Picture yourself in this situation. You just installed the Magento Platform and you played around with the administrative panel. Hey you got some products on your page and it’s beginning to look like you might have this e-commerce thing down. So, what’s next you ask? Well how are you going to make your site, your site? We’re talking about that little something special, a secret sauce that will not only make a good first impression on your customers, but also make your site memorable.

The Magento platform has an entire community backing the development of extensions to its platform that they’ve dubbed Magento Connect. While extensions won’t make your site pretty, they offer you a lot in terms of customizing  and enhancing what the platform provides to cater to the needs of your customer. Remember that it’s all about the customer.

To install an extension: simply login to your admin panel, select System -> Magento Connect -> Magento Connect Manager. Plug in the appropriate extension key and then click “Install”.

The Review

This first Magento Extension Review will cover the Exploded Menu extension. Here is the extension key for reference: magento-community/Raptor_ExplodedMenu.

Exploded Menu is essentially a free version of Raptor Commerce’s SuperMenu, but without certain features and without official support. There’s not much information on the extension page of Exploded Menu besides a short description: “Replaces the standard single column drop down with a multi-column drop-down featuring 2nd and 3rd level menu items.” In case that description was a little bit confusing for you, the extension supposedly offers two features over the typical drop-down menu. It organize all levels of menu items in a single drop down (this will be illustrated later). It also offers the ability to create multiple columns in the drop down.

After playing around with the extension, we’re disappointed to say that the multiple columns feature is not supported in Exploded Menu and is only offered in the full fledged Super Menu product. The only real benefit of Exploded Menu is the multi-level drop down!

Now it’s time to walk through the grand gallery of screenshots! To begin playing with drop-down menus all you have to do is add some categories through your admin panel. Select the “Catalog” tab and click “Manage Categories”:

You can then proceed to add categories and subcategories that eventually show up on your menu. Note that selecting a category and click “Add Subcategory” will add another level of category below the current category. In our experience, we’ve managed to add 6 levels of subcategories beneath root. The assumption is that there is no end to the depth of subcategories you can add although you might want to think about customer experience if you’re adding more than 2 or 3 levels. Playing “how much patience do you have hovering over all these tabs” with your customers might not make you their favorite site.

Here is what our categories look like:

Before and After

Now here’s what the menu looks like on our test page before installing Exploded Menu:

Before

After installing the Exploded Menu extension, it does clean up the formatting of the menu quite nicely given that you have multiple levels of subcategories.

After

Conclusion

The Exploded Menu up does clean up the menu quite nicely, but suffers from a case of bad advertisement. Why surprise users with limited access to the features after they’ve gone through the trouble of installing it? If you’re up front and honest you may get better word-of-mouth advertisement. That being said if you want all the features, you could fork up $75 for the full version of Exploded Menu, Super Menu or even try a free trial. Exploded Menu is fun to play around, but we don’t recommend building it into your production site because of the lack of real support.

How to Optimizing your Apparel eCommerce Site

Viralogy is out to help eCommerce firms give their visitors a much better experience in finding what they want and generate more sales as a result to that. We have now created a Conversion Optimization Guide for Apparel Retailers. We also recommend the Magento platform as it allows you to mostly easily follow the advice in the guide. Feel free to provide feedback and share with your connections who have eCommerce sites so they can make it better for themselves and their visitors!

Photo by lavverue

“Social media” and “ROI” - it’s hard to find two bigger buzzwords among internet marketers over the past couple of years.* Yet the combination of the two of these fields create both a compelling, yet elusive industry. Literally dozens of social media analytics companies have popped up over the past few years. Radian6, Visible Technologies, Scout Labs, Meteor Solutions, Techrigy (Alterian) and 20 Decibels are just a few of the most well known professional social media analytics tools available. That’s not to mention the countless number of free measurement tools - a list that includes Social Mention, Twitalyzer, Monitter, Klout, Twendz, Twitter Grader, Trendistic, and more. The list goes on and on.
*I should know, two of the topics I write on most extensively for Viralogy are social media tactics and online ROI.

