Holding the power to decide the destiny of your eCommerce sales, SEO becomes the core of your eCommerce website. With the SEO driving in 14.6% of the conversion rates, the industry-standard status that it enjoys in generating leads can never be underplayed. As Forbes recognizes improving the search engine ranking as one of the most powerful marketing plans of action, the visibility of your eCommerce website depends on how optimized your search engine strategies are.  

But why is that so?

• SEO increases your reach, letting customers find you.
• With your eCommerce website ranking high, chances of profitability will soar. 
• With the right eCommerce platform, it becomes an investment that has long-lasting benefits. 

Your choice of the eCommerce platform also becomes the major deciding factor in improving the visibility. While all eCommerce platforms strive to ensure that your eCommerce website ranks well, what makes Magento stand out from the rest? With the in-built Magento SEO features to enhance your search engine ranking, Magento sets the bar high in developing an SEO-friendly online storefront. 

Let’s see how- 

Five SEO Improvement Tactics in Magento 2

1. XML Sitemap

Magento 2 comes with great improvements with respect to the XML sitemap. The new version enables you to individually customize website pages, products, categories, and CMS depending on their priority. The sitemap can be sent to search engines through a very simple process. With Magento 2, you can easily add images, sitemap index, and also focus on parameters. 

Once you enable the sitemap, a file named sitemap.xml will be developed by Magento, which will be saved in your specified location. Unlike the HTML sitemap that focuses more on the users, the XML sitemap is imperative as it is readily accessible to web crawlers. Make sure to optimize the sitemap by delivering information on the latest updates, frequency of updates, and relevance of web pages. 

A proper sitemap ensures that the crawlers do not overlook any of your webpages. Moreover, Magento also provides a tool to generate the XML sitemap. By default, Magento 2 has various updated XML sitemap features to boost ranking.

By leveraging the sitemap, search engines will get a precise idea about your website’s structure. This will, in turn, enable search engines to identify your web pages that must have been missed while indexing. 

2. Product Fields Auto-Generation Template

You cannot undermine the effect of meta title and meta description as it is the primary link between your eCommerce website and search engines. In this regard, one of the major additions in Magento 2 is the introduction of the Product Fields Auto-Generation Template. This feature facilitates you to develop metadata templates for product pages.

The feature is a significant addition because optimal metadata throws light on the relevance of your product pages to the search engines. Product Fields Auto-Generation Template comes in handy especially when you have to manage an eCommerce website with a large amount of content as it lets you add templates for product metadata at a global level. 

This functionality also helps you to add custom meta value in bulk without much effort. With Product Fields Auto-Generation Template, you can create samples for keywords, meta titles, and descriptions for each product in your online storefront. 

3. Rich Snippet

The inclusion of Rich Snippet in Magento 2 is a noteworthy addition. A brief description will be automatically included in every product page. This structured data facilitates search engines to understand the information provided in your web pages. Moreover, it helps the search engines to display additional information in organic searches like price, stock availability, logo, ratings, and many more.  

With Rich Snippet as a default feature in Magento 2, you need not have to work on it additionally. It presents structured markup data in Google search results. With Rich Snippet, customers will know what they will find in your eCommerce website, thus improving the on-page behavioral data like CTR and bounce rates. Hence, despite Rich Snippet not being a direct SEO tool, it can indirectly improve your website ranking.  

Additionally, Rich Snippets make your page more indexable, while providing more precise and clear metadata. Relevant targeted traffic will be directed to your eCommerce website ensuring higher user engagements. With this increased dwell time, search engines analyze the relevance of your online storefront and it will move your eCommerce website a position up.

4. Canonical Meta Tag

If you have numerous URLs that direct to one particular content, then chances are high for some search engines to penalize your website. But with canonical meta tags enabled by Magento 2, you will be able to inform the search engines to index a specific page in case multiple URLs direct to the same or identical content. Hence, a canonical meta tag can save your eCommerce website from duplicate contents that could have backfired your SEO ranking.

By giving links to your preferred URL, search engines can track them down and provide a higher rank. You can use canonical meta tags for category filters, multi-store, product pages, etc. while having an upper hand in informing about link equity. In its absence, your eCommerce website will be perceived as not providing any unique content and this can be reflected in SERPs as well. 

By using canonical meta tags, you avoid the risk of web crawlers missing out unique content that should appear in search results. Through canonical tags, search engines will provide ranking value, identifying the page as the source URL. Canonical meta tags ensure to generate traffic to your desired web page by showing a standard resource. 

5. URL Rewrite Tool

Magento 2 incorporates the URL Rewrite tool with which you can change the URL of a CMS, product, or category page. By using this tool, any link that directs the customers to the previous URL will now be redirected to the new address. Through this tool, you can change highly complicated URLs to decipherable ones that can be better understood by the search engines and site visitors. 

You can now optimize the URL by making it short and rich with keywords. With the URL Rewrite tool, you can make the new URL more adaptable to the search engines especially when you are new to eCommerce. Additionally, Magento settings give you the privilege to use top-level product URLs instead of including any subcategory hierarchy in the URL. In this way, you can avoid any potential duplication issues.  

Using the URL Rewrite tool, you can edit URLs and lessen the chance for indexation bloat. It also transforms user experience as customers can easily search for the products. Studies show that SEO- friendly URLs can project a sense of relevance for your eCommerce website. 

Checklist to Enhance SEO for Your Magento Store

Along with the functionalities of Magento 2, you also need to take care of other factors that would help you boost the search engine ranking. So, do grab a look at the following checklist-

SSL Certificate

Procuring a Secure Software Layer (SSL) Certificate is necessary as Google uses it as a yardstick to measure the trustworthiness of your eCommerce website. Without this security measure, website ranking can be affected as Google started providing a ranking boost to secured websites from the year 2014. 

So, if your competitor incorporates an SSL Certificate despite other factors being on par with that of your eCommerce website, it is highly likely that you will rank lower. SSL Certificate will not only make the site secure, but the browser will also display padlock as a trust indicator in the address bar. 

Set Up Google Analytics

You can easily track the outcome of your Magento SEO strategy by adding the tracking code of Google Analytics into your eCommerce website. Through the tracking code, you can regularly keep an eye on your website performance. You will get an idea of marketing insights like top-performing pages and mobile traffic. 

Setting up Google Search Console can also aid you in understanding online traffic while improving your presence in the organic searches. In this way, you can easily redeem the errors that can affect the search engine rankings. Apart from Google Analytics, there are also Magento website developers who can help you develop an SEO-friendly Magento online storefront. 

Product Image Labels

Optimizing product images is very crucial to improve visibility and relevance. Never forget to add alt-tags that would describe your images. Since search engines are unequipped to read images, it is the alt texts that bridge this communication gap. But there are certain things that you have to consider-

1. Make sure that you don’t use keywords excessively in alt-texts.
2. While adding filenames for images, ensure that they are informative and easy to decipher.
3. Keep them short and precise.
4. In the case of a specific product, never forget to include the product name and the product ID.

Backlinking

Backlinking is one of the three most important ranking factors of Google, the other two being the content and search query relevancy. As the web crawlers follow the links, they will understand the connection between web pages, blogs, and other content displayed on your eCommerce website. There are several reasons why backlinking is important.

1. Generating high-standard backlinks also vouches for the quality of your content. 
2. They help web crawlers to identify new web pages. If your eCommerce website generates relevant backlinks, then chances are high for your web page to rank higher.
3. By generating backlinks, your website credibility is enhanced letting search engines direct traffic to your online storefront.

After choosing the perfect eCommerce platform, the next step is to find the right Magento website developer to build an online storefront just the way you want it.

Why DCKAP?

With over 15 years of experience, DCKAP is equipped with the right expertise to optimize your eCommerce website. Being the Magento solution partner, we have in-house developers who would work with you to make your dream online store a reality. Our determination to toil for the successful completion of projects has gained us happy and content clients. With the perfect solutions, we, at DCKAP, offer to provide you with a fully optimized SEO-friendly online storefront that will guarantee you immense growth and reputation in the world of eCommerce. 

With the B2B eCommerce sales predicted to hit $3 trillion by 2024, you are left with no other option than to be on the cutting edge with your eCommerce website. In this competitive scenario, performance optimization of your Magento store gains paramount importance. 

Keeping in mind that you are presenting your website content to customers who are impatient enough to leave your slow site that exceeds 3 seconds to load, it’s high time for you to weigh the measures that could rectify  these issues. Your faster online storefront will keep your customers hooked, let them explore everything that you offer.

If you are thinking hard to find ways to leverage your website speed, do consider the following factors:

• TTFB Optimization
• Effective Utilization of PWA
• MySQL Configuration
• Enable Content Delivery Network
• Image Optimization
• Enable Varnish Cache Tool
• Eliminate Unwanted Extensions

As you read along, you will get a better idea about how these factors come alive while curating your fully optimized eCommerce website. 

How to Host an Optimal Magento Store? 

1. TTFB Optimization

As a significant website speed metrics, Time to First Byte (TTFB) shows the web server’s responsiveness, indicating the time taken between the HTTP request made by the customer and receiving the first byte of the data. You can use Magento 2 Profiler to analyze the performance of your eCommerce website and take adequate steps for TTFB optimization.

The higher the TTFB, the slower will be your Magento store. To lower this server response time, scanning your Magento codebase is essential. TTFB depends on the number of code that has to be run by the PHP interpreter. Being an intricate eCommerce platform, Magento 2 might have numerous lines of code and a TTFB audit is recommended to have a clear insight of each code.  

Its optimization is mainly required for pages including customer profiles, cart, and checkout, which does not benefit from the built-in full page cache enabled by Magento 2 as opposed to other pages. Leveraging browser cache can result in a reduced TTFB as it lowers the web server load, thereby lessening the time to load your web pages.

2. Effective Utilization of PWA

PWA in Magento 2 utilizes JavaScript. Through PWA, pages load much faster due to three main reasons:

• Reduced traffic of data
• Multiple cache management
• Saving offline user-generated data

The JS code facilitates the offline operations of the app with more agility than the native apps. Thanks to the service workers, browser-level caching enables PWAs to operate at a faster pace. Through the service workers, PWAs precache sections of a webpage to load immediately when the customer clicks on it again.

The cross-platform compatibility of PWA ensures its smooth functioning across various devices and browsers using a single web codebase. This eliminates the need for you to develop different apps for each platform. Lazy loading of files is possible on your website that would ease the page load times as the customer navigates through different web pages. Your eCommerce website will also cache API call responses when a customer visits your site, which will lower the server load. 

Additionally, the PWA site’s app icon can be added directly to the home screen. Your eCommerce website can be accessed directly without the need for a browser, automatically increasing user engagement. 

3. MySQL Configuration

With large databases that involve greater activities, performance tuning is imperative. Tweaking your MySQL setting becomes significant for increasing the speed of the database server. If your MySQL database is slow, try to understand its cause, and in case you are unsure about its origin, it is advisable to change only one setting at a time. 

Creating accurate indexes is essential for MySQL optimization. The right index enhances the query performance as it reduces the amount of data that must be scanned, speeding up access in the database. The configurable settings of MySQL can be put to use efficiently to improve website behavior and performance. You cannot overlook these settings and use it in default mode, since by default, MySQL is adjusted for small-scale development installations.

Moreover, the database environment can also be affected by MySQL glitches, increased traffic, or application bugs. A quick solution to such issues is necessary before it damages the performance of your Magento store. Monitoring tools like MySQL Enterprise Monitor are available that monitor the performance and analyze any potential threats so that you will be prepared. With such tools, operational visibility comes into effect that helps in troubleshooting.  

4. Enable Content Delivery Network

By caching files on remote servers and facilitating faster delivery of contents, the Content Delivery Network (CDN) enhances the user experience especially when you have wider target customers spanning all over the world. Lessening the load of web servers, CDN delivers static content like stylesheets, JavaScript files, CSS files, images, and many more through the servers that are nearer to your customer’s location, considerably reducing the store response time.

This interlinked system of cache servers supports geographical proximity as a criterion for delivering content. From redirecting the request from the original server to the nearest server of the customer, CDN provides the cached content at a lightning speed. CDN is best suited to handle your eCommerce website when there is a surge in traffic by maintaining server infrastructure across the globe. 

The dynamic capacity and enhanced infrastructure that CDN offers lower the bandwidth stress by allowing you to restrict the data flow when fulfilling the data requests of the customers. This will, in turn, prevent website crashes during heavy online traffic. Additionally, content changes are also constantly updated as the CDN regularly interacts with the original server. 

5. Image Optimization

With media being one of the foremost factors of your eCommerce website, optimizing the images plays an important role. Make sure that the files you upload will not go beyond the image requirements and don’t forget to minify large images before uploading. JPEG format is appropriate for product images, while PNG or SVG is best suited for logo and layout.   

Magento 2 image sizes focus on resultative Magento 2 image compression. Images with large sizes can make your eCommerce website heavy, affecting its speed. Magento 2 offers image optimization extensions and other tools to compress images without compromising on their quality. Command-line tools do away with decoding the image, rather they rearrange the compressed data. This does not leave space for degradation of the image quality, while not putting stress on the website load. 

Fastly Image Optimization (Fastly IO) of Magento 2 allows image optimization and manipulation in real-time that strengthens image delivery. After you configure Fastly IO, its following features will come in handy:

• Deep image optimization
• Adaptive pixel ratios
• Force lossy conversion
• Common image format support (JPEG, PNG, GIF)

Depending on the configuration settings, VCL code is inserted by Fastly IO snippet for optimizing images, facilitating faster delivery of product images. 

6. Enable Varnish Cache Tool

Being an HTTP accelerator, Varnish cache improves the speed of web pages of your Magento store that are highly content-driven. By developing fragment files, Magento Varnish reduces the duration and consumption of network bandwidth for any imminent requests. 

After the customer visits your eCommerce website, Varnish builds a replica of what has been delivered to that customer. As a result, if any customer visits your web page, the previous request will be identified by the proxy, and delivers the cached version within no time, doubling the website performance. Delivering a cached version proves to be faster than processing a request from scratch.

Moreover, by enabling Varnish cache, server space can be reduced considerably, aiding you to design your platform effectively, while also relieving you from the expenditure incurred from any on-premise hardware. The Varnished cache can be employed for a variety of roles to optimize the website performance:

• Load balancing
• Failover system
• Reverse proxy cache

7. Eliminate Unwanted Extensions

Using extensions leads to loading more HTTP requests, JavaScript files, and CSS sheets. So, despite extensions enhancing your website functionalities, employing countless extensions can have a deteriorating effect on your website speed. Additionally, some third-party extensions might contain bugs that can further lower the website performance. Be wary of that as well.

