Nowadays it’s really trendy to optimize websites for mobile devices. We do our utmost to let Magento store owners be in step with the times. After great success of the iPhone Theme for Magento we are glad to introduce a new mobile module which is available with 50% discount right now.

The Mobile Order Tracking Magento extension from aheadWorks will help you express caring attitude towards your clients. Undoubtedly, it will improve your customer service and enhance the level of customer satisfaction.

With Mobile Order Tracking, your customers can track the shipment & payment statuses all the way through the delivery process using mobile devices or desktop computers. They can get updated information about their orders at any moment.

Now it’s so easy to track orders. Your clients get the real-time access to the information without logging-in to your web store. It’s really convenient. The customers receive a completely protected link by email. Following it they get admission to the details of shipment & payment statuses via mobile phones or PC’s.

Moreover, Mobile Order Tracking Magento extension gives the opportunity to check shipment & payment statuses from your Magento store easily and quickly. Your customers have to enter only their order ID and email address.

Cater to your clientele. Pleasantly surprise your customers with new possibilities. The Mobile Order Tracking Magento extension will give them a positive experience and encourage future purchases.

Hurry up and get it now! The 50% OFF price is only available for a limited time.

As you already might know, on February 1, 2012 Magento announced the end-of-life of Magento Professional.

Here is the quote from an article posted on the official Magento blog:”Following an extensive review of our current solutions and projected customer needs, we are making an important change: we are phasing out the Magento Professional Edition.

While Magento Professional was embraced by a significant number of merchants, we have seen much greater demand for our Enterprise and new Enterprise Premium offerings.”

aheadWorks won’t phase out its Magento PE extensions

aheadWorks, on its part, wants to assure all our Magento Professional customers that we are not going to phase out the PE extensions. We will continue to work with our Professional customers and provide them with the best eCommerce solutions and custom support.

If customers running PE-based stores see the value in upgrading to Magento Enterprise or downgrading to Community editions, we are happy to offer a 50% and 25% discount correspondingly for all our Magento extensions and Themes.

All you have to do is contact us and get a personal coupon code.

We are just about to release our new Magento extension which will help your customers easily track their orders from their mobile devices as well as PC’s. Our QA department has already tested it carefully and the extension is on the final stage of preparing for final release.

Now we are looking for some volunteers from the Magento community to finalize our tests. Every volunteer will get a significant discount after the extension official release.

If you run Magento CE 1.5+ or PE/EE 1.11 and have DHL, FedEx or UPS installed and configured, please contact Peter Samoilov at samoilov@aheadworks.com for further details.

A study done by the Association of Sales Executives revealed that the majority of sales happen after the follow-ups.

With the Follow Up Email extension, you can make the emails automatically sent to customers on any event – abandoned cart, order obtained certain status, customer added product to wishlist, etc. This indispensable tool will help you win more sales and always stay in close touch with your consumers.

Since the latest update of Follow Up Email, you can specify a tracking code for every rule and analyze the efficiency of your follow-ups in Google Analytics.

Today we are excited to release Follow Up Email v.3.3.4 with the following bug fixes:

• Error on running cron
• Emails sending improvements
• Newsletter template disappears from FUE rules if it has been changed
• Minor bug fixes

Learn more about the extension features and play with the Follow Up Email demo on the product page.

Be sure to read Part 1 of this interview where Steve describes the first years of using Magento and the positive changes happened in the past few years.

Q: What’s the most powerful extension/s for you and why?

A: Well, Z-Blocks has been a dream. We’re exploring new ways to use it all of the time. Right now we’re looking at getting the RSS Reader to bring in multiple feeds, from our blogs, our Forums, our Facebook page, put them into Z-Blocks and start displaying them in different places, so we have dynamic content to engage our customers and encourage them to interact with us in those settings.

We also have on tap to try to get polls into Z-Blocks, so that we can schedule the old poll to go offline and a new one to come online weekly without us having to be there at that time to make that change. Z-Blocks is SO powerful.

Although I’ve had it for a long while and the shine has worn off and I’m not quite as enamored as I once was, the Review Rotator is a powerful tool. Marketers know just how powerful reviews are, and having them out in a sidebar where they might attract some attention to a previously untried product, is invaluable. The extension allows you to apply a filter so that you don’t get the really horrible reviews rotating through either. There aren’t very many, but you know there are those people that just like to complain.

Q: What extension can’t you do without?

A: Help Desk Ultimate. My staff loves it. Since we have implemented it, so many fewer things have slipped through the cracks. I do believe there would be real tears if we had to do without it.

Advanced Reports isn’t all that glamorous, but personally I don’t think that the regular Magento sales reports are entirely accurate. Sometimes, I get vastly different numbers from Magento > Sales and Advanced Reports > Sales. I think part of it has to do with cancelled orders, but I haven’t been able to figure out the rest. But Advanced Reports is configurable so that I can filter out cancelled orders and any other status that I want and get a really accurate report of sales.

Q: Extension of your dream. What extension would you like to use in your store that hasn’t been released yet?

