There are million Magento stores with a wide range of extensions aimed at engaging customers and helping merchants boost sales.

Since I like to see what solutions the store owners have chosen for these purposes, I’d like to share with you a success story I’ve got from one of our customers. Read on to learn how iPhone Theme helped Zap Sweets increase mobile sales by 15%.

Who: zapsweets.co.uk

What: Not only does Zap Sweets specialize in bulk confectionery but they stock a vast range of wholesale retro sweets, chocolate, fudge, American candy, drinks and lots, lots more.

Where: London, UK

Q: Tell us a little about your business, and how you became involved with Magento.

A: The business was initially established in 2009 after planning to launch an online e-commerce store. Whilst many ideas were discussed, finally the idea of creating a confectionery store that was a fun, modern environment where customers could browse and reminisce about sweets from the past won the battle!

When the researching began, we researched many shopping carts to find the most suitable to the business. Magento was our favorite from the very start. It was packed full of features and could be easily customized to our needs.

Q: So, you had no experience with Magento. What was the hardest thing in launching an ecommerce store?

A: Launching our Magento store took around 3-4 months from start to finish. The majority of the time was spent adding products and uploading good quality images to attract customers to our store.

We also spent a lot of time optimizing and tuning our store to ensure that it runs at lightening speeds! We combined and tweaked the JS/CSS files to ensure that any unused code was removed. We also took full advantage of the .htaccess file and installed Varnish on our VPS server which cut loading times by almost 3s! It has paid off in the long run as our customers often compliment us on our fast site.

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This month we’ll spotlight Magento store that has only – attention – four items in the catalog, Kirkland Science Labs!

‘Life should be good’ the company’s slogan says, and the business IS good confirms Brad Dennis, the store owner I had the chance to talk to. Read on to learn the company’s follow up strategy and how the store managed to increase sales by 8%.

Who: kirklandsciencelabs.com

What: Kirkland Science Labs design and sell supplement stacks. A stack is a synergistic formulation of nutrients that work together to help you achieve your goals faster.

Where: Seattle, US

Q: How you became involved with Magento?

A: We have been running our store a little over a year. But we used this platform for an earlier business so we had experience with Magento.

Q: What was the hardest thing in launching a Magento-based store?

A: Design is definitely the hardest part. It’s a real intensive process getting the store & emails themed and developed the way you want. Especially with add-ons.

Image Slider, Featured Products, Z-Blocks & Knowledge Base in use.
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Many store owners often ask me how to take part in our regular ‘Store of the Month’ section and submit their store. Well, there are no explicit steps. Some merchants showcase their stores in our forum, others left reviews on the extensions they’ve bought on the product pages. So, any activity is welcome!

This time I had the opportunity to interview Stefan Schwann, the chief of web development and design of electronic4you, to gain some insights into what goes into creating a Magento store from scratch and why the platform continues to be so popular.

Who: http://electronic4you.at

What: This Austria based retailer sells electronic items, like TV’s, audio products, handies, smartphones, tablet computers, etc. They sell products online and provide shipping within the country and outside Austria.

electronic4you has eight stores were customers can pick up their online orders or take a look at a product before buying it.

The company’s goal is to provide the best quality, price and customer service.

Where: Klagenfurt, Austria

Q. What attracted electronic4you to Magento?

A. Back in 2010, when we began the development of our store we faced the problem of choosing a platform.

We carefully analyzed pros and cons of existing ecommerce platforms and the decision fell to Magento. It was the best platform existing on the market at that time.

Magento can handle a huge amount of products and orders without any problems and the customization of the look and feel is also easy.

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I had a chance to prove the theory that you are just six degrees of separation from anyone in the world recently. Reviewing our customers stores to choose the one for my ‘Store of the Month’ section I stumbled on Dip ‘N Dive.

The first thing that attracted my attention was the fact that the store used 12 aheadWorks extensions, quite many, I thought. Secondly, they had been involved with Magento for two years.

As chance would have it, Oleksiy Chaukin, the person I contacted, appeared to be our former countryman. Moreover, the friend who recommended Oleksiy extensions happened to know aheadWorks owners. In my case the chain of acquaintances had four intermediaries.