All the extensions that you have enabled will use up your resources to some extent. In case such extensions are not configured properly, the TTFB will be slowed down. A third-party extension audit will help you to look through the extensions and remove those that have not been proven worthy. 

You can understand its impact through a simple process:

• Try disabling the extensions one at a time
• Check all the important pages like the homepage, product pages, and so on to inspect any considerable changes
• Take a note of the differences in speed
• Identify the ones that are time-consuming and remove them  

Find the Right Developers for Magento Performance Optimization

Once you have analyzed the ways to optimize the performance of your Magento eCommerce store, you need to get in touch with the right developers to help you host an online storefront that would exceed your expectations. So, while hiring developers, make sure you tick off everything from the following checklist:

• Right expertise
• Hands-on experience
• Familiar with all eCommerce trends
• Satisfactory reviews and testimonials
• Good communicator

DCKAP- Your Ultimate Solution

Being a certified Magento solutions partner, our 30+ certified developers at DCKAP will help you curate your desired Magento storefront. With the right expertise, our 15+ years of experience has resulted in rewarding success stories. Our team of in-house developers is all eyes and ears to communicate with you at each turn. With DCKAP, you can gear up your optimal eCommerce website that would well boost your competitive positioning.

Overwhelmed with the ever-changing dynamics of eCommerce? With revenue from B2B eCommerce all set to hit $1.2 trillion in 2021, these evolving trends are not going to abate soon. Keeping your Magento store ready to emerge a winner from this whirlpool of eCommerce trends is unquestioningly the need of the hour. To hit the right chord with your customers, digging deep into the innovations not only becomes your necessity but also becomes your anchor for scalability. 

As vital as ever, catching up with the emerging advancements is also a matter of visibility and brand reputation. So before you march on, here are two basic thoughts to ponder over-

• What exactly are those Magento eCommerce development trends that you have to deal with?
• How will Magento 2 equip you with the survival tactics?

To reach the answers, do read on..

Watch Out For the Five Magento eCommerce Development Trends

#1 Live Streaming

Live streaming is the recent head-turner in the marketing strategies. Thriving on the impact of audiovisuals, Magento 2 is incorporating the new trend to demonstrate your product through live broadcast on your website or social media. The reason for this shift is mainly the COVID-19 crisis that has pushed the need for sustaining your interaction with your customers. 

With video marketing increasing traffic for 87% of the eCommerce websites, adding live videos to your Magento store will direct more attention and engagement as audiovisuals bring in more clarity to what you offer. You can direct potential customers from social media platforms to your eCommerce website. 

By communicating in real-time, customers feel a sense of inclusivity since their queries can be heard and answered. Since live streaming has higher viewer retention rates, the medium can be used for spreading brand awareness, announcements, and important messages. By 2021, video traffic is expected to reach 80% of the total consumer internet traffic, making it detrimental to ignore its influence among your customers. 

#2 Personalization

With Forbes stating that 91% of the customers favor recommendations and offers, personalization becomes the key for customer retention. The in-built features of Magento 2 eases customer segmentation and personalization. With the innovative technologies of Chatbot and AI, your Magento store can offer products based on the preferences of your customers.

Providing sales announcements, discount codes, and messages can be better executed through personalized sales. Keeping up with this trend is easier through your Magento store as its customer segmentation feature helps you to build dynamic segments for your customer base by assessing their purchase behavior. Displaying personalized content like shopping cart price rules, banners, and related products can further strengthen your customer base. 

Securing online and offline data in real time to develop comprehensive customer profiles is facilitated through omnichannel personalization across all touchpoints. You can allow customers to resume their shopping expedition from where they had left off. 

The technological advancement of AI enables this trend of eCommerce personalization to gain strongholds with customers’ increasing need for dynamic pricing as their shopping history can be easily accessed. This also increases scope for retargeting solutions, leading to the generation of customer-preferred ads.

#3 Push Notifications

With the push notifications enjoying a 90% higher opening rate, you cannot undermine the power push notifications have in attracting your customers to your eCommerce website. Notifying your customers about your offers, discounts, and promotions becomes easier by sending out simple push notifications.

You can also constantly provide timely updates, securing a good communication with your customer base. To keep up with the current trend, Magento 2 offers various push notification extensions that can sustain your visibility. Dealing with cart abandonment is one of the challenging eCommerce areas. With push notifications flying in, customers are constantly reminded about them, pulling them back to your online store.  

Another reason to follow this trend is the space for direct interaction that it offers. You can communicate with your customers even when they are not on your website, and they don’t even need to open their mailbox to see your message. So there is no chance of your message being missed. This is especially beneficial if you are offering any limited period offers.

Moreover, personalizing the content for push notifications shows an increase in open rates by 4 times. Not only is push notification cost-effective, it also eases customer engagement since they are more likely to read short and crisp messages than long emails.

#4 Voice Search

Voice-enabled searches take eCommerce a step forward in easing the shopping experience. With The Union Journal pointing out that revenue generated from voice commerce sales is expected to reach $40 billion by 2022, this new eCommerce trend is here to stay. So you cannot shut your eyes from leveraging your content for voice search.  

As per the guidelines of Google, textual content should be incorporated for voice search content so that they can appear in knowledge graphs and rich snippets. Classifying products with voice activation is necessary to delve into voice search. To implement the right search strategy, you need to start treating search queries as conversations.

Since voice search mostly deals with answering the customer’s search questions, developing your content that strikes a conversational style is highly recommended. Keeping in mind this linguistic pattern, using long tail keywords can be of help. Along with keywords, you can also use trigger words in such cases.

Maintaining a well-structured FAQ page becomes effective for voice searches. You can efficiently list out all the probable questions that your customer may ask. Thus, through the voice search, when a customer asks a search query that is even slightly related to the ones in your FAQ page, chances are high for your page to be tracked down by the search engine. 

#5 Chatbot

Coupled with Artificial Intelligence, chatbots are grabbing the eyeballs. By solving customer’s queries, chatbots can also influence their purchasing decisions giving an insight on discount codes. Additionally, with the advancements in AI, chatbots can predict future purchases of your customers as they can assess the shopping behavior by accessing purchase history. Apart from the voice and text, chatbots also display good quality product images, tutorial videos, relevant web pages, and blogs. 

The APIs also enable machines to interact with your customers through Natural Language Processing. Upselling or cross-selling becomes more concrete as chatbots store the order history, also facilitating product recommendations. By integrating chatbots with your eCommerce website, placing the order can be done efficiently from the messenger itself, taking customer service to a whole new level.  

Since 83% of your customers require assistance to carry forward their purchase, what more do you need to provide them with than an ever-friendly chatbot! If your customers have any problems in finding adequate information, chatbots can solve all the issues. They can even go a step further by asking questions to the customers to understand the speed breaks in their shopping spree. 

Take the Plunge With Magento 2

To reap the benefits of all the current and potential trends, you need to host your online storefront on the perfect eCommerce platform. With these in-built features of Magento 2, your eCommerce website can always be on the radar:

1. Marketing Tools  

The marketing menu of the admin panel in Magento 2 can put your marketing strategies to work efficiently by overseeing communication, user-generated content, and promotions. You can work on cart and catalog price rules simultaneously, offering discounts once the specified conditions are met. 

With the Magento Commerce edition, you can optimize your customer base by offering private sales and catalog events. They allow you to carry out limited-time sales, while also limiting sales to a particular group of members, increasing the scope for personalized sales. Magento 2 lets you customize emails and notifications that can be sent from your eCommerce website. 

The marketing feature of Magento 2 facilitates curating promotions depending on customer’s preferences, location, gender, browsing history, and many more. You can also create newsletter templates for any of your requirements and the Newsletter Queue option manages its sending to different customers. 

Through the drag-and-drop feature of Magento, you can either manually or automatically categorize and arrange best-selling products and new arrivals. Additionally, Magento 2 gives you the provision of deciding whether only the registered customers can post reviews or you want to extend it to guest customers as well. 

2. Responsive Web Design

The responsive web design enables frictionless access to your eCommerce store across various devices ranging from desktops to mobile devices. Enabled by CSS and JavaScript, Magento Blank and Luma themes adopt mobile-first approach, improving your SEO ranking as Google pays more attention to mobile site version.

Since Magento 2 is designed specifically catering to responsiveness, the UI will easily adapt to any device. Going by the mobile-first approach, its themes are suited for all sizes and resolutions. Not only do these themes enhance responsiveness, they also include mobile-specific features. 

As your Magento store uses the same URL in all devices, SEO ranking will improve when your customers share your eCommerce website. This feature also makes it easier for the search engines to crawl, index, and organize your web content. Since 57% of customers are unlikely to recommend an online store that is not mobile-friendly, you cannot let go of a responsive web design. 

With reduced development costs, responsive web designing becomes more feasible while attaining greater versatility than maintaining a separate website version accessible to mobile users. The standardized testing methodologies adopted by responsive design also facilitates timely glance into the optimal functioning of the layout across all channels. 

3. Innovative Technology

The commerce edition of Magento 2 offers product recommendations powered by Adobe Sensei that employs machine learning technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI). You can now display automated and intelligent product recommendations on your website. 

Unlike the traditional searching process that uses the keywords, AI includes context-based search. Through NLP, meaning of the keywords can be understood better, thereby showing only relevant and accurate search results to customers. By analyzing the demographics and shopping history, AI creates predictive models. Magento 2 employs them to understand the target base to develop better marketing strategies.

Powered by AI, the image recognition algorithm enables visual search, which is more convenient to customers shopping from mobile devices. Using this feature, the customer can easily upload an image into the search bar and after identifying it, your eCommerce website will be equipped to display similar or related products within no time.

The predefined scripts employed by AI aids in responding to customer grievances or any purchase-related problems in a much quicker pace. Apart from customer services, AI and machine learning enabled by Magento 2 strengthens the security of your eCommerce website by linking machine learning and security standards. Through behavioral analysis of AI, the system can spot false positives so that you can act upon them. 

4. Elasticsearch 

With the increasing convenience and dynamic trends the customers are exposed to, they expect a smooth journey across your online storefront. Magento 2.4 employs the server-based tool, Elasticsearch 7.6, as its default catalog search engine that facilitates full-text search at a faster rate. This quick speed is brought about by the indexing service that favors contextual search. 

A few of the features that Magento 2 offers through Elasticsearch are:

• Search autocomplete
• Favors searches in multiple languages 
• Supports synonyms
• Stop words detection

By sorting dates and numbers at an enhanced pace, Elasticsearch 7.6 proves to be faster than its previous versions. Furthermore, your customers will not face any disturbance when Elasticsearch re-indexes. It can be effectively run on any system and in clusters that have numerous nodes. 

Maintaining your online storefront to be on point with the Magento eCommerce development trends can be your lifesaver in a highly competitive market. Look for the right eCommerce website development agency that can help you curate your perfect Magento storefront.

With DCKAP, Experience the Best Magento Development Services 

DCKAP is equipped with 15+ years of experience in the eCommerce spectrum, helping us set the bar high with our seamless Magento development services. Innovation that meets quality- that’s the exact goal driving our in-house Magento developers to build your online storefront in the perfect platform that exceeds your expectations. 

Our expertise in the field will help you in providing a top-notch shopping experience to your customers, ensuring conversion rates that are guaranteed to be on a rise. Being the Magento solutions partner, our consistent work results in timely completion of projects that prepares our clients to adapt to any emerging trends or innovations in this fast-paced world of eCommerce. With our Magento services, brace yourselves to scale high.

You asked, and we heard. Here you go, a small guide on how to install Magento 2.4.x. 

Install Magento 2.4 and start with the most prominent features of the latest version like:

• 2FA security for Magento 2 admin panel
• Purchase approval workflows
• Seller assisted shopping
• In-store pickup
• New media gallery
• PWA Development
• Headless commerce

Please click here to check out the detailed features of Magento 2.4.

We are pretty excited, and I’m sure you are too!

Now, the Installation of Magento 2.4 can be done in 2 ways.

1.    composer (Using command line)
2.    compressed package

Method 1: Installation using composer (command line):

You should have the following system requirements: 

• PHP 7.4.x and its extensions

Run this command to install php extensions :

sudo apt-get install php7.4-bcmath php7.4-common php7.4-curl php7.4-xml php7.4-gd php7.4-intl php7.4-mbstring php7.4-mysql php7.4-soap php7.4-xsl php7.4-zip

• Mysql8
• Elastic search 7.6.x (If you don’t have elastic search already, please find the here the installation steps)

Now follow the below steps to install Magento 2.4:

1. Run this command in terminal =>

 composer create-project –repository-url=https://repo.magento.com/ magento/project-community-edition 2.4.1

(if it asks for username and password, please provide access keys from repo.magento.com)

2. Go to your project directory.

3. Create a database and grant all privileges for the database.

4. Now run the below command in your project directory.

Note: Please change details in the below command

php bin/magento setup:install –base-url=”yourwebsiteurl” –db-host=db-host –db-name=db-name –db-user=db-user –db-password=db-password –admin-firstname=Magento –admin-lastname=User –admin-email=user@example.com –admin-user=admin –admin-password=admin123 –language=en_US –currency=USD –timezone=America/Chicago –use-rewrites=1 –search-engine=elasticsearch7 –elasticsearch-host=yourhost-name –elasticsearch-port=port-no –backend-frontname=admin

5 : Run  “bin/magento setup:upgrade” command. 

6 : After the Magento installation is completed for a better experience, deploy the sample data.

7 : Run “bin/magento samplecontent:deploy” command to deploy sample data on your site.

8 : Run below set of commands:

• bin/magento setup:upgrade
• bin/magento setup:di:compile
• bin/magento static-content:deploy -f
• chmod -R 0777 app/ var/ pub/ generated/

Method 2: Installation using package

1. Download the package from the Magento official site and extract it to your project directory.
2. Follow the same steps from step 3 as mentioned above in Method 1.

Hurray, Magento2.4 installation completed!!!

If you have any doubts about the installation process, I’d be happy to help you out.

Thank you!

Composer in a step-by-step tutorial.

Magento 2 has very specific server requirements that require a lot of server configuration and tweaking, along with setting up Composer (not a default option at many platforms). 

Let me clear up why Composer is really important for Magento 2. Composer is an essential requirement for managing the Magento system, extensions, the involved dependencies, and for declaring libraries for the project.

Before you start, you need to have these things at hand:

1: XAMPP Server installed on your computer with the latest PHP 7.3 or 7.4.

2: Download Magento 2.4.1 along with sample data (You can download Magento 2 from this link)

3:Here are the basic Magento 2.4.1 server requirements:

• Apache Version 2.2 or 2.4
• PHP Version 7.3.x or 7.4.x
• MySQL Version 5.6.x, 5.7.x
• Elasticsearch 7.6.x or higher

Here I will cover the entire process of installing Magento 2 on localhost so that you would not  face any issues in replicating the process:

• Open the XAMPP server and start Apache and MySQL applications.

