As time passes by, I become convinced that Magento is very similar to Julius Caesar in its quest to conquer the world. Turned out, this famous Roman emperor took up the reins mostly of European terrains, but Magento, it seems, cherishes plans to gain the whole planet.

When a high popularity of Magento in Europe and both American continents is no longer questioned, Asia is still perceived as a tidbit by rival eCommerce platforms. It’s especially true for a tech tycoon Japan.

Common understanding of Magento state in the Land of the Rising Sun is vague. If you also wonder what’s going on in Japanese Magento market, meet Hirokazu Nishi for a brief talk. Currently he works as CTO at Celtic Corporation (which appears to be aheadWorks Official Partner!) and is in charge of Magento Meetup Tokyo organization.

Hirokazu, you provide Magento technical support and extension development service in Japan. How did you get interested in Magento in the first place?

H.N.: At the end of September 2007 I found the article about a new eCommerce software. It was an early version of Magento and I felt it would become a great platform. Then I started using Magento.

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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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Since my first days in Magento ecosystem for over a year by now, I regularly meet smart, broad-minded and open folks who are passionate about Magento in a very extraordinary way, as it might seem.

These people educate themselves constantly and their Magento expertise is heavily based on their willingness to get and share knowledge they possess. They spend a lot to cross half the world to participate in Magento events and often invest their private funds to organize meetups and hackathons of their own.

It’s not fair that you may not know them well. From now, I will try to bring popular Magento enthusiasts to our blog and reveal their personality to you. And you can challenge them with questions and comments!

Today I’m glad to talk with Andre Gugliotti, Brazilian Magento Evangelist, the organizer of Bargento Brazil and the author of webinar series in Portuguese about basics and tricks for Magento developers.

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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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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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