Who: dipndive.com

What: Established in 1976, Dip ‘N Dive maintains a full service retail store, travel department, teaching facility and repair center. For over 30 years Dip ‘n Dive has been instructing and outfitting divers all over the world. At dipndive.com they train new divers, advanced divers, master divers, or even dive masters and instructors. The retail store features the latest in diving equipment from nationally recognized manufacturers.

Where: Buffalo, NY, USA

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In this post I’d like to tell you about aheadWorks coupons, discounts and loyalty program and how you can get a significant discount even in your first order.

aheadWorks store is empowered with the in-house module Magento Points & Rewards. With the help of this Magento extension we reward our customers for simple things such as signing up for a site, newsletter subscription, posting a review to a product, just to name a few.

The reward program is obvious and most customers can see it right away when they hit their account page.

Most our customers and potential customers are our Facebook fans and can use ‘Fan’s only 5% discount’ while placing an order too.

A picture is worth a thousand words. The graphic below explains how to get a discount on the spot.

Steps to get aheadWorks discount

Step 1

· Sign up for a new account – Get 1$ to your balance

· Subscribe for a newsletter – Get 2$ to your balance

Step 2

 · Find 5% off aheadWorks coupon code* on our Facebook page

*The aheadWorks coupon code works for 1 order only.

Step 3

 · Add the second item to cart – Get extra 5% off your entire order.

These three discounts can work together.

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Thousands of companies are using Magento Enterprise to grow their online businesses. Today I sat down with Michael Carlisle, CTO at MusicShop, to learn more about the challenges they faced moving from Magento CE to Magento EE edition.

Who: MusicShop.com.au, Pushys.com.au

What: The Music Shop Online originally started out as an eBay store. It ran out of the Brisbane office of The Music Shop retail store in Australia. As the eBay store grew, the Managing Directors could see the potential for the online market space, and decided to launch its own website called MusicShop.com.au in 2007 and consequently had to move into their own 400m square warehouse in Salisbury, Brisbane Australia.

Over the past 4-5 years, MusicShop.com.au has grown considerably and has added Pushys.com.au to their online business, which sells cycling accessories and components. Because of this growth, MusicShop.com.au and Pushys.com.au moved into a much larger distribution centre boasting 2500m square warehouse space at the start of 2012.

Where: Salisbury, Brisbane Australia

Q: You own two stores. How long have you been running each of them?

A: MusicShop.com.au has been running since 2007. Pushys.com.au commenced on July 2011.

Q: Tell us a little about your business, and how you became involved with Magento.

A: We initially became involved with Magento very early on when the platform was in Beta stage in 2007.

Even in Magento’s Beta form, it still boasted better features and options than what was offered at the time on other platforms. And of course, it was open source.

More so than, Magento offered a very active community on their forums for support, and a positive development path which was key to us joining so early on.

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Hi there and welcome back to our ‘Store of the Month’ series. It has been always interesting to learn how our customers came up with Magento platform, what features attracted them most of all, and what issues they probably faced.

Today I had a chance to speak with Jerome Ng, an aheadWorks community member and a General Manager of online audio products shop TREOO. Jerome can be rightfully considered a pioneer for Magento, as they started to use the platform when Magento was at its infant stages.

In this interview, Jerome expands on moving from Zen Cart and his attempt to self code.

Who: http://www.treoo.com

What: TREOO.com is a Singapore based e-retailer of genuine portable audio products. They provide an online platform that connects distributors & manufacturers of audio brands to audiophile clients.

Where: Singapore, Singapore

Q: How long have you been running your store?

A: We have been in business since October 2008, so up to 3 years and running.

Q: Tell us a little about your business, and how you became involved with Magento.

A: We started with simple accessories shop on Zen Cart, drop shipping products from Apple accessories to even sex toys during our startup period. It was a period of trial and error, learning to code and to design. Nobody saw it coming to today’s success.

We improved on our site design till we meet Logitech who wanted to utilize our platform to develop their eCommerce project. We realized that this was a great opportunity to tap on and to improve the site.

Magento was new but it was a platform that people were talking about. There were so many great things about an eCommerce store that allowed people to easily upgrade their sites (as compared to Zencart). So, it was a natural move (except for the harder migration part).

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