• Extract Magento 2.4.1 files to your xampp/htdocs folder.
• Check Weather your PHP Extensions are all installed:
• ext-bcmath
• ext-ctype
• ext-curl
• ext-dom
• ext-gd
• ext-hash
• ext-iconv
• ext-intl
• ext-mbstring
• ext-openssl
• ext-pdo_mysql
• ext-simplexml
• ext-soap
• ext-xsl
• ext-zip
• lib-libxml

Install Composer

Download and run Composer-Setup.exe. This will install the latest version and set up your path so that you can “call” Composer from any directory.

Click Next, and browse to the path of the PHP in the XAMPP folder.

Now click Install to initiate the final step.

Launch the Command Prompt and run the Composer command to verify that it has been installed without any issues.

 After installing the composer, you must enable the extension (php_intl.dll) in the php.ini file. To enable the extension, edit php.ini and uncomment the line “extension=php_intl.dll” and just remove the semicolon “;” from the starting of the line. Next, restart the XAMPP control panel.

Install Elasticsearch for Magento 2.4.1

Elasticsearch is a highly recommended extension for Magento 2.4.1.

Download and install the latest version of Elasticsearch from here. Once installed, run the bash file as an administrator. 

 You can also check the availability of Elasticsearch on port:9200. Type local:9200 in the browser and you will get the details of the installed Elasticsearch extension.

Create a Database for Magento 2.4.1

Access localhost/phpmyadmin, create a database. 

IMPORTANT Remember the name of the database you would create.

Magento 2.4.1 Installation

First, unzip the downloaded Magento 2.4.1 file to xampp/htdocs/. After this, go to the Magento 2 folder (inside the htdocs folder).

Hold the Shift key and right-click, and select “Open command window here”. This will open a command prompt on the location.

In the command prompt, execute the command:

$ php bin/magento setup:install –base-url=”http://localhost/magento2/” –db-host=”localhost” –db-name=”dbmagento241″ –db-user=”root” –admin-firstname=”admin” –admin-lastname=”admin” –admin-email=”user@example.com” –admin-user=”admin” –admin-password=”admin123″ –language=”en_US” –currency=”USD” –timezone=”America/Chicago” –use-rewrites=”1″ –backend-frontname=”admin” –search-engine=elasticsearch7 –elasticsearch-host=”localhost” –elasticsearch-port=9200

Please note: Assign the base URL as per your path, note down the admin username and password and do not the Elasticsearch port.

After you give that command please wait for a while to load modules and all required files for Magento 2.4.1. 

After the installation, you will end up with these results.

If you hit the URL, you might won’t see the updated content with sample data on the storefront.

For that, you need to run the following commands.

1. php bin/magento indexer:reindex
2. php bin/magento setup:upgrade
3. php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -f
4. php bin/magento cache:flush

Now hit the URL (usually, localhost/magento2) or the base URL that you set earlier for the installation.

Congratulations! You have now successfully installed Magento 2..4.1 on your localhost. You can now start making your preferred customizations and launch a fully functional ecommerce store right on the local machine.

Problems During Magento 2.4.1 Installation

There is a chance that you might encounter an issue during the Magento 2 installation process. Here are some of the most common ones, along with a solution.  

• Blank Grey Page – Magento Admin Panel

All you have to do is go to the directory path …\vendor\magento\framework\View\Element\Template\File\Validator.php

 In the function isPathInDirectories, add a line.

• $realPath = str_replace(‘\\’, ‘/’, $this->fileDriver->getRealPath($path));

Refer to the following image for the point where you need to insert the line:

• If You Get an Authentication Error

If you couldn’t log in to the Magento Admin Panel and encounter an authentication error, simply run the following command in the Composer:

• php bin/magento module:disable Magento_TwoFactorAuth

Choosing a Robust Platform for B2B eCommerce

With over 45 years of service, Midland Scientific is a nationwide, full-line distributor of lab supplies and equipment. Their customers range from the food and beverage industry to agriculture and mining, and they work hard at catering to these variances. In searching for an ecommerce platform to accommodate their needs, the ability for flexibility and adaptation to customer requirements was a main theme. During our most recent DCKAP eSessions event, Rodrigo Neves, the Director of IT at Midland Scientific, told us about the process of choosing the partners they did for their new site, and the results we were able to achieve together.

When speaking about their situation prior to choosing a new ecommerce platform, Rodrigo explains their process. “We were using an ecommerce platform called B2B Seller (for Epicor). We already had about 20 of our orders online, and over the years we had a lot of customizations that we had to make on that platform to accommodate our customer requirements. Especially in the B2B market.”

Customers finding what they need quickly and efficiently is at the core of ensuring sales in B2B ecommerce. As Rodrigo tell us, “The main problem that we were facing was in ‘search’. It’s something that we’re still trying to adjust in our site, but speed and accuracy were some of the big factors that were affecting our site.”

Going further into their thought process, he continues by laying out the questions that were most important to their team. “When we were choosing our new platform, and all of the systems that were around the ecommerce area, we had to answer some of these questions before we started even talking about the requirements.”

Looking at competitors, keeping in mind the way their current customers order from them, and learning new trends and technologies they could use on their site were some of the ways they evaluated to improve the ecommerce experience. This led them to choose the best partners for their needs. Magento as the platform of choice, Nexcess as the best option for hosting, as well as using the expertise of Avalara for tax support, and as DCKAP and Cloras for seamless integration.

The Importance of Tax Regulation for B2B eCommerce

Avalara covers all of your business, including sales and use tax, going even beyond ecommerce. Working with every kind of industry and with over 30,000 customers worldwide, it’s safe to say they are the experts in tax regulation and compliance.

“Let’s talk a little about sales tax,” says Maria Tringali, Senior Solutions Consultant at Avalara, during the start of her presentation. What she initially conveys to us is the importance of tax compliance, and what all companies need to think about when it comes to meeting these guidelines, no matter the industry.

Nexus, exemption certificates, filing returns (even if zero dollar), and being prepared for an audit – these are just some of the things “under the iceberg” that companies should be thinking about. Maria carefully takes us through some of those things to more closely consider.

“It’s important because manufacturers, distributors, and B2B businesses are at very high risk for audit. Auditors know that getting a sales tax rate wrong is just a little bit of revenue, but not having an exemption certificate on file for a sale can be a lot more money to them. If you had a $10,000 item that you sold and you did not charge tax, and you can’t prove why you didn’t, you’d have to pay the full tax rate to the government.”

When discussing how companies can improve their processes, she cites some of the things she sees in her experience. “The key things here is a poor process, for handling these exemption certificates for your exempt businesses, creates negative customer experiences.” This is why it’s important to know if you’re prepared for these situations.

“We need to make this process easier on our staff. They’re not tax experts.” – Maria Tringali

So, what does a B2B seller have to think about? Maria tells us that regardless of whether you are a B2B or B2C company, you have to be concerned with things like nexus, exemption certificates, cost and expertise, and customer experience. “All of these apply to your local business as well as your online business,” she explains.

With Avalara being able to fully support Midland’s invoicing and sales process, and ensuring tax exemption for every transaction, this has been an important part of their success story. In going further on tax compliance automation, Maria tells us about the best way to start automating. “What you need in the beginning there is, not excel, but you need a compliance platform for your exemption certificates that connects with your tax determination engine.” 

This is where Avalara CertCapture comes in. It manages incoming certificates and digitizes and validates them, as well as communicates with customers, and much more. This also allows a seamless experience through the website shopping cart. Additionally, she tells us how their latest intimation of tax support with Avalara Vendor Exemption Management helps businesses rid the hassle of creating, sending, and tracking documents during purchase. It helps users easily send out certificates to vendors and digitally store and track what’s needed. Avalara Vendor Exemption Management works with Avalara CertCapture, allowing businesses the ability to manage incoming and outgoing tax exemption documents with a single, integrated application. In this way, and as seen in the example of Midland Scientific, Avalara shows us how easy and seamless the automation of B2B tax compliance can really be. 

Enterprise Hosting Made Easy with Magento Commerce

Gary Smith, Strategic Partner Development Manager at Nexcess, was able to provide some insight in the hosting needs of Midland Scientific. He spoke on how they have been able to successfully manage performance and security, as well as some of the available features and the many advantages of their managed hosting solutions.

In talking more about local development environments versus cloud development environments, he brings up that certain circumstances do call for local environments to be the best option. But, more often, they see the need for a greater scale. As he tells us in talking more about their cloud plans. “Increasingly, virtualized servers, which we host in our own data centers, allow us to provide highly performance server instances and they range all the way from extra small, which starts at $49 a month. Scaled for about 20 users, all the way up to 2x servers at $849 a month. And those are conservatively scaled for 120 concurrent users, 800 GB of storage, and so on.”

Traffic is one of those occurrences that require great consideration. Depending on the amount of usage, auto-scaling can be very helpful. As Gary says, “For traffic spikes and heavy admin usage, which often occurs especially in a B2B site, we’ve got another resource to improve performance, which is auto-scaling.”

“We provide 24 hours of auto-scaling at no charge every month, so you don’t get a surprise bill when you have those relatively contained periods.” – Gary Smith

Many merchants also need to worry about those moments of heavy loads and how to avoid bogging down servers and ensuring consistency. “Containers are a way that we take certain services, and use those resources when they’re not being consumed by the main site,” Gary tells us. It helps expand the performance, management and security of your site. Deploying different cloud plans, or development instances, allows you to save time and cost, and really ensures that you have options and flexibility.

The Best Middleware Solution and Choosing DCKAP for B2B Implementation

Haritha Sridhar, Senior Software Engineer at DCKAP, talked about the key benefits of our Cloras integration. That being the flexibility, increased efficiency, easier troubleshooting, and the improved user interface it provides. DCKAP worked with the client to understand their needs, simplify their processes, and ensure the end to end implementation

DCKAP was able to address and satisfy the client’s pain points, with speed and accuracy being at the center of their concerns. This included the much needed expansion of customization options and the flexibility of their Magento platform, offering better troubleshooting options, improving the time and speeds involved, as well as the ease of the user interface. With Cloras (Cloud Rapid Automating System), our team was able to seamlessly integrate their Magento 2 platform with their P21 ERP software. Now, the systems can communicate in real time, greatly improving operations and providing the best solution for all their needs. You can read more in our full case study.

A Deeper Dive into Integration and B2B Features

After the presentations, we sat down with all our guests to ask them some further questions around the project with Midland. We asked about their personal experiences and the successes they helped to drive, as well as insights in the importance of the integrated experience.

Efi Shabtai, Senior Commercial Customer Success Manager at Magento, came onboard to speak more on the advantages of Magento’s open source platform and how they shine in B2B. Efi was asked, in thinking about this project and others in a similar position looking to start their eCommerce venture, why choose Magento Commerce for B2B?

As she explains, Magento was a trail blazer in allowing a high level of flexibility to their merchants. “We’re one of the first open source platforms that enabled merchants to succeed with scalability and flexibility. You know, with being open source, you have that opportunity to create and innovate to what your business needs are and to be able to structure it that way.”

In going more in depth, she cites many ways that having this flexibility is helpful, such as offering better service, the ability to attract new customers, and more easily transitioning everyone into this new technology. One of their main goals is to ensure that the platform is able to cater to both B2C and B2B in one. “There’s a lot of features that are available that can be really useful to our merchants, as far as policies, procedure, approvals, workflows. So there’s a variety of things that can be very beneficial to both B2B and B2C merchants.”

When asking further about some of the biggest pain points they see in the B2B market, and how the Magento platform can help solve those pain points, she referenced back to the scalability and flexibility they offer. Solving merchant’s issues and ensuring the best ecommerce experience, really comes down to being a robust open source platform.

As Efi described, Magento helps “many different types of B2B businesses that have a large variety of SKUs, that have different workflows, different purchasing procedures, so there is that flexibility to kind of create the workflow based on certain levels and what the company wants to see as far as how the workflow works for them.”  In this way, along with their detailed support and years of experience, they’re able to bend and flex to the wide variance of B2B ecommerce needs, to work with each unique business requirement.

If you’d like to read highlights or watch any of the speakers from last year’s DCKAP eSummit B2B Edition event, you can visit our post event recap blog, and you can watch the full event playlist here.

Knockout Js is an open source Javascript Library that has an ability to provide an object that links view and models of MVVM design pattern which always keeps them synchronized. KO Js enables the two-way binding using the view-models. It is used for declarative binding which means the developer can state the properties which needs to be bind on the HTML template while all the other actions regarding binding the properties will be taken care of by the Library itself.

In Magento 2, Knockout Js is used to build the dynamic contents in the frontend say checkout page, mini cart and UI components which are prevalent in Magento admin. In this blog we are going to learn on Initializing and binding the options to date picker using Knockout Js in Magento 2 Checkout page. 

Let us begin with a user story where the user has to choose the options from the created fields under the shipping method.

• When the shopper chooses shipping method, a datepicker field will be displayed under it.
• Based on the shipping method the starting time and closing time will be different.
• We will take ‘Table Rate’ and ‘Flat Rate’ shipping method for learning the datepicker initialization.

Before we jump on to create the date field, let us see the path of the Knockout components (Js files) and the html template from which the properties are displayed.

The KO components reside in Custom modules under,

app/code/<vendor_name>/<module_name>/view/frontend/web/js/

And in  Magento modules under,

vendor/magento/<vendor_name>/<module_name>/view/frontend/web/js/

The KO template reside in Custom modules under,

app/code/<vendor_name>/<module_name>/view/frontend/web/template/

And in Magento modules under,

vendor/magento/<vendor_name>/<module_name>/view/frontend/web/template/

**It is important to make a note that Knockout template and the phtml template files reside at different places.

Now we will begin with initializing the Knockout variables in a component for placing them in the checkout page below the shipping method. I have created a Vendor DCKAP and module name as KnockoutJs. To add the new fields under shipping method follow the below steps. 