These companies continue to pop up because nobody has done (or can do) a perfect job of social media analysis. Social media analysis and ROI measurement is a difficult thing to measure, and there are some who say it’s immeasurable. A once-common retort is “how do you measure the ROI of your telephone”? The plain fact is that measuring social media ROI is not (nor will it ever be) an exact science. But it can be measured and analyzed. The important thing is to be wary of and avoid the frequent pitfalls that come about when measuring it.

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There’s nothing more elusive than a first time visitor. Visitors entering your site through inbound links (either via Google/Bing, through advertising or marketing campaigns) are exactly why you pay your marketing team, optimize your website for search engines and why you are currently investing in that crazy little social media fad. Yet once you finally capture your user, are you properly monetizing them? Unless you’re ready to start serving ads to generate revenue, you are likely losing valuable conversions on a typically underperforming category: first time visitors.

First time visitors are a double edged sword - marketers love them (they represent possibility) while website optimization specialists often hate them (they represent low conversion). Most of all, though, they represent a vital part of any business, and one that is almost always neglected.

Why First Time Visitors Are Bad

First time visitors historically perform worse than other segments of web visitors. On average, only 1.4% of first time visitors actually convert into sales. For all of your marketing team’s search engine optimization, social media efforts and viral marketing campaigns, less than 2 of every 100 visitors will even turn into a sale. That’s a tiny amount.

Not only do first time visitors underperform, but there’s relatively little data about them. With a repeat customer, there’s all sorts of demographic and psychographic data at your fingertips. For a new visitor, you have absolutely no purchase data, and no idea whether their intent is to buy, browse or otherwise. This is a big reason that first time visitors are typically stressed much less than repeat customers. For repeat customers you’ve already made the sale once. That first sale makes it much easier to sell the second, third, fourth and fifth time.

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Advertisements. Whether you like them or hate them, they are one of the means by which website owners are generating revenue. While for some the revenue from advertisements are enough to be the average American’s paycheck, for others it is just a nice way to get rewarded for hard work. Either way, even before thinking about what to do with the money you will make off advertisements on your website, what you should be asking yourself is if you are even ready.

One of the biggest misconceptions about making money off your website is that it if you follow the ’steps’ that the ‘experts’ say, you will be making money in no time. The first thing that website owners need to understand is that ’steps’ are different for everyone. Everyone has a unique website and to say that the same thing will work for every single one is impossible. Secondly, unless someone has a proven track record of monetizing multiple websites in different markets, they are not an ‘expert.’

Here are 4 questions that anyone thinking about having advertisements on their website should ask themselves: (more…)

You need to give your consumers a reason to become a fan or follow you on Twitter.  Small and medium-sized companies often make the mistake that the simple action of building a FB Fan Page will instantly allow them to have tens of thousands of fans.  Depending on your company brand and culture, a strategy that you might want to engage in is to be bold, controversial, and sexy.

American Apparel is no small brand.  They are well known and have an excellent following.  At the same time, they are a perfect example of how to push the envelope and generate buzz by using “sex” as the hook but always making sure that the campaign is true to their company culture and brand.

Their latest campaign, Best Bottom in the World, is one of my favorite campaigns that I’ve seen in a very long time.  Lets dive into the campaign to see how they’ve marketed it and how I would improve the campaign.
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Depending on what type of website you have, and what type of content you serve, your average visit length is likely between 30 seconds and 5 minutes.* That’s an awfully short time to focus someone’s attention. Most websites have dozens of pieces of visible content on each page, and often over a hundred links. It’s no wonder companies like Google focus so much on usability (sometimes even to a fault). When you limited time to convert a customer with a very short attention span (hello, internet!), you have to focus your user.
*Some web forums and sites with heavy engagement may have a longer length of visit. Also, if you’re Facebook, disregard everything I say here. The average length of visit for Facebook is measured in hours, not minutes.

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