarely used. Its great to have and we are receiving a steady trickle of online sales.

The shopping cart feature, one could say, is a bonus. With these two stores, the bulk of sales are done by store visits and via email/telephone.

All in all we are having great success with Magento.  A very informal statistic and comparison:  With our trophy store, it took 3 weeks to receive 49 online transactions, and it took nearly 10 months to receive 70 online transactionswhile we were using WP-Ecommerce.

Next post in this series will tackle hosting a Magento store.

The event was absolutely awesome with Durban showcasing some of the best automotive styling concepts and designs out there.   We commissioned FreeStyleFilms.co.za to shoot the event,  check out a trailer video of the days event.

Autostyle Expo Durban, South Africa from Freestyle Films on Vimeo.

That said,  be sure to support South African cinema and support a movie with a positive message.  Their cast should appeal to all race groups in South Africa,  check out the trailer below. I’ve been told there’s tons of Autostyle placements from the race tracks to the vehicle signage to authentic street credible accessories.

The Race-ist Movie is showing at major cinemas in South Africa from 1st April 2010