Step 1: create a checkout_index_index.xml under the path app/code/DCKAP/KnockoutJs/view/frontend/layout to override the shipping method template

<?xml version=”1.0″?>

<page xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation=”urn:magento:framework:View/Layout/etc/page_configuration.xsd”>

   <body>

       <referenceBlock name=”checkout.root”>

           <arguments>

               <argument name=”jsLayout” xsi:type=”array”>

                   …

                   <item name=”shippingAddress” xsi:type=”array”>

                       <item name=”config” xsi:type=”array”>

                           <item name=”shippingMethodItemTemplate” xsi:type=”string”>DCKAP_KnockoutJs/shipping-address/shipping-method-item</item>

                       </item>

                   </item>

                   …

               </argument>

           </arguments>

       </referenceBlock>

   </body>

</page>

Step 2: Create shipping.js under the path app/code/DCKAP/KnockoutJs/view/frontend/web/js/view/ with a mixin for Magento_Checkout/js/view/shipping component as follows,

The Start and closing time are initialized as KO observables and there are some values which depends on the other factors that KO is already observing. As per our case, the date picker options are dependending on the shipping method and gets initialized. To handle this scenario the KO has provided the computed observables (this.selectedMethod).

define([

       ‘jquery’,

       ‘ko’,

       ‘Magento_Checkout/js/model/quote’

   ], function (

   $,

   ko,

   quote

   ) {

       ‘use strict’;

       var mixin = {

           defaults: {

               startTimeArray: [6,7],

               closeTimeArray: [16,17],

               localWeekend: [0,6] //Weekend Sunday and Saturday

           },

           initialize: function (config) {

               this.storeCustomDate = ko.observable(new Date());

               this.startTime = ko.observable();

               this.closeTime = ko.observable();

               this._super();

           }

       };

       return function (target) {

           return target.extend(mixin);

       };

   }

);

this.selectedMethod method will be computed whenever the shopper switches between shipping methods. The selected method is called from the KO template before binding the date picker value by passing the chosen shipping method to the computed observable. By matching the parameter received with the quote shipping method we decide to initialize the corresponding datepicker options. For instance, We have provided the start and closing time as 7AM – 5PM for Flat Rate shipping method which can be identified from the code provided.

 initObservable: function () {

               this._super();

               this.selectedMethod = function(present_method){

                   return ko.computed(function () {

                       var method = quote.shippingMethod();

                       var selectedMethod = method != null ? method.method_code + ‘_’ + method.carrier_code : null;

                       if (selectedMethod === ‘bestway_tablerate’) {

                           this.startTime = this.startTimeArray[0];

                           this.closeTime = this.closeTimeArray[0];

                       } else if (selectedMethod === ‘flatrate_flatrate’){

                           this.startTime = this.startTimeArray[1];

                           this.closeTime = this.closeTimeArray[1];

                       }

                       return selectedMethod === present_method;

                       }, this);

               };

               return this;

           },

The local weekend variables has values as 0 and 6 which are the equivalent code of Sunday and Saturday respectively. This variable will be used in the beforeShowDay option to disable the datepicker from weekends.

getMinDate: function() {

   var currentDate = new Date(), currentTime, currentDay, i, localeWeekend = this.getLocalWeekend(),

       startTime = this.startTime;

   currentTime = currentDate.getHours();

   if(currentTime >= this.closeTime){

       currentDate = new Date(currentDate.setDate(currentDate.getDate() + 1));

   }

   currentDay = currentDate.getDay();

   var dateFactor = function(currentDate) {

       if(localeWeekend.indexOf(currentDay) >=0 ) {

           currentDate = new Date(currentDate.setDate(currentDate.getDate() + 1));

           currentDay = currentDate.getDay();

           return dateFactor(currentDate);

       }

       return currentDate;

   };

   currentDate = dateFactor(currentDate);

   currentDate.setHours(startTime);

   currentDate.setMinutes(0);

   return currentDate;

},

getLocalWeekend: function() {

   return this.localWeekend;

}

The method getMinDate provides the minimum selectable date from date picker, this feature includes showing the selectable date from current date and reset the hours and minutes chosen based on the start and closing time. 

Step 3: Configure the mixin in app/code/DCKAP/KnockoutJs/view/frontend/requirejs-config.js

var config = {

   config: {

       mixins: {

           ‘Magento_Checkout/js/view/shipping’: {

               ‘DCKAP_KnockoutJs/js/view/shipping’: true

           }

       }

   }

};

Step 4: Override the shipping method template in the following path app/code/DCKAP/KnockoutJs/view/frontend/web/template/shipping-address/shipping-method-item.html

<!– ko if: ( element.selectedMethod(method.method_code + ‘_’ + method.carrier_code) ) –>

<tr class=“row”>

   <td colspan=“4”>

       <div class=“field _required”>

           <label class=“label”>

               <span>Date: </span>

           </label>

           <div class=“control”>

   <input class=“input-text” type=“text” data-bind=“datepicker: { storage: element.storeCustomDate,

                  options:

                   {

                       showsTime: true,

                       minuteMax:0,

                       showMinute:false,

                       minDate: element.getMinDate(),

                       hourMin: element.startTime,

                       hourMax: element.closeTime,

                       timeFormat: ‘HH:mm’,

                       beforeShowDay: function(datevar){

                           var date = new Date(datevar),

                               dayName = date.getDay(),

                               count = element.getLocalWeekend().length,

                               i, localWeekend = element.getLocalWeekend();

                               for (i = 0; i < count; i++) {

                                   if (dayName === localWeekend[i]){ return [false];

                               }

                           }

                           return [true];

                       }

                   }

               }” name=“date_field” id=“date-field” >

           </div>

       </div>

   </td>

</tr>

<!– /ko –>

The date picker is defined in the Knockout template as shown below, where hour Min and hour Max are the options we are using for illustration of start and closing time, before ShowDay option disables shopper from choosing the weekends from date picker.

In recent times, the B2B sector is seeing a massive change in its adoption of digital transformation. And as per the numbers, this shift is not going to subside soon. With B2B eCommerce in the US all set to hit $1.8 trillion in 2023, digital transformation is definitely the buzzword that shies from ebbing away.

The expanding B2B buyer demographic and their expectations of a shopping experience similar to that of B2C eCommerce put forth the need to leverage your online storefront to meet the growing demands for you to gain brand recognition. Hosting your eCommerce website on the best platform is the best way to hit the mark with your potential customers.

Magento 2.4.2 comes with upgraded features to back B2B capabilities. The latest version accounts for performance improvements and security fixes among additional significant platform improvements. Giving room for over 280 fixes to core code, 30+ security enhancements, enhanced GraphQL, and 290 Github issues resolution, the release aims to expand the horizons of the online shopping experience.

Read on to know more about the upgraded features.  

Magento 2.4.2 Features To Look Out For

Enhanced B2B capabilities for purchase approvals and headless commerce

The new facelift that comes with Magento 2.4.2 backs online payments, bringing forth an enhanced purchase approval experience, which was previously restricted to just offline payments. You can now easily accept purchasing policies irrespective of the payment methods. Your buyers can also make use of the same approval process for all their orders.

The online payment option will be provided at the check-out in addition to the onscreen reminders and email notifications signaling to include the payment details. The latest version also comes with new GraphQL APIs such as Company Credit and Requisition List that will ultimately support headless commerce implementations for B2B eCommerce websites.

Improved storefront performance and content management

The new Media Gallery, which was introduced in Magento 2.4, now comes up with Image Optimization. So, when you enable it, a fully web-optimized version of the product image will be displayed in place of the high-resolution image that is stored in the Media gallery. Such a generation of smaller image files without making changes to the original image will sustain the performance of your eCommerce website.

The Media Gallery backs Access Control List in the Admin. You can now define user permissions for accessing Media Gallery and control actions. This will allow designers and digital agencies to access Magento instance and oversee any asset in the system directly eliminating the need for you to expose your data.

Further, with the updates in the Page Builder, you can preview the content for both desktop and mobile views. Since migrating content to Page Builder and customizing Page Builder CSS are no longer tedious tasks, considerably minimize developer effort for their successful completion. 

As over 52% of B2B buyers are dissatisfied with the lack of information displayed on the websites, make sure to leverage the enhanced content management feature to gain competitive advantage.

Faster time to market and lower cost of ownership with PWA Studio 

PWA Studio provides for multi-currency and multi-language support enabling you to launch international sites as top-tier PWAs smoothly and at a faster pace. The latest updates in PWA Studio bring up new Venia components that cover ‘My Account’ to speed up launches. 

Along with it comes extensibility and performance enhancements that can significantly deliver an enhanced experience for the developer and your customers. In addition to different performance optimizations and bug fixes, the extensibility framework has been improved for supporting code changes via extensions. 

This latest release of PWA Studio brings with it initial components for ‘My Account’ related features that include: 

• Order History
• Wishlist
• Address Book
• Saved Payments  

Realize faster time-to-value with In-Product Guidance

Magento 2.4.2 unleashes In-Product Guidance. Providing a personalized, proactive, and scalable In-Product experience facilitates all users to interact efficiently with crucial product features and value paths. Such experiences will quicken time to value and help your customers in their buying journey.

Easily utilize these in-product experiences to let your customers know more about new features and onboard them real quick. In-product Guidance is made accessible only to those operating on Magento 2.4.2 and it calls for users to be opted-in to Admin User Tracking.

Platform quality and performance 

The latest version provides for enhancements relating to platform quality and performance that would add to your developer’s ease as well. It provides space for VBE improvements, some of which are mentioned below:

• Braintree provides Buy Now Pay Later functionality
• Dotdigital offers transactional SMS messages
• Vertex will provide support for shipping in and out of global regions

Improved API performance and Admin response time back eCommerce websites with larger catalogs, making it easier to deal with multi-store implementations that have complex catalogs. Remote storage solutions come with AWS S3 support, ultimately leading to infrastructure optimization. Magento 2.4.2 has resolved 280+ functional quality issues, including those from Magento 2.4.1.

Upgrade Compatibility Tool

At present in Alpha, the Upgrade Compatibility Tool will ensure better transparency in the upgrade process. This Command-Line Interface tool examines a Magento instance against a specific version by assessing each and every non-Magento module that is installed on it.

The Upgrade Compatibility Tool looks into any potential problems that are required to be fixed in your custom code prior to upgrading to Magento’s newer version. The tool presents a clear report of warnings and errors that are to be addressed before you take off to the newer version.

Not only does it work perfectly between any two Magento Commerce 2.x versions, but it also presents an estimated complexity score related to the upgrade process. In the current Alpha release, it can validate Magento PHP APIs and the GraphQL schema to get hold of any potential issues and you can effectively analyze the compatibility of customizations.

What forms the next big step?

Aiming for digital transformation is one of the most crucial steps for your business. Your decision forms the foundation, being the first rung in your eCommerce ladder. 

What lies ahead is your choice of the eCommerce development community. With numerous choices ahead, it may not be as easy as you think.

Here are some basic key points that you can search for:

• Concrete experience
• Impressive portfolio
• Thorough expertise 
• Great communication
• Precise idea about the implementation process

Why DCKAP?

Over the 15 years since its inception, DCKAP has proven time and again in providing the best services to curate eCommerce websites, backed by its history of successful implementations. Complying with the web standards, our skilled resources deliver re-platforming and migration services with zero data loss.

A trusted Magento partner, our Magento developers align the online storefronts to drive quality. The development phase of the Magento store puts across third-party integrations and custom functions in addition to the advanced UI/UX services. 

From Magento upgrade services, customized theme design, user-responsive design to SEO services, our certified Magento experts design and develop your eCommerce website with utmost perfection. Be ready to host your website with the best-in-class design and witness the upsurge in sales.

Get in touch with us to know more!

Magento is undoubtedly the most popular commerce platform in the world, trusted by a number of merchants across the globe helping with driving innovation. It is the topmost preferred option in B2B commerce, powering 41 merchants on the Internet Retailer B2B eCommerce Top 300 list. With Magento, you can create an outstanding B2B experience that exceeds customers’ expectations.

Epicor, on the other hand is a popular industry leader when it comes to distribution software, which is known for its emphasis on vertical markets and also the development of applications on a best-of-breed basis. The Epicor Distribution Suite portfolio consists of popular distribution systems, Prophet 21® and Eclipse.

It can be best described as a fully integrated ERP solution with plenty of features for inventory control, accounting, pre-production materials planning, as well as manufacturing execution (MES). The system is delivered either on-premise or can be hosted, or you can even use it as a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) offering.

ERP is short for enterprise resource planning. Enterprise resource planning(ERP) refers to a business process management software that allows an organization to use a system made up with integrated applications which can best manage a business and automate various back-office functions in association with technology, HR and different services.

Magento 2 – P 21 Integration

In this article, we share our knowledge to integrate the popular open-source digital commerce platform – Magento 2 with Prophet 21, called P 21.

Magento 2 has many new and improved features. Magento 2’s industry-standard API feature called REST was used to Integrate with P 21 in both ways.

REST API services of P 21 was implemented to sync Customer and Order data into P 21.

In the same way, P 21 uses Magento 2 REST API to send back Customer address update data, Product Create and update.

To create an order which originated in P 21 into Magento 2, we used Magento 2 cron which will extract JSON data from the file. Once the file is created, it is fed into Magento by P 21.

Data Services – P 21

Customer Create

When a new customer is registered in Magento, it will also be created in P 21 and a P 21 customer id will be assigned.

Customer Specific Pricing

If the logged-in customer is a contractor, then the contract pricing will be pulled from P 21.

Inventory

When a customer views the product listing in the website, the P 21 service checks the availability of the product stock and displays the current inventory status on the website.

Credit Line

The credit line service allows a customer to purchase without making any immediate payment.

Order Feed

P 21 offline orders (for e.g. by sales team) need to be synched with Magento and this is achieved by order feed CSV.

Data Services – Magento 2

Customer Update

When a customer is created in P 21 (based on a registration in Magento), it updates Magento with the following information – P 21 Customer ID, Sales Location ID, Billing and Shipping Address, and Freight Type.

Product Create and Update

The product created in P 21 will be created with basic information into Magento. If there is any change in the product price or weight, this will be updated in Magento.

Order Status Update

Status and tracking information will be updated using this web service for the orders which originated in Magento.

Takeaways

Magento allows you to make your site your own. Integration with an ERP makes it far more cost-effective than a re-platform and grants you access to a ton of benefits.

Seamless integration of Magento with P 21 is sure to make your lives easier and focus on customers and your business.

Cloras, a DCKAP product, is an enterprise ERP integration platform specializing in Magento P21 integration. Request a free demo to see how Cloras can solve your current integration challenges.

If you have any queries…please visit our FAQ section or feel free to get in touch in the comments section below.Looking for Magento P21 integration? Here’s our team of Magento developers to make it happen. Let’s get started.

RabbitMQ Configuration

Want to grasp the nuances of RabbitMQ?

If so, you’re at the right place.

RabbitMQ can help to transfer tasks into queues and get them processed at a time or as parallel processing through asynchronous messaging, thereby allowing web servers to respond quickly.

In this blog, we can learn how to configure RabbitMQ with Magento 2.

What is RabbitMQ?