A: A truly advanced search. Magento search is pretty awful. We have put a lot of work into creating hard links for certain search terms so that our folks get where we think they want to go very quickly. But now we have articles and videos with descriptions in WordPress, articles in AW Knowledgebase, CMS pages, info in AW Product Questions, a PHPBB forum, customer reviews, two external blogs, and of course the product descriptions themselves.

I’m excited that aheadWorks has come out with the Advanced Search extension, and that they have plans to extend it to cover their existing content modules. But I’d like to see it go further. I’d like to be able to add content sources, give a URL or database access, and Title and Description, have the Title appear in a dropdown beside the search bar, so that I can select to search forum for example, or do global search or perhaps even search two areas at ones holding down the control key to select. And then have the results appear, like the top 5 results in each content category, organized by category, with a link that says “more from this category”.

I’ve had dreams of other modules, but they aren’t coming to mind right now. Well the one that I’ve had a number of customers requests is a rapid order entry page – something like what we get to use on the admin side. One more that I could have used in the past before we got an external system to do it, is an inventory management page where you could adjust inventory quantities line by line instead of having to browse through so many pages to change one number. Especially useful after taking a physical inventory.

Q: Any recommendations for people evaluating Magento?

A: Magento is great and getting better. I would recommend finding somebody faithful, with high availability to create and manage your website, though there are little quirks that pop up, either an individual, but more likely a trustworthy company. Trying to go super-cheap could result in a lot of heartache in the future.

Q: Any last words you might have?

A: I just want to mention something about AW tech support. The modules are pretty solid. I mean, we’ve had very few problems and some of them were not problems with the aheadWorks extensions, but were problems on my end that affected the AW extensions.

Tech support has resolved the issues that I have had, quickly fixing problems on the AW end, and helping me track down problems on my end. Also both tech support and sales have been helpful in providing information about how I can use various extensions. I’m pretty sure that they get tired of my inquiries, but it hasn’t shown yet.

Plus it’s not really advertised that well, but there is a 15 day money back guarantee. Sometimes I read the description, look at the pictures, and just don’t know if the extension is going to do what I want it to do. I get it, I test it. So far everything has gone into production and I haven’t asked for any money back!

Thank you Steve for such informative answers.

P.S. If you would like to share your store with Magento society, please feel free to contact me at korol@aheadworks.com

Steve will tell us about the first frustrating years of using Magento, the money he has spent to get a theme that was breaking with every upgrade. He also talks over the positive changes happened in the past few years and describes the extension of his dream.

Already intrigued? Keep on reading to know the lack of what extension can make his staff literally cry.

Who: http://www.beeyoutiful.com/

What: Beeyoutiful.com sells vitamins and other nutritional supplements, as well as some natural skin and hair products.

Where: Centerville, TN, USA

Q: Can you specify the list of extensions you’ve installed on your store?

A: Currently in production we have:

• Advanced Reports with New vs. Returning Customers, Sales by Coupon Code, and Sales by Payment Type units
• Grid Manager
• Help Desk Ultimate
• Knowledge Base
• Product Questions
• Review Rotator
• Z-Blocks

We have Advanced Search, iPhone Theme, and Video Testimonials in testing.

And we’re looking at RSS Reader, Checkout Promo, Market Segmentation Suite, and a couple of other extensions.

Q: How long have you been running your store?

A: We have been in operation since March of 2006, so just about 6 years. We’ve been on Magento since mid 2008. We used osCommerce before that.

Q: Why did you choose Magento as your current platform?

A: We were on osCommerce before, but the entire platform started going downhill. We had to edit core files. Edits here were breaking things there. I hired a programmer to fix this, and when everything was done, the result was something else broken. Then I had to pay the guys to fix the second thing. Sometimes they couldn’t find the problem. It got really frustrating because I was paying these guys, and not getting very far. It was even more frustrating when they couldn’t find the problems, and me, with my extremely limited knowledge of programming (I can read parts of the code but not all), was able to identify and fix some of the problems they couldn’t find.

We started looking around, chose Magento because of its flexibility and extensibility. I have the code. I can pay anybody to work on it, so one company isn’t going to have me over a barrel. I can get to my data whenever I want, export it, and move to a new platform if I want. Those aren’t possibilities with a lot of other platforms.

We looked at it when it was brand new, and we were one of the first adopters, which meant there were a lot of bugs, and there weren’t a lot of extensions. We spent a lot of money to get a theme that broke with every upgrade, and extensions that did basic functions, but didn’t do them very well. The first couple of years were frustrating.

We are so pleased that Magento has matured and that companies like aheadWorks are making extensions that cost hundreds of dollars that are far superior to the extensions we built for thousands. They are easy to install and there is a top notch customer support. The added bonuses make the experience even better.

Q: Do you use only aheadWorks’ extensions in your store?

A: No, we use some custom extensions and a few others we purchased from other companies. But we have almost as many AW extensions as we do all others combined, and with the quality extensions coming out from aheadWorks we’ll probably keep adding more.

Q: Why did you choose aheadWorks Co. as a Magento extensions provider?

