FireBear Studio - Magento 2 extensions & E-Commerce

Magento Community Edition 1.9.1 and Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 released!

November 25, 2014 - E-Commerce, Magento tips & tricks

A new version of Magento Enterprise Edition arrives today. Get ready for the new features, tools and responsive design capabilities. In addition, you will get faster technical issue resolution, better performance, and deeper insights.

Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 includes a new drag-and-drop tool, designed to make your work with product categories much easier. There are also new abilities to assign products to categories automatically by setting up different rules. Another new feature of 1.14.1 is swatches with more detailed product information. The new version of Magento Enterprise Edition is also much more responsive: the enhanced responsive design reference theme now includes responsive emails. Better performance and security are also represented in new Magento thanks to PHP 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 support. With Enterprise Edition 1.14.1, you will get the new support tool designed to generate detailed reports, the ability to make product updates by significantly larger team of administrators simultaneously, and Google Universal Analytics support. In general, more than 70 items have been improved in 1.14.1.
You can download Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14 at My Account. And download Magento Community Edition 1.9.1 at the download page.

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Why choose Magento over WordPress for your Ecommerce Site

November 18, 2014 - E-Commerce

The war between Magento and WordPress has been in existence ever since these CMS platforms made their way into ecommerce. While WordPress supports MySQL and PHP language, Magento utilizes MySQL, PHP as well as Zend Framework. Magento also uses, model-view-controller and entity-attributes-value model to store in database.

While WordPress is a favorite for blogging platforms, Magento has carved out a name for itself as the better CMS platform for ecommerce sites. It is an open source cross-platform. Both the platforms are highly SEO friendly and has huge user base.

Magento provides powerful features as well as control of marketers to manage their respective online stores. Magento provides its users with a huge range of shopping cart plugins and payment options. The Magento Admin panel is flooded with various forms of ecommerce plugins like shipping option, price management, inventory, payment integration and the likes. It is also a trusted site for secure payment integration. The easy customization and simple management makes Magento a preferred site for people who want to build ecommerce sites.

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Magento testing, audit and code analysis methods and tools

November 16, 2014 - E-Commerce, Magento tips & tricks

In this post, we are going to talk about different Magento tools for testing, audit and code analysis. There are 3 major groups of testing: Unit, Functional and Integration. They all have their goals, so you should know their major features to choose the most suitable for your issue. Of course, there are extensions and services developed to perform testing, audit and code analysis for Magento, but let’s start from the theoretical aspect of the problem.

The first major software testing method is a unit testing. Its main goal is to determine if individual parts of source code and different sets of program modules work correctly. This testing method relies on units as the smallest testable parts of an application. A unit could be an individual function, an entire module or interface. The gradation depends on a programming type. Each test case should be independent from the other cases. Substitutes such as mock objects, method stubs, fakes, and harnesses are usually used in order to assist testing a module in isolation. By performing unit tests, you can get all the necessary information required to understand that code behaves as intended. You set apart each part of the program and find out if individual parts work as expected.

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Magento Extensions For European Union Ecommerce

November 9, 2014 - E-Commerce, Magento tips & tricks

The importance of e-commerce in Europe constantly grows. More and more people prefer to purchase products and services online. Meanwhile, e-commerce gains its influence on the European economy. Whereas the European GDP was more than €16.4trn in 2013, the part of e-commerce is 2.2% of this number. Additionally, e-commerce becomes the important source for new jobs. All these factors turn e-commerce into a significant economic power for the European market. And there are a lot of extensions, designed to adapt your Magento store for the conditions of the European market. We gathered the most useful solutions in this post. The following article sheds light on the latest GDPR requirements and tools to make your store fully compatible with them, various tax extensions, and integrations with locak carriers, banks, and payment systems.

The Best Magento Extensions For Custom And Improved Emails

November 9, 2014 - Magento tips & tricks

The default Magento functionality is a little bit limited in the most of its key areas. But you can always solve this problem by installing dedicated extensions. In this post, we gathered tools developed to enhance all the aspects of email in Magento.

Improved Emails for Magento 2

How To Make Every Magento Store Responsive And Mobile Ready

October 31, 2014 - E-Commerce, Magento tips & tricks

Responsive design is a special approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience for mobile devices. Responsive web design provides easy reading and navigation, and reduces resizing, panning and scrolling to minimum.

The technology relies on proportion-based grids with page element sizing in percentages, flexible images sized in relative units, and CSS3 media queries, which allow the page to use CSS style rules, based on characteristics of every single device. But why is Responsive design so important for e-commerce?

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Personal Recommendation Services And Engines For Magento

October 21, 2014 - Magento tips & tricks

Recommender or recommendation systems form a subclass of information filtering systems. Their main purpose is to produce lists of recommendations for individual users. There are two methods used at the heart of the process: collaborative and content-based filtering. The first one relies on user’s past behavior and similar decisions made by other customers. The second one uses a series of discrete characteristics of an item in order to create a list of additional items with similar properties. Both approaches are often combined to create more complex system. Thanks to personal recommendation services and engines, e-commerce is now based on individual approach to every customer: products are marketed to individuals based on their unique needs.

Best Magento Newsletter Extensions And Email Marketing Services

October 20, 2014 - Magento tips & tricks

Email marketing is one of the key tools of e-commerce business development, which helps you reach your audience and understand its response. By sending commercial messages to different groups of people using email, you build loyalty, trust, and brand awareness. You can use both sold lists and current customer database to implement email marketing for your business. There are a lot of Magento tools designed for email marketing. In this post, you will find the best Magento newsletter extensions and email marketing services.

Magento 2 Newsletter Extensions And Email Marketing Services

Improved Emails for Magento 2

Magento Ajax Extensions (login, cart, catalog, navigation and more)

October 16, 2014 - Magento tips & tricks

Ajax is a group of web development techniques designed to create asynchronous web applications. By using Ajax, web apps can exchange data with a server in the background. Ajax can work in combination with CSS and HTML to mark up and style information.

Ajax is widely used in Magento. There are different Ajax extensions for login, cart, catalog, navigation and other components of e-commerce store.

Magento 2 Ajax Extensions

Custom Product Pricing Magento Extensions (tier, group, configurable, custom prices, and more)

October 14, 2014 - E-Commerce, Magento tips & tricks

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The default Magento functionality provides limited abilities when it comes to custom product pricing. But you can dramatically change the situation by using custom product pricing Magento extensions. In this post, we gathered the most popular tools and solutions aimed at improving the way you work with tier, group, configurable, and custom prices. Below, you will find both free and paid Magento extensions from top developers.