Magento 2 RabbitMQ works as a message intermediator between sender and receiver. It is an open-source communication broker that provides your applications with a common platform while offering a secure and convenient messaging system.

It offers a highly reliable, scalable, and portable messaging system.

Magento 2 added asynchronous messaging capabilities with the implementation of RabbitMQ. 

Message Queuing allows web servers to respond quickly to requests and represent them to a third party for processing rather than perform the task instantaneously. This helps in handling multiple, resource-intensive requests efficiently.

Several activities are being performed within a website’s architecture as a customer places an order from the website. These are:

• Generating the order
• Taking payment
• Stock management
• Enabling email and text communications
• Sending/Receiving order data to SAP/CRM/ERP systems

When all these activities are performed in real-time, more time is consumed to complete the order process, which can have a negative impact on business. 

Here comes RabbitMQ, which can help to transfer most of these tasks into queues and get them processed at a time or as parallel processing through asynchronous messaging, thereby allowing web servers to respond quickly.

RabbitMq is a message queue system. It will process at a time or in parallel. If anything goes wrong, it will not directly impact the Magento Instance.

Benefits of RabbitMQ

• Asynchronous Messaging
• Highly Available Queues
• Management UI
• Plugin System

The following diagram illustrates the Message Queue Framework:

A publisher is a component that sends messages to an exchange. It knows which exchange to publish to and the format of the messages it sends.

An exchange receives messages from publishers and sends them to a queue.

A queue is a buffer that stores messages.

A consumer receives messages. It knows which queue to consume. It can map the processors of the message to a specific queue.

Connect RabbitMQ to Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce

Here’s the process to set up RabbitMQ to our Magento instance:

STEP -1  

Add Queue Configuration

 Add a queue section in the <install_directory>/app/etc/env.php file so that it is similar to the following:

‘queue’ =>

array (

   ’amqp’ =>

   array (

     ’host’ => ‘192.XXX.XX.XX’, (This needs to be updated as per your project IP)

     ’port’ => ‘15672’, (Port on which RabbitMQ runs. 15672 is default port)

     ’user’ =>’test’,

     ’password’ => ‘magento’,

     ’virtualhost’ => ‘/’

   ),

),

Step 2  

Open the terminal and change the directory to your Magento root path.

Step 3 

Add RabbitMQ user

Run the below command to set the RabbitMQ user.

Syntax : sudo rabbitmqctl add_user {user_name} {passwd}

Sample: sudo rabbitmqctl add_user test magento

Step 4 

Set RabbitMQ user Role

Run the below command to set the RabbitMQ user role.

Syntax : sudo rabbitmqctl set_user_tags {user_name} administrator

Sample: sudo rabbitmqctl set_user_tags test administrator

Step 5 

Set RabbitMQ User Role Permissions

Run the below command to set the RabbitMQ user role permissions.

Syntax : sudo rabbitmqctl set_permissions -p / {user_name} “.*” “.*” “.*”

Sample: sudo rabbitmqctl set_permissions -p /  test “.*” “.*” “.*”

Step 6

Then, run bin/Magento setup: upgrade to apply the changes.

Step 7 

To access the RabbitMQ Admin-

Use this URL to access the RabbitMQ Admin

Syntax: http://Your_Server_IP:15672/

Sample: http://192.XXX.XX.XX:15672/ 

Enter the Username and Password to log into RabbitMQ Admin.

Hurray! You have now connected the Magento instance and the RabbitMQ. 

You are all set to begin the message queue consumers!

Final Thoughts

Upgrading your eCommerce website with the latest technology definitely requires you to put a lot of thought into the process. Not only should you find the best development services possible but also requires you to grab onto adequate maintenance support. 

So what if you get both high-grade Magento development services and maintenance support under one roof?

In the 15+ years of experience in digital commerce, DCKAP has helped several distributors and manufacturers to digitally transform their B2B ventures. Our diligent team of Magento experts builds and designs result-yielding Magento storefronts. Apart from the maintenance services, our cutting-edge integration solutions connect leading eCommerce platforms like Magento with ERP, CRM, and other applications. 

But our services just don’t end here. To learn more, feel free to reach out to our team and grow your eCommerce with us.

Magento is one of the most coveted platforms for eCommerce. In this blog, we would be delving into a very interesting aspect of it known as Headless Commerce. Headless Commerce is a technique where we split the traditional website into two different parts, the frontend and the backend since both the frontend and backend are decoupled and separated from each other it opens up a wide number of possibilities in terms of integration and Omnichannel operations. One of the main reasons why the traditional website is moving into Headless architecture is the fact that it can be easily integrated with any platform. It opens up an enormous number of possibilities in terms of customization and most importantly it is extremely fast when compared to traditional websites and provides a better user experience.

Advantages of Headless Commerce Approach for Magento:

Since the Frontend and Backend are decoupled from each other the process of development and integration becomes much easier. Also, with the modern framework like React JS and Vue JS the larger chunk of code has been separated into multiple components and thus it improves the code readability there by improving the development experience.

Numerous benefits are reaped on the Business front such as:

• Super Fast Websites
• Agile Marketing
• Better SEO Score
• Cost-Efficient Servers
• Seamless Integration
• Better Omni-Channel Experience
• Faster Time To Market
• Increased Audience and Revenue

To know more about Headless Commerce refer to this blog

How do we attain more performance from Headless Commerce?

If performance is the key factor that you are looking for then you are at the right place, just with the decoupled architecture multiple integrations become easy and fast but performance is a great question because having the same backend Architecture (Magento) will definitely not help much as Magento by itself is a very heavy framework which a lot of computation in the backend and end up being slow despite eating up a whole lot of server memory.

So how do we overcome this issue and get more performance out of Magento? The answer is by introducing a middleware layer in between the Magento backend and our headless frontend. If we build a strong middleware then we can solve the problem by having the middleware as a middleman which can process the same data much faster and also doubles as a cache server.

What is middleware and how do we build a strong middleware?
Middleware is a concept that was been ideated by the developers of DCKAP wherein we have a server that takes care of data transfer and data synchronization between the Magento backend and the headless frontend. It acts as an intermediary caching server that is responsible for serving the data multiple times faster than the existing Magento server.
We used NodeJS as the backend programming language for designing the middleware server where NodeJS gives the best in class performance in terms of serving Rest API and GraphQl API.

Creating data sync between Magento and Middleware
When we have a middleware that stores the data from the Magento server and serves it to the Headless Frontend, it’s very important to note how often the data gets updated to the middleware from the Magento server. When it comes to data sync we ideally have two options:

– Create a WebHook for real-time data sync
– Create a CRON job for data update

Create a WebHook for real-time data sync

Creating a webhook will be the most efficient and most preferred way for creating data sync because a webhook provides data updates in real-time and also it consumes less memory when there is a requirement for a large amount of data to get updated.

–  Create a CRON job for data update

– Creating a CRON job on the other hand is the traditional approach where you schedule a Job in a particular interval of time and get the updated data and store it in the  Middleware server.

– Handling Large User Base

– When it comes to user handling the latest frameworks like Nodejs and NextJs handles large users with ease as they are designed to handle a large number of concurrent users by consuming a very less amount of resources when compared to the traditional web framers like Magento, so you shouldn’t be having any trouble in handling thousands of users concurrently.

Why DCKAP?

Our team with Magento expertise is sure to deliver the best product for you! We are here to advise you for ideal eCommerce implementations and our certified professionals ensure effortless front end-user experience with the use of technologies like headless commerce. 

A trusted Magento partner, our Magento developers align the online storefronts to drive quality. The development phase of the Magento store puts across third-party integrations and custom functions in addition to the advanced UI/UX services. 

From Magento upgrade services, customized theme design, user-responsive design to SEO services, our certified Magento experts design and develop your eCommerce website with utmost perfection. Be ready to host your website with the best-in-class design and witness the upsurge in sales.

Get in touch with us to know more!

Wondering about Magento 2 migration?

The time is now ripe for the perfect platform migration.

With 89% of the businesses already adopting digital transformation strategies, you cannot be left behind in upgrading your eCommerce website with the latest updates and innovations.

Every eCommerce merchant’s goal is to have a site that has a faster load time, improved admin interface, enhanced customer experience, and so on. Magento 2.x can help you achieve that goal. As Magento 1.x reached the End of Life in June 2020, it’s crucial to consider migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2. 

What is holding you back from migrating to Magento 2?

Magento 2.x works much better than Magento 1.x in many ways. High performance that Magento 2 guarantees will enhance your eCommerce website to be more conversion-driven. 

This blog will walk you through accurate steps to easily migrate your Magento 1.x store to Magento 2.x. Before that, let’s focus on the reasons to migrate to Magento 2.x.

Some key features of Magento 2.x are:

• Improved checkout
• Improved search and SEO features
• Improved product section
• User-friendly approach
• Mobile-optimized experiences

Magento 2.3.x has excellent features, optimizations, and back-end enhancements such as:

• Progressive Web App (PWA)
• Providing support for GraphQL – Alternative solution for REST and SOAP web APIs for front-end development.
• Multi Source Inventory (MSI) – Supports easy management of physical inventory across locations in Magento.
• Declarative DB Schema – Simplifies the installation and upgrade procedures.
• Elasticsearch – Performs swift and advanced searches on products in the catalog. (Learn more about the advantages of using Elasticsearch in Magento 2.)
• PHP 7.2.x Support – Enhances performance and security.
• Page Builder – A Drag and Drop visual content editing tool that allows customizing the appearance of your storefront without writing any code.
• Provides better security enhancements.
• Admin Backend – Import and export improvements.

Still wondering why you should be migrating from Magento 1.x to Magento 2.x? 

The answer is simple – “You want to stay updated, and not outdated.”

Points to be considered before Magento migration

Before you upgrade from Magento 1.x to Magento 2.x, the following essential aspects should be considered:

• Make a complete backup of your Magento 1.x store’s files, databases, and the folders you need.
• Start data migration from the cloned Magento 1.x store database.
• Examine what has to be removed or maintained from the new Magento 2.x store.
• Make sure that your current custom code, extensions, and themes are compatible with Magento 2.x.

4 Simple Steps to Migrate from Magento 1.9 to 2.3

• Theme Migration
• Extension Migration
• Customization Migration via Code Migration Tool
• Data Migration using Data Migration Tool

Step 1: Theme Migration

• To upgrade from the Magento 1.9.x theme to Magento 2.3.x, you must check if the same Magento 1.9.x theme is available in the Magento 2.x version or not.
• If yes, then you can install the same theme in Magento 2.x. It will simplify the process of the migration and also save your time.
• If not, then you can either get the theme from the Magento Marketplace or create your custom theme.

Step 2: Extension Migration

• To upgrade from the Magento 1.9.x extension to Magento 2.3.x, you have to check if the same Magento 1.9.x extension is available in the Magento 2.3.x version or not.
• If yes, then you can integrate the same extension in Magento 2.3.x.
• If not, then you must convert the Magento 1.9.x coding into Magento 2.3.x or get the required extensions from your Prefered Magento Store or the Marketplace.

Step 3: Customizations/Code Migration

• You can migrate your customizations by using Magento’s Code Migration Tool. It will save your time and work involved in migration.
• However, after following the migration procedure, you will have to manually edit some of the generated files.

Step 4: Data Migration

Before proceeding with the data migration, you must first install the Data Migration Tool from repo.magento.com and configure the Data Migration Tool for the migration. The Data Migration Tool version should be the same as the version of Magento 2.x.

4.1 Check your Magento 2 version by using the following command

php bin/magento --version

4. 2 Installing the Data Migration Tool

composer config repositories.magento composer https://repo.magento.com 
composer require magento/data-migration-tool:<magento_2.x_version>

The above command will update the Magento 2.x root composer.json file to add the repository https:/repo.magento.com. Instead of that, you can replace it with the Magento 2.x version that’s required. Let’s consider that the required Magento version is 2.3.2.

Hence, the actual command would be:

composer require magento/data-migration-tool:2.3.2

4.3 Configuring the Magento 2 Data Migration Tool

After installing the data migration tool, you must set the configuration for data migration. Inside the data-migration-tool/etc. folder, you could locate three folders with the following names: ce-to-ce, ce-to-ee, ee-to-ee.

The folder ce-to-ce contains scripts and configuration files for migrating the data from Magento 1.x CE to Magento 2.x CE, and the folder ee-to-ee contains configuration files and scripts for migrating the data from Magento 1.x EE to Magento 2.x EE. Similarly, there are settings files and scripts in the ce-to-ee folder to migrate the information from Magento 1.x CE to Magento 2.x EE.

Now, enter the folder for which you have planned to perform the migration. For example, in the case of data migration from the community edition to the enterprise edition, you need to choose ce-to-ee. Now, navigate to the directory with the Magento 1.x version name. For instance, if you perform the Magento 1.9.0 version migration, you should enter the 1.9.0 folder.

Before migrating the settings and data, create a config.xml file in the relevant directory. Let’s say that if you are performing the migration from the Magento 1.x Open Source platform to Magento 2.x Enterprise edition, then navigate to-

<Magento 2 root dir>/vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/opensource-to-enterprise/<Magento 1.x version> directory and rename config.xml.dist to config.xml.

Next, open config.xml file and specify the following:

<source>
<database host="localhost" name="Magento1-Database-name" user="Database-username" password="Database-password"/>
</source>
<destination>
<database host="localhost" name="Magento2-Database-name" user="Database-username" password="Database-password"/>
</destination>
<options>
<crypt_key>Magento1-Encrypted-Key</crypt_key>
</options>

In the above code, the database information of Magento 1.x and the relevant database information of Magento 2.x. are mandatory and should be filled in before running it. It is the encryption key of the Magento 1.x store, where you can find it in the /app/etc/local.xml file within the tag.

When finished, save the config.xml, and you are done.

4.4 Migrate settings

Use the Data Migration Tool to migrate the settings from Magento 1.x to Magento 2.x.

This step is related to reconfiguring your language, currency, shipping, email templates, taxes, and CMS pages on the Magento 2 websites.

To begin, navigate to the Magento 2 root directory via SSH terminal and run the below command:

php bin/magento migrate:settings --reset <path to your config.xml>

For example:

php bin/magento migrate:settings --reset 
vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/ce-to-ee/1.9.0/config.xml

Upon successful migration, a message will be displayed.

4.5 Migrate Data

You have to migrate the database assets (e.g., products, categories, customer information, orders, configurations, etc.) from the existing Magento 1.9.x store to the new store. 

Follow this command:

php bin/magento migration:data --reset <path to your config.xml>

For example:

php bin/magento migrate:data --reset 
vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/ce-to-ee/1.9.0/config.xml

Most common issues faced:

Source documents/fields are not mapped 

This issue occurs when some Magento 1 entities (in most cases, coming from extensions) do not exist in the Magento 2 database. Install the corresponding Magento 2 extensions from the Magento Marketplace or configure the tool to ignore the problematic data.