A: Well, to start with, it was because AW made the extensions that did what we wanted. And I guess that is still the case, except that, if there are multiple companies providing an extension with the same functionality, we’ll usually choose aheadWorks because of the support, the ease of installation, the full compatibility with new Magento versions, and the compatibility and interoperability among AW modules.

On Monday I’ll post the second part of this interview, where Steve speaks about the most powerful module and shares his thoughts of the ideal ‘search’ extension. Stay tuned!

P.S. If you would like to share your store with Magento society, please feel free to contact me at korol@aheadworks.com

The Search Autocomplete and Suggest Magento extension helps your customers find what they are looking for in a few seconds and navigate directly to the desired product page, completely bypassing the search results page.

The new 3.2 version of Search Autocomplete and Suggest is now compatible with the Advanced Search aheadWorks extension.

The following bugs have been fixed in Search Autocomplete and Suggest v.3.2:

• Incorrect displaying of search results in Magento PE
• AW_All is updated

Learn more about the extension features and try the Search Autocomplete and Suggest demo on the product page.

We use Advanced Newsletter + MailChimp for our email marketing purposes. The Advanced Newsletter extension allows us to segment our subscribers and send them the information they are interested in only. MailChimp is very cool and useful email marketing service which lets us to successfully send our campaigns as well as thoroughly analyze them afterwards.

MailChimp allows reviewing subscribers’ activity. Don’t forget that this member rating is counted according to email opens and clicks. Here an email is tracked as “open” when recipient has images turned on. Unfortunately, it is not possible to define who has images turned off. So be careful and apologize if the email was sent to your regular reader by mistake

I analyzed the level of our subscribers’ engagement and came to the conclusion that about 50% of them either did not open our emails at all or opened them long ago. Our subscribers’ base is rather “mature”. No wonder that for several years many of our emails readers could move to other CMS, change their area of activity, forget password or get new email address.

I intended to clean out inactive members from our list as we didn’t want to boost our ego with laaaarge list of email addresses, but aimed to work only with those who are interested in the things we share with them. So it was decided to find subscribers with low member rating and send them our last email from aheadWorks.

Email marketing gurus say that you shouldn’t hope for high open rates of such emails. But I couldn’t just delete those people from our list – I wanted to give them the last chance.

When sending an email to people who haven’t read your newsletters for years you have only few seconds to attract the recipients’ attention and single your email out in the everyday flow of messages. So I had to find a “hook” – an emotionally strong phrase which makes people open the email. Such subject can be of any kind, but it should definitely touch people’s feelings and emotions. I found such phrase and got 6.2% open rate!

Great! People opened my email. But what’s next? I had to arouse their interest in Magento and aheadWorks and motivate them to keep reading us. A couple of teasers and 1.5% asked me not to delete their email addresses. So I can assure you – tell people what vitally important information you are going to share with them in the nearest future and get profit!

In my email, I also asked our subscribers to let me know why they had broken off the relations with aheadWorks and stopped reading our emails. I didn’t expect for a single answer but it was nice to get several emails where people told me that they were very busy at the moment and hadn’t a spare minute to check their email. I am proud and thankful that they’ve managed to find time to open my email as well as answer me.

My email sending gave the following results:

• successful deliveries – 98.9%
• opens – 6.1%
• unsubscribers – 0.3%
• asked to keep their email address – 1.5%

So, finally, let’s sum up what I’ve done and what you should do to cut “deadwood” from the subscribers’ list:

1. Use a “hook” in email subject
   to make them open your email.
    
2. Ask your subscribers why they stopped reading your messages
   to analyze what’s wrong.
    
3. Motivate your subscribers to keep reading your emails
   to convert them in your return customers.

Now I am sure that we can build our email marketing efficiently and will get trustworthy results. And the same I wish to you

Advanced Search is a perfect solution for search through Magento-based stores. This extension replaces an external search engine Sphinx so search works much faster, the server load is decreased, and the results become more trustworthy.

Some of the key improvements in Advanced Search v.1.1 include:

• CMS pages index
• Support of customer search terms
• Sphinx 2.0.3 compatibility

Also the following bug has been fixed:

• Incorrect attributes source

See the Advanced Search comparison table and play with the extension demo on the product page.

The On Sale Magento extension allows you to attract customers’ attention to any product by adding visually-appealing labels. Only 10 items are left? New product is out? Inform your customers about it. You can specify two different label images and call-to-action text for each item on the Product and Category pages, and also set the number of days for the label to disappear. Today we are excited to release the new 2.3 version of On Sale which is compatible with the Ajax Catalog aheadWorks extension. The following bugs have been fixed in On Sale v.2.3: Issues with multiple inquiries in database Minor bug fixes

See the extension in work on the On Sale product page.

In terms of growth, the extensions for Social & Marketing integration (+17 in comparison with November), Social (+14), Automation (+18), and Order Management (+10) are the leading ones. This way, the extensions for the Social & Marketing integration are ranking first for the second time in a row. All these useful tools provide Magento store owners with the new tools to improve their stores functionality & usability, and increase their revenue.

In total, the overall number of all the extensions in Magento Connect is 5877.

aheadWorks is looking forward to continue the research and we’ll be back in February 2012 to see the results for the first month of 2012.