Class does not exist but is mentioned as an error 

A class from Magento 1 codebase could not be found in the Magento 2 codebase during the EAV migration step. In most scenarios, the missing class might belong to an extension. Install the corresponding Magento 2 extension or ignore the attribute that causes the issue.

Foreign key constraint fails 

There are missing database records in the parent_table, which the field_id of the child_table is pointing to. Delete the records from the child_table, which is causing the issue, or disable the Data Integrity step by modifying the Data Migration Tool’s config.xml.

Duplicates in URL rewrites 

The Target path in a URL rewrite must be specified by a unique pair of Request path + Store ID. Enable the auto_resolve_urlrewrite_duplicates option in the config.xml file.

Flaws in the display of Homepage 

If the home page does not show up correctly, then this issue might have occurred due to the Magento 1.9.x version having a custom layout for the home page. At this point, you will have to create a custom layout in Magento 2.3.x.

Products not appearing in the category 

You need to reindex all the indexers by executing the following command, bin/magento indexer:reindex.

Problems in loading CSS JS files 

For this, you will need to flush your cache and then deploy the static content. In case of any error, refer to Magento’s Troubleshooting page.

After the migration has been done, run a test to ensure the proper functioning of Magento 2.x. 

A Seamless Magento 2 Migration – Your One-Stop Solution

Magento migration from version 1.x to 2.x is a necessity for your eCommerce business. With perfect platform migration, equip your eCommerce website with a wide range of functionalities and a faster time to respond. 

Magento experts at DCKAP provide end-to-end services to ensure spotless Magento migration, promising endless customizations and flexibility. We help you upgrade your online store to the latest version and optimize your website for driving revenue. Our certified Magento experts have the right resources to aid you through seamless development and migration services along with all the much-required eCommerce services and solutions.  

Looking to migrate to Magento 2.x, but don’t know where to start? Get started with the migration process and take your website to a whole new level.

Upgrading your Magento eCommerce Store to Magento 2 can be quite a challenging task. With each website implementing an array of Plugins, ensuring an error-free shopping experience after the upgrade, is paramount. 

The upgrade testing can be split across three environments, namely QA, Staging, and Live servers, to have a structured testing process. 

Read on to know more about the complete Magento testing checklist and upgrade to Magento 2 without any bottlenecks.

Magento Testing Checklist – Key Points To Be Considered After Magento 2 Upgrade

Prepare a comprehensive test checklist which should cover the overall features of the website along with:

• Front-end functionalities
• Business scenarios specific to the site
• Magento admin
• Third-party Integrations
• Verification of automated regression scripts and updates

Checklist For Testing After Magento 2 Upgrade

Front-end

Make the test scenarios up to date with the site’s latest functionality.

Do Sanity testing of the complete website to identify broken links and functionalities.

After upgrading to Magento 2, check the end user’s workflows to ensure that the user experience isn’t affected:

1. Access the site

2. Add Product to the bag

3. Check shopping bag

4. Edit the item

5. Update the quantity

6. Update shopping bag

7. Go to checkout

8. Test the different checkout flows

• • Guest Checkout
  • Checkout as an already existing, registered user
  • Checkout as a new user
  • Place an order with different payment methods available on the site (Credit card, PayPal, Gift card, etc.,)

9. Check the tax calculation.

10.Check the shipping methods and shipping amount.

11. After placing the order, verify if the invoice has been created.

12. The next step of invoicing is shipments.

13. After shipment, check the RMA process. A return/exchanges credit memo should be created.

14. Order cancellation scenario – When the product is out of stock or due to any unavoidable reasons. Another scenario is the user calling customer support and canceling the order.

15. Check the transaction mails for  the below actions:

• • User registration
  • Forgot password
  • Order confirmation
  • Shipment creation
  • In case of RMA return/exchange, a credit memo will be created.
  • In case of cancellation scenarios, a credit memo will be created and the amount will be refunded.
  • Wishlist

16. Check the CMS pages/blocks

17. Email Subscription

18. Contact Us

19. Compatibility Testing (Device/Browser)

20. Regression Testing

Defects are sometimes tricky and invisible, don't let the customers catch them.A dedicated testing team can handle the post-upgrade defects better.

Get In Touch

Business scenarios specific to the site

1. Check the customization features specific to the site. For example, the sale promotion strategy differs from one site to other. It should work seamlessly exactly like it was with Magento 1.
2. Sale promotion rules should be defined.
3. URL of Catalog, product pages should match M1 site.
4. Verify SEO metadata, canonical tags, and description by checking view page source.

Admin

1. Admin URL should be obfuscated. This is as per the Magento EQP standard.

2. Check the import processes.

• Product
• Inventory
• Tax

3. Reports

Third-party integrations

Check the third-party integrations that handle functions like:

• ERP
• Product feeds
• Tracking Pixels
• Custom modules

Verification Of Automated Regression Scripts And Updates

Upgrading will impact automation scripts, so run the scripts. Based on the results, update the scripts. Re-run the scripts and share the results with stakeholders.

In a few instances, we have noted that having a dedicated testing team for the upgrade helps to find defects invisible to the developers. A Magento Upgrade should upgrade the overall experience of the customer.

Upgrade To Magento 2 Without A Glitch!

As you have already gone through the checklist by now, ensure an error-free and smooth upgrade to Magento 2. With top-end Magento services and the latest technologies, DCKAP curates and develops profitable eCommerce websites along with complete maintenance support.

With our testing solution, gauge your project’s success through our centralized hub to track and measure your operations and implementations. Our certified Magento experts are here to help you in bringing forth a result-driven online storefront that promises eCommerce growth.

Upgrade to Magento 2 to leverage its latest improvements and enhanced functionalities to your eCommerce store. Migrate to Magento 2 Now!

Changing times have brought exponential growth in eCommerce. No matter what the industry is. The same goes for the automotive industry as well.

As going digital is no longer an option but a necessity, choosing the perfect eCommerce platform can definitely guarantee your eCommerce success. And what best option than Magento 2!

Magento 2 comes with exclusive B2B features that can power your eCommerce operations. With over 250,000 active sites on Magento, it has strengthened its base as one of the leading eCommerce platforms.

Wondering how Magento 2 can help you win over the automotive market?

Read on to dig out the reasons. 

Magento 2 – The Perfect Online Store For Automotives

Enable multi-store and multi-language support

Magento’s multi-store feature is especially useful as you are in the automotive industry. You can easily enable multiple stores feature with just a single installation. The multi-store feature comes in handy when you are handling numerous Store Views or when you deal with different versions of your store for multiple locations.

You can control multiple stores via a single admin panel. With this feature, a clear and precise display of products comes into place, letting you target specific customers much more effectively. Also, categorize your products based on their niche shops to conduct sales accordingly.

If your customer base spreads across countries, then the multi-language feature of Magento Commerce (now renamed as Adobe Commerce) can help you out. You can also attract potential customers to your online storefront. As most customers search in their native language, gain the added benefit as search engines promote searches based on native languages. Magento theme facilitates multi-language support that lets users choose a language from a higher number of languages provided.

Explore the vast possibilities of Magento Marketplace

Magento 2 comes up with Multi-Vendor Marketplace Extension. With this feature, function your website as a thriving online marketplace. The extension lets suppliers keep track of shipping methods as your customers can select a predefined shipping method.

The extension comes with many features and a few of them are:

• Membership option
• Shipping management option
• Scheduled payments for vendors
• Vendor registration page

Different vendor portals can be set up with separate and unique dashboards to manage products. Also, set up a distinct registration and login page for each supplier, and keep track of all the products added by these suppliers. The extension facilitates bulk product upload through CSV files and provides advanced tracking codes for shipping all orders.

Generate sales reports and sales conversions of suppliers, while gaining an overview of monthly vendor payments. Additionally, access statistical reports on business operations to know which products were sold more, their shipping locations, etc.

Leverage Magento’s web responsive templates and UI Library

Magento 2 comes with a responsive web design that provides an impeccable viewing experience across all devices. Enabling a responsive web design is necessary as your customers are likely to return to your eCommerce website if it is mobile-friendly. 

You can improve the mobile viewing experience by adopting Magento Blank and Luma themes. Using these in-built themes will be more viable than creating a theme from scratch. These themes will help you organize your catalog page that can be accessed seamlessly across a wide range of devices.

The UI Library of Magento 2 is a highly flexible frontend library. It facilitates easy customizations and frontend theme development by using mixins for base elements.

You can also customize and reuse these below-mentioned properties and elements of the user interface with Magento UI Library:

• Layout
• Actions-toolbar
• Forms
• Breadcrumbs
• Icon
• Dropdowns
• Pop-ups 
• Sections – tabs and accordions

Manage inventory better through the Multi-Source Inventory feature

With Magento 2, you can link various inventory sources to your online storefront. Along with the multi-store support, you can also link multiple warehouses and brick and mortar stores as well for better operational transparency. Multi-Source Inventory facilitates the management of both single and multi-channel inventories in addition to managing different sales channels from the Magento 2 admin panel.

Easily manage all your inventory and warehouses irrespective of the warehouse location, customer location, sales channels, or the type of products. Expand your eCommerce website through easy updates of quantities, add stocks, sources, and sales channels.

Multi-Source Inventory feature of Magento 2 helps you to:

• Keep an eye on inventory at various warehouses.
• Assign different products and their respective quantities to multiple warehouses, stores, and factories.
• Enable third-party integration with inventory systems.
• Assign rules to manage and control inventory sources.

Multi-Source Inventory also smoothens operational workflow and omnichannel strategies to deliver a seamless shopping experience.

Optimize its mobile commerce features to target a wider customer base

In recent times, mobile commerce is gaining immense popularity owing to its sheer convenience. Set yourself up for a mobile-ready site as the future is definitely mobile.

Magento 2 provides a mobile-friendly checkout experience. A seamless mobile-optimized workflow is guaranteed through Instant Purchase and other payment gateway integrations like Braintree and PayPal. Enhance the cross-channel experience through built-in responsive design reference templates to create a mobile-friendly eCommerce website.

Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) can also be leveraged. The mobile commerce features of Magento 2 are highly flexible and customizable. You can set the layout of your app, change the color, or even add anything according to your business requirements with just a few clicks.

Pro-tip* While implementing mobile SEO tactics, make sure you optimize images and videos for mobile view. Also, reduce heavy content as it can be exhausting to view on mobile devices.

Enhance Real-Time Magento 2-ERP Integration For Dynamic Pricing   

In the B2B space, dynamic pricing enjoys a significant spot. The Reuters report that came at the start of the decade also validates its growing applicability. The report suggests that dynamic pricing generated over $1 billion in the automotive industry over the past decade. You can also retain customers by allocating pricing accordingly.

As you already know the benefits of dynamic pricing, you now need the real-time integration of your Magento store and your ERP system.

Bring in automated data synchronization by connecting your eCommerce website with your ERP through Cloras, our enterprise-level integration platform and middleware solution. Cloras facilitates the real-time integration of all data to and forth your eCommerce and ERP, ensuring zero data loss. The information entered in your website will be automatically reflected in your ERP and vice versa.

Ensure error-free data transfer with Cloras as it guarantees end-to-end data automation and centralize all your data in one place. Provide dynamic pricing through Cloras and display specific prices for your customers. With refined workflows, gain higher productivity and immense operational flexibility for a better digital commerce experience.

Final Thoughts

As the automotive industry has always grown from strength to strength, upgrading your online storefront with the latest updates can witness immense progress coming your way.

Augment your eCommerce website with the end-to-end digital commerce services and solutions of DCKAP. In the years spanning over a decade, DCKAP has built conversion-driven online storefronts for several B2B brands, manufacturers, and distributors. From re-platforming, site upgrades, integrations to maintenance and support, our eCommerce services are tailor-made to drive profitable results. Build your online store with us and stay updated with all the latest innovations that will lead you towards a successful eCommerce implementation.

In case of any eCommerce requirements, our domain experts are here to help you out.

As Magento enhances its features day to day, as a developer or a user, we are supposed to learn more about its new features. And because of that, we need to change our implementation technique for each version as per their standard.

Here is one such implementation issue that I have faced, and I would like to share it with someone who is looking for it.

In Magento 2, we were almost familiar with Page Builder, and most of us using that for CMS Page customization on our projects. Which makes most of our customization on theme-related works less. 

When we are using “Product” content on your page, which is under Add Content. Which is used to list the set of products on the Custom page or a specific section. 

Based on my need, I need to change the no of products per row. By default, it was 5.

In the Category page or search page of Magento 2, the no of products per row is controlled by CSS. Where us in Page Builder found it hard to change it. After some diagnosis, we found it can be achieved via theme.

Here we explained how we achieved it. Hope it helps you.

Create a view.xml under the mentioned below path.

app/design/frontend/<yourpackage>/<yourtheme>/etc/view.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<view xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:framework:Config/etc/view.xsd">

   <vars module="Magento_PageBuilder">

       <var name="breakpoints">

           <var name="desktop">

               <var name="conditions">

                   <var name="min-width">1024px</var>

               </var>

               <var name="options">

                   <var name="products">

                       <var name="default">

                           <var name="slidesToShow">4</var>

                       </var>

                   </var>

               </var>

           </var>

           <var name="tablet">

               <var name="conditions">

                   <var name="max-width">1024px</var>

                   <var name="min-width">768px</var>

               </var>

               <var name="options">

                   <var name="products">

                       <var name="default">

                           <var name="slidesToShow">3</var>

                       </var>

                       <var name="continuous">

                           <var name="slidesToShow">3</var>

                       </var>

                   </var>

               </var>

           </var>

           <var name="mobile">

               <var name="conditions">

                   <var name="max-width">767px</var>

                   <var name="min-width">640px</var>

               </var>

               <var name="options">

                   <var name="products">

                       <var name="default">

                           <var name="slidesToShow">2</var>

                       </var>

                   </var>

               </var>

           </var>

           <var name="mobile-small">

               <var name="conditions">

                   <var name="max-width">640px</var>

               </var>

               <var name="options">

                   <var name="products">

                       <var name="default">

                           <var name="slidesToShow">1</var>

                           <var name="slidesToScroll">1</var>

                       </var>

                       <var name="continuous">

                           <var name="slidesToShow">1</var>

                           <var name="slidesToScroll">1</var>

                       </var>

                   </var>

               </var>

           </var>

       </var>

   </vars>

</view>

In the above example, we have shared the conditions for various devices like Desktop, Tablet, Mobile, and Smaller mobiles. 

We can also change the max-width based on our theme condition. Based on each condition we can set the no of products per row.

Happy Coding!

Over 250,000 online stores rely on this powerful CMS to run their online business, and merchants using Magento have experienced growth three times faster, on average. Premier brands like Ford, Omega Watches, Bvlgari, Canon, Nike, Coca-cola, Swatch, Vizio, and many more, trusted Magento as their perfect choice for online business.

Choose the right Magento Development Service for your eCommerce store. A Magento development company with skilled Magento developers will give you endless opportunities to build the perfect store that aligns with your business requirements.

We are here for all your requirements. Get in touch with our experts for more information.

Are you looking for the best Magento website development services?

We are here to provide you with three significant steps for Magento implementation.

Gartner’s recognition of Magento Commerce (now renamed as Adobe Commerce) as the leader in eCommerce platforms comes with the promise that the platform will lead you towards eCommerce success. With enhanced B2B capabilities and the best-suited features for merchants, wholesalers, and distributors, Magento has already established itself as one of the most reliable eCommerce platforms. 

Magento Certified Developers

Building your feature-rich Magento website requires an intricate and hassle-free development process. Joining hands with the best Magento Certified Developers is all that matters to set the base for your digital commerce experience.

At DCKAP, we have Magento Professional Developers and Certified Magento Full-Stack Developers who have the right business and technical expertise to offer you the best solution.

Read on to know more about how our developers weave successful Magento website development projects with our proven processes.

Our 3 Proven Steps For High-Quality Magento Website Development

1. Planning Your Magento Website – Business Analysis

This is the most basic step and the one that forms the base of your online store. Understanding your business and your target customers is, hands down, the most important ingredient that goes into eCommerce website development. It will, in turn, help in understanding your strengths and pain points as well. And that is exactly what we kick off with.

Having an in-depth idea about your products and their categories, content/images for the products, shipping options, payment possibilities, checkout process, etc., will help in developing a peerless Magento website. 

The more we get to know about your business, the more fruitful our implementation will be. So, communication is key. Our business analysis team ensures communication at each stage to know your requirements/feedback. We use Basecamp, a project management and team communication tool to keep you updated about project progress and timelines and also for seamless communication with the stakeholders.

2. Building Your Magento Website

• Magento Website Design 

At DCKAP, we endeavor to design intelligent and customer-focused insights that are clear and actionable. Our business analysts and designers discuss both UX and UI to understand more about the navigation as well as the look and feel of the eCommerce website.

When we design B2B eCommerce sites, we keep in mind that the B2B users are ‘returning Visitors’ and ‘Domain Professionals’. We take into account that the B2B users use SKUs to search products, navigate using bread crumbs, filter by product attributes, perform feature queries, and do keyboard tabbing through forms. We work with your team, analyze your buyer behavior and strive to deliver a seamless user experience. 

• Magento Website Development 

Every eCommerce site is unique and their needs are different. It is important to support these needs. 

Features/functionalities like shipping options, payment gateway integration, customizations, back-end development like admin logins, inventory, taking stock, etc, analytical/Social Media tools to be integrated for eCommerce marketing, scalability, and security are thoroughly discussed by Business Analysts with all the stakeholders.

Planning your website features before starting with the design and development gives a clear picture of how your Magento website will be. 

You also need to finalize any features/functionalities that you specifically need. We help you put in place robust features for a better eCommerce experience. They can be:

• Home Page & Categories
• On-Site Search
• Product Lists & Filtering
• Product Page
• Cart & Checkouts
• Customer Accounts
• Order Tracking & Returns
• Mobile eCommerce
• Blogs/Videos (and whatnot!)

In a nutshell, the features and functionalities of your online storefront are decided at this juncture. 

• Third-Party Integrations

Our Magento development process also involves complex third-party integrations and custom functions that improve the interaction of end-users with your website. The Magento Plugins expand Magento solutions with powerful new features and functionality and helps retailers and distributors do more with their eCommerce stores.

• Mobile Commerce

As the traffic comes increasingly from mobile devices, optimizing your eCommerce website for a mobile-friendly experience is inevitable. A responsive web design comes into place for your online store to be accessed across devices. With UI/UX optimization, your customers can navigate easily through your website that can ultimately lead to customer retention. 

3. Delivering Your Magento Website

Our job is not done after you go live with your Magento website. Optimizing the website performance is equally important as developing a Magento store. Ensuring a high-performing website that can turn visitors into customers is very much crucial in this competitive digital landscape.

Here’s a checklist of various important factors to consider:

• Search Engine Optimization

Building SEO-friendly web pages and mapping the URLs are necessary for your website to rank higher in search engines. Guiding your visitors through accurate internal links becomes seamless when you leverage SEO web design. 

Our on-site SEO services include assessing key factors that contribute to your ranking like keyword research, H tags, content, image alt tags, etc. that lead to data-driven analysis. 

The most important point in client projects that have existing eCommerce sites is to ensure that they have the same URLs and their SEO rankings for their crucial keywords do not go down in SERP rankings after you go live. In case any existing URLs are discarded for business purposes, we make sure that they are redirected and do not throw 404 errors. 

• Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance is an essential aspect that ensures the growth of your website. We make sure that your customers get a smooth experience through a functional user interface. Our QA team checks for any flaws that must have been missed out in the development stage.

Right QA testing can help you troubleshoot any performance glitch or eCommerce bottlenecks. Quality Assurance improves the website development process to eliminate any negative impacts on your website through the timely fixing of errors.

• Maintenance and Support  

The whole Magento website development process won’t just end with setting up your online store. Website maintenance is also equally important. Fixing bugs, installing new features, security patches, and ensuring zero downtime are all that contribute to the high-performance of your website.

Platform version upgrades are never to be undermined as they keep your website ready for the latest advancements and updates. You need to keep your website up-to-date with the newer versions to benefit from the new features. Apart from boosting your website performance, upgrades can also enhance security by eliminating any potential threats.

As you have gone through our tried and proven process in Magento website development, you are now ready to go for the perfect implementation of your Magento store.

And we are here to help you out.

Why DCKAP?

Our journey as a digital commerce ecosystem over these 15+ years has witnessed successful eCommerce implementations of our cherished clients. DCKAP has always been instrumental in digitally transforming several B2B/B2C businesses with our eCommerce services and solutions.

As an Adobe Solution Partner, we come with the right skillset and expertise that guarantee an optimal Magento store. Our certified Magento experts strive to deliver your website with a promise of the best-in-class shopping experience.

Our Solutions 

Our solutions like the Cloras integration platform and flexiPIM, our product information management software can further enhance your Magento implementation. Your Magento store should be equipped with the right product data as it eases your customer’s shopping journey. Hence, developing your Magento 2 store with the perfect web design and integrations can never be ignored. With QA Touch, our Test Case Management Tool, bring in a centralized hub to gauge your project’s success and make smarter business decisions with vizB, our data intelligence tool.

If you are on the lookout for any eCommerce services or solutions, we’re just a call away

The chapter “B2B Web Design” in the book ‘The B2B eCommerce Handbook’ by Matt Haig begins like this – “There is no such thing as a perfect B2B website. It simply does not exist and indeed cannot, exist. The web itself is an inherently imperfect medium because, as its inventor Tim Berners-Lee is more than happy to concede, it will always be ‘a little broken’.”

So here comes the need for best practices in Magento B2B testing.

The requirements of a B2B eCommerce website are different from that of a B2C eCommerce website. The business workflow of a B2B site is much more complex, non-standardized, and differs from client to client and industry to industry.

Magento is one of the leading eCommerce platforms that has been making successful forays in the B2B space. The core features of Magento 2.4 specifically align with B2B operations, acting as a huge support system. 

We have come up with the best practices and learnings from the Magento B2B projects that we implemented. We have presented it in the form of differences in testing a B2C and a B2B eCommerce website. This is also to bring into focus the B2B features that need to be tested apart from the regular eCommerce features in B2C.

Here’s Your Checklist for Magento B2B Testing

Along with the checklist, we can also take a look at the differences in the processes involved in the operations of B2B and B2C websites.

Differences in testing a B2C and B2B ECommerce site:

Account Management:

• Creating company accounts in a B2C site is simple and does not need any approval.
• Creating company accounts in a B2B site involves approval from the accounting team or other appropriate teams after a customer registers on the site.

What to Test:

• Customer registration with/without Credit Line
• Register using a unique email address and password
• Approval from the Accounting/other teams

Pricing:

• In a B2C site, there is no dynamic pricing. The product price is usually the same for all consumers.
• In a B2B site, there are different pricing types such as tier pricing, customer-specific pricing, etc.

What to Test:

• Pricing for each customer
• Pricing for guest user
• Boundary testing for Tier pricing

Searching & Browsing Products:

• Search in a B2C site is simple.
• B2B has enhanced search features that need to be tested with various keywords/SKU to achieve the exact search results.

What to Test:

• Search by one or more keywords
• Search by partial keywords
• Search by partial/full SKU
• Search by price range

Purchasing Products:

• In a B2C site, consumers can purchase a product by using the standard functionalities.
• B2B e-commerce platforms are expected to offer full support for Quick Orders, Request A Quote, Reordering for the wholesale customers to help drive repeat business. 

What to Test:

Quick Order:

• Search and Add product using partial/full SKU
• Search and Add products using keywords
• Increase/decrease Quantity

Request A Quote:

• Request and submit product quote
• Approve/Reject the quote 
• Buy the quoted products with the negotiated price if approved

Reorder:

• Reorder a previously placed order
• Reorder and add new items and proceed to checkout

Payment Processing:

• In a B2C site, customers are offered payment options like Paypal, Credit/Debit card, COD
• B2B companies extend credit to customers in addition to traditional payment methods like credit cards and PayPal

What to Test:

• Check using allowed credit card types
• Check expiry month/year
• Pay using credit line amount
• Pay via ACH/e-check

Shipping methods:

• In a B2C site, consumers often purchase products that are lightweight, and hence they ship via common carriers such as UPS, FedEx, or US Postal Service.
• In a B2B site, business customers purchase products in bulk using LTL or FTL  shipments and also use UPS, FedEx, US Postal Service for products that are lightweight. 

What to Test:

• Add products with different weights
• Verify the UPS, FedEx, LTL, FTL rates

Order Tracking:

• In a B2C site, tracking orders by consumers is a common feature.
• In a B2B site, the ability to track orders is a key component of the overall customer experience wherein they can find the order status. This plays a crucial role for the supplier to fulfill the expectations of the distributors.

What to Test:

• Track order status using Order ID, Email account, Zip Code
• Track order status using the tracking number

B2B eCommerce websites are complex and layered in nature.  The QA professional who tests the site must be familiar and comfortable with the industry jargon, workflows, approval cycles, pricing, buying and payment patterns, etc. This will help her to test not just the functionalities but also from the company and buyer’s points of view.

Final Thoughts

Testing your Magento B2B website is as important as implementing it. Just like how building your perfect Magento website is the result of a lot of plannings and strategies, the best testing practices also require intricate planning.

And we are here to help you with the best Magento B2B testing practices.  Our expert QA professionals ensure we deliver you a high-performing Magento B2B website.  DCKAP has always been instrumental in helping leading B2B brands, manufacturers, and distributors in achieving eCommerce success with our services and solutions. With us, get your feature-rich online storefront up and running.

Aiming to build the best-in-class eCommerce website? Our experts are just a call away!

Adopting new technologies and leveraging them are definitely the needs of the hour in a digital commerce landscape as you cannot be left behind in terms of scalability and growth.

As you are looking for accurate steps to install Magento 2 on MacBook, you have reached the right place. Here’s a complete guide for you on the successful installation of Magento 2. 

Dive in to get a deeper look at the process.

Our easy steps to set up Magento 2.4.1 on Mac operating system 

Check out the exact steps for you to follow:

Web services Requirements

    Apache 2.2 or 2.4

    Nginx 1.x

Database Engine Requirements

    MySQL 5.7

    MariaDB 5.6, 5.7

PHP Requirements

    >= 7.4

Elasticsearch 

    >= 7.7

Composer

    >= 1.x

Step 1: Install MAMP

1. Here we need to download MAMP in our machine. Just click on the link for download MAMP in our machine.
2. Once you successfully downloaded MAMP in your machine, then start the setup step by step.

3.After the setup is completed, open MAMP and click on preferences and setup the port link

below: apache: 80; Nginx: 80; MySQL: 3306

4. Select Apache from the radio button

Step 2: Install Composer

You can download from the composer website or you can use the command line for composer installation.

php -r “copy(‘https://getcomposer.org/installer’, ‘composer-setup.php’);”

php -r “if (hash_file(‘sha384’, ‘composer-setup.php’) === ‘756890a4488ce9024fc62c56153228907f1545c228516cbf63f885e036d37e9a59d27d63f46af1d4d07ee0f76181c7d3’) { echo ‘Installer verified’; } else { echo ‘Installer corrupt’; unlink(‘composer-setup.php’); } echo PHP_EOL;”

php composer-setup.php

php -r “unlink(‘composer-setup.php’);”

sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Check whether the Composer is installed or not to run this command in terminal.

composer -v

Ouput:

Step 3: Download Magento 2 Setup

Here we are going to download Magento 2 from the official website. Click on the link here. You can select the version from the drop-down and click on the download button.

Step 4: Now copy downloaded file to htdocs folder and extract the folder inside of htdocs.

Path: /Applications/MAMP/htdocs

Step 5: Install Elasticsearch for Magento 2.4.1

Elasticsearch is recommended by Magento 2.4.1. Just click on the link and you can download Elasticsearch in your system. After installing it successfully, you can run the Elasticsearch in your system.

Once you clicked on Open, you can check your terminal. The code will execute. After successfully running the command, you can check localhost and port number 9200.

http://localhost:9200

Step 6: Now we need to create a database. You can use phpmyadmin or command line.

Step 7: Here we going to set up Magento 2.

Run the below command:

/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php7.4.16/bin/php -dmemory_limit=5G /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/magento2/bin/magento setup:install –backend-frontname=”admin”  –db-host=”localhost”  –db-name=”magento”  –db-user=”root”  –db-password=”root”  –language=”en_US”  –currency=”USD”  –base-url=”http://localhost/dckap/”  –admin-user=”admin”  –admin-password=”root@123″  –admin-email=”siddharths@dckap.com”  –admin-firstname=”admin”  –admin-lastname=”user”

In the above command, check your system path and also look for the ID and password for admin. You can select from your end and forget the database ID and password.

Step 8: After successfully running above command, you need to run the below command to set up Magento 2.

sudo php bin/magento setup:upgrade

sudo php bin/magento setup:di:compile

sudo bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -f

sudo php bin/magento c:f

rm -r pub/ var/ generated/

sudo chmod -R 0777 var/ generated/ pub/

php bin/magento maintenance:enable

rm -rf var/cache/* var/page_cache/* var/di/* var/generation/* var/view_preprocessed/* generated/* pub/static/*

php -d memory_limit=12G bin/magento setup:upgrade

php -d memory_limit=12G bin/magento setup:di:compile

php -d memory_limit=12G bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -f

php bin/magento c:f

php bin/magento c:c

chmod -R 0777 var/ generated/ pub/static

php bin/magento maintenance:disable

Step 9: Now you can ensure the proper functioning of your Magento website.

http://localhost/magento2/

http://localhost/magento2/admin

In admin panel login, you need to put your credentials and you are now all set to go ahead and operate.

Admin Panel

If you want to disable Two Factor Authentication, then run the below command in the terminal inside of the project.

php bin/magento module:disable Magento_TwoFactorAuth

Interested to learn more about setting up Magento 2? Here’s another detailed blog on how to install Magento 2.4.1 on Windows 10. 

Final Thoughts

As a digital commerce ecosystem, DCKAP comes with 15+ years of expertise to aid you in running your eCommerce store with an improved digital presence. Our certified developers and team of experts are just a call away to help you out with your eCommerce needs. Get in touch with us and optimize your website for high performance.

Magento is a growing platform with all the new addons to the Magento development services, and thanks to an outstanding product and exceptional marketing, retailers are abreast of the latest offerings in Magento.

eBay Enterprise has released the new versions of Magento Enterprise Edition (version 1.14) and Community Edition (version 1.9) at the Imagine 2014 global ecommerce event on May 13, 2014. This new release provides more than 50 enhancements that improve quality and security throughout the product.

Technology Updates:

EE 1.14 and CE 1.9 include the following technology updates:

• PHP 5.4, which provides better performance and more efficient memory usage
• The Zend Framework has been upgraded to version 1.12.3
• Magento EE only. Magento EE 1.14 supports Apache Solr versions up to 3.6.2

Responsive Web Design Templates (One website fits all):

The new responsive design reference theme is built on the modern technologies like CSS3, HTML5 and natively available jQuery. This design incorporates the best practices for mobile sites. This feature is available in both Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14 and Community Edition 1.9.

Faster time to market: This new release enables the developers to build the mobile and tablet friendly websites in half the time as previously required.

More customers & more sales: According to Pew Research Center Internet Project, nearly two thirds of cell phone owners use their phone to go online, and one in five cell owners do most of their online browsing on their phone (http://bit.ly/1ebr0Aa). Responsive design enables the site to connect with more customers, thereby leading to a surge in revenue stream.

Competition without size parameters: By the end of December 2012 most of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as other large enterprises had started implementing responsive design to their website. This new responsive web design provides all the Magento websites a chance to compete with these large enterprises in the mobile and tablet ecommerce platform.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Friendly: Responsive web design is Google’s recommended approach to mobile-optimized websites. Hence, this design helps improve the SEO ranking.

Bill Me Later:

“Bill Me Later® is a PayPal service that gives your customers access to No Payments and No Interest if paid in full in 6 months on purchases of $99 or more”. It helps retailers sell more inventory and capture up to 18 percent more sales(http://bit.ly/Scrgva) by offering special financing options on qualified purchases.

This feature is available in both Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14 and Community Edition 1.9.

Improved PayPal Express Checkout: The improved PayPal Express Checkout allows merchants to offer a streamlined checkout experience which automatically tries alternative payment options if the customer’s credit card is declined, increasing conversion rates and sales.

Drive Repeat purchases: The Bill Me Later integration provides great benefits for all involved. Customers can now spread out payments and retailers can sell more merchandise and drive repeat purchases. On a recent comScore online survey (http://bit.ly/Scrgva), “30% of Bill Me Later shoppers said they spent more than planned due to the six month financing offer.” “Financing gave them the flexibility to buy now and pay later on all purchases of $99 and up, so they can keep coming back for more.”

No Additional Fee: Customers have up to six months to complete the full payment of the transaction. Also, the merchant  is not charged for additional fees except the standard PayPal transaction fees. The consumer is not the only one winning in this program, the Bill Me Later feature also allows for the merchant to be paid up front.

Cross Border Trade (price consistency):

“Cross-border trade (also referred to as price consistency) was added to support European Union (EU) merchants who want to maintain consistent prices for customers whose tax rates are different than the store tax rate.”

This feature is available in both Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14 and Community Edition 1.9.

Single Price across regions and geographies: “Merchants operating across regions and geographies can show their customers a single price. Pricing is clean and uncluttered regardless of tax structures and rates that vary from country to country.”

Great control over the pricing: This option provides greater control over their site and how their pricing is displayed.

NOTE: This feature is available for the EU (European Union) merchants and the prices must be displayed inclusive of the taxes. For more information regarding the configuration of this feature refer http://bit.ly/1kIhpbz.

Checkout Improvements:

Ajax Checkout: The customer can change the quantity of items in the shopping cart or remove items without refreshing the page.

Improvement in PayPal  Express Checkout: Improve the PayPal Express checkout experience by eliminating the following steps in the checkout process:

• The order review page can be enabled or disabled. (The order review page displays after the customer logs in to PayPal.)
• Eliminate the necessity of clicking Update Order before Place Order.

Use of widget in mini Shopping cart: You can use the widget in mini shopping cart.

Solr Search Engine Changes (Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14 only)

Fast indexing: Magento EE 1.14 now comes with native support for Solr 3.6.2. Hence, the search indexing is performed as the catalog changes without any manual intervention.

Fresh Search Results: Due to the improvement in the fast indexing, the shoppers are provided with more up-to-date search results.

More efficient operation: These improvements helps merchants to be more efficient in operations and improve their performance during search indexing.

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DCKAP is having tremendous experience in handling Magento consulting and upgrade projects. We have executed major upgrades for large enterprise customers. If you would like our technical experts to review your website and provide suggestion for an upgrade, please contact us.

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Updating Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) to the latest version provides protection against security vulnerabilities, bug fixes, and implementing new features.  It is quite a complex task to upgrade the Magento EE edition.  With each website having its own set of plugins and extensions, creating a seamless upgrade is a challenge.

Key points to consider during an upgrade

1. If we are endeavoring to update from a genuinely old type of Enterprise Edition or underneath to latest edition of Magento Enterprise 1.13 or 1.14, we are going to run into a huge amount of issues. Magento has added quite a few features over the past few years and significant changes to the core.
2. Rearranging a rundown of the extensions that are present in our current installation and ascertain they are manually integrated in after the upgrade. A mundane mistake most rookie Magento Developers do is, they write all their custom code directly in the files located in the core folder. While upgrading or migrating Magento supersedes the files in the core folder, consequently overwriting all the custom code that has been composed.
3. There is a decent measure of contrast in the Database schema/pattern between the different versions in Magento. While the vast majority of the core tables are basic, the Enterprise Edition to be upgraded to has several extra tables that need to be available to work.
4. The themes are very contrary between the two versions and we will have a lot of re-work while upgrading the themes to the Enterprise Edition.
5. Magento upgrade needs lots of concentration, testing and deep knowledge of mage libraries.

PREVALENT ISSUES AND CONSTRAINTS

1. While upgrading Magento version, we need to update it through one version at a time, or else it might create lots of issues and the upgrade may not work properly.  Try upgrading to one version at a time and do not jump to the final version.
2. While upgrading, make sure the tab running the Magento upgrade (in browser) is not reloaded or closed.  In case the tab is reloaded or closed, upgrade will start over again.
3. After upgrading, there may be a possibility that indexing has not taken place. In such cases, just make sure all the indexes are moved to pending state, clear the price indexing table and rerun the indexing.
4. After the upgrade, it is possible that some of the custom modules may not work, and it needs to be fixed manually as Magento upgrade doesn’t provide fixes for those.
5. If any 3rd party extension component has performed major changes in code to improve its functionality, then it can be a big issue during upgrade process.
6. Another issue during Magento Upgrade is the changes in the custom template. For example, if we are upgrading a Magento Ecommerce store from 1.3.2.4 to 1.4.2, then any custom template prior to 1.4 requires several changes.
7. Sometimes Magento upgrade process may include issues regarding old shipping and payment methods. PayPal and other Payment standards should be changed according to conditions.
8. When upgrading Magento to latest version, custom themes can face a few errors in the check out page.  This may not occur if we use a default theme

MAGENTO UPGRADE APPROACH

During a Magento upgrade, it’s highly recommended to follow a standard approach.

1. Downloading Magento database and sources to development server.
2. Running a thorough audit of Magento code and modules, finding bugs and compatibility issues.
3. Upgrading Magento store and fixing all the issues, including layout bugs, problem with third party extension, etc. During this stage you will be able to monitor the results on the developer’s server.
4. Data synchronization – during this stage we synchronize all the data so that you could get the latest platform version with all your orders, customers, and products.
5. Site publication.

STEPS FOR MAGENTO UPGRADES

There are several ways for performing a Magento upgrade.

1. Upgrading via database with simple Magento installation
2. Upgrading via SSH.
3. Upgrading via Magento Connect.

Because of changes to URL rewrites, Upgrading from EE 1.12 or earlier to EE 1.14.0.0 are more complex than other upgrades. 

HIGH LEVEL ROADMAP TO UPGRADE EE 1.14 FROM EE 1.12

1.  Install Magento in a different directory:

a) Recommended. Set up a identical replica of an existing system to carry out the upgrades.

b) Install Magento in a new, empty root installation directory on the same server.

Important: Do not upgrade Magento in the same directory on the same server because post-upgrade errors are likely to occur.

If Magento EE 1.12 is installed in the Development/test environment (as a replica of production server Magento version) then step (h) in Point 3 should be done manually for upgrade.

If Magento EE 1.14 is installed in the Development/test environment upgrades script will run automatically when the base URL is clicked/opened in the browser

2. In current production environment:

a)      Take the backup of Magento database.
b)      Archive the file system. This includes the media directory and subdirectories; all extensions and customizations; and all custom themes.

3. In the development or test environment :

a)      Create a new, empty database instance.

b)      Import the production database tables into the development database instance

c)       Copy production media directory, extensions, themes, and other customizations to the development system.

d)      Copy local.xml to [Magento install dir]/app/etc and edit it if necessary to reference the production database instance

e)      Stop all cron jobs.

f)       In a web browser, go to your new base URL

g)      Wait for upgrade scripts to run.

h)      OPTIONAL STEP: THIS STEP IS REQUIRED ONLY IF MAGENTO 1.12 IS INSTALLED IN DEVELOPMENT/TEST ENVIRONMENT 

Upgrade using SSH command 

Please follow the instructions provided in link for upgrading via SSH command http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/groups/227/upgrading_magento_via_ssh

 UPGRADE USING MAGENTO CONNECT 

• Before starting the upgrade log in the admin panel of Magento, go to System menu>Cache Management and flush the cache. Then disable the cache. To do this, mark the checkboxes for all the cache types, select Disable from the Actions menu in the upper right corner of the table and click on the Submit button.
• Enable the cache again after the upgrade is complete.
• In case the built-in compiler is enabled, it’s a good idea to disable that as well. You can do this from System menu>Tools>Compilation.
• Access the Connect Manager. To do this, in the admin panel go to System menu>Magento Connect>Magento Connect Manager: On the page that opens, type your admin username and password to access the Connect Manager.
• Inside the Connect Manager, make sure that the checkbox for Put store on the maintenance mode while installing/upgrading (at the top of the page) is marked, and then mark the checkbox and Clear all sessions after successful install or upgrade:
• Next, click on the Check for Upgrades button. The list with the extensions will be updated and those which have a newer version will be colored in yellow. In that list find Mage_All_Latest and from its drop-down menu select the newest stable package (EE 1.14) Then click on the Commit Changes button at the bottom of the page:

Note that if for some reason the core modules including Mage_All_Latest do not appear after clicked on the Check for Upgrades button, then paste the extension key http://connect20.magentocommerce.com/community/Mage_All_Latest in the extension key text field that’s on the same page and click on the Install button (also can use the shorter version of the extension key: community/Mage_All_Latest). When we do that, the new versions of the core modules will be listed; just click on the Proceed button that’s under the list. Example screenshot given below

• After the upgrade starts, the command-line window will appear. In that window, we can see the operations that are performed during the upgrade:
• Wait several minutes until the upgrade is complete. When this happens, a Refresh button will appear under the command-line window.  Then click on it:
• Click on the Refresh button, it’s possible that we may get an Internal Server Error. There is nothing to worry since during the Magento upgrades, some of our file permissions can get messed up. The correct permissions for files are 644 or 664 and for folders 775 or 755. After an upgrade, many of the files might have permissions of 666 and the permissions of folders may be changed to 777. What we need to do is to change the permissions to the correct ones.
• After the upgrade process is finished:
  • Delete a file labeled maintenance.flag from the root Magento directory on your hosting account.
  • Log in to the admin panel and re-index the data from System menu>Index Management.
  • We should re-enable the cache from System menu>Cache Management. In case you use the compiler, you can enable that as well from System>Tools>Compilation

 STEPS TO FOLLOW AFTER A SUCCESSFUL UPGRADE

1. Set all indexers to update when scheduled (System > Configuration > ADVANCED >Index Management, Update when scheduled.
2. Run the URL redirect script to create 301 redirects:
   • [Magento install dir]/php -f shell/url_migration_to_1_13.php – thread-count
3. thread-count is the number of CPU cores in Magento server, minus 1, to a maximum of 15 
4. Run a full reindex from the command line:   
   • [Magento install dir]/php -f shell/indexer.php — –reindexall 
5. Clear the following directories from the command line:
   • [Magento install dir]/var/cache /var/full_page_cache /var/locks 
6. Enable cron and make sure the Magento cron job is set up.
7. Verify the upgraded system is now identical to the production system. If they are not, then fix issues, retest, and upgrade again.
8. Test the upgrade thoroughly, including:
   1. Extensions, themes, and customizations.
9. Place orders using all web stores and all payment methods.

After Magento upgrade is successful, we should check out whether the following features are updated-

1. Magento theme update to make the website look effective and professional.
2. Magento debugging updates to ensure database security for online shop.
3. Magento template upgrade for better promotion of online business.
4. Magento website upgrade to benefit from the latest features and functions of the new version.
5. Magento 3^rd party extension upgrades to deliver best upgrade services without losing vital information and data. 

Upgrading from Magento EE 1.12 to 1.14 provides a lot of features that includes Visual Merchandising, Responsive themes, Payment options, Search indexing, International pricing and lots more. But with each retailer optimizing their store according their business, every Magento upgrade has its own share of interesting challenges.