Page Text: 21 Mar, 2016 | Posted in News Online Marketing By
Mage Australia
Google Merchant Centre Feed
Starting in Sep. 2015, Google Shopping required GTIN (EAN/UPC) in the feed specification for this list of brands. Beginning May 16, 2016 Google will require that all products have a GTIN (EAN / UPC) in your data feeds to Google Merchant Centre for all brands that have assigned GTIN’s by the manufacturer in the following countries: Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, or the US.
20 Dec, 2012 | Posted in Magento Development By
Matthew Campbell
We're working on a large multistore job over the last 6 months. We came across an issue due to internationalisation where we didn't want to show certain products for certain countries in the catalog but we still wanted to display it if people searched for it and we wanted to tell the end user that it was or was not available in their countries. Finally, it was a tacked on after-thought by our client. Read More
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12 Oct, 2012 | Posted in Magento Errors & Problems How to, Tutorials & Training By
Matthew Campbell
A very quick blog post how to change Magento's sitemap to correct the lastmod field for categories, products and cms pages. Read More
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12 Mar, 2012 | Posted in Magento Extensions By
Magento Australia
Magento comes by default with a number of product types for different situations. These product types are: Simple, Virtual, Downloadable, Grouped, Configurable or Bundle. Each product type shines in particular scenarios - bundles are great for building custom products, grouping items together as a discount while still managing stock levels. Grouped Products are great for quick data entry in B2B or when multiple qty's of different products need to be chosen quickly. Configurable products are great when you have to select multiple options to choose a single product (ie: Large and Red).
Through Magento's great extension ecosystem, it's now possibly to mix and match Configurables (the ability to choose multiple options for a single product) with Grouped products (the ability to choose multiple quantities of similiar products) in a single product detail view page.
Now, obviously, this screenshot is a cut down example but consider the above scenario where you might be ordering Team Jerseys, School Uniforms or Work Uniforms and you may need to order 3 x Large, Red Men's, 3 x Large, Blue Men's, 2x Small, Red Women's etc. In grouped product scenario, you would have a massive grid of products containing all the different sizes and colours for both mens and womens. Or alternatively, in a configurable product scenario, you would need to enter and re-enter the page many times.
Mix this up with an Ajax 'add to cart' affect and you can achieve very quick ordering of complex product types very easily. Simplifying these processes are vital. Our Google Analytics data shows us that the large majority of orders are placed by a customer in under 5 minutes. In many cases, it's less than 3 minutes. Making it difficult for customers to fill their baskets is like walking into a shopping centre where, you can only use a carry basket instead of a trolley and everything is on shelves almost out of reach and then reaching the checkout and there's a 20 metre queue. It would be a frustrating experience. Always keep these things in mind when developing your Ecommerce experience for customers.
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02 Feb, 2012 | Posted in How to, Tutorials & Training Magento Extensions By
Luis Gómez
If you need to log or monitor actions performed in Magento Admin? Inchoo's admin logging actions extension comes to the rescue. A feature normally only found in Magento Enterprise Edition, this extension will help you discover which admin user logged in, where they were and what areas were modified, if any. And of course, this can also serve as a security tool as well.
23 Jan, 2012 | Posted in How to, Tutorials & Training Magento Extensions Magento Development By
Matthew Campbell
Magento's out of the box search experience is not the best, we can all agree. One of the sorely missed points is that CMS Pages are not searched by default. This can be a painful experience for you, if you have a lot of worth Static Page Content. Read More
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28 Dec, 2011 | Posted in How to, Tutorials & Training By
Matthew Campbell
Magento has a built-in cache. In version 1.5.0.1 Magento added a Full Page Cache option to Magento which gives us the ability to use holepunch techniques to cache blocks. This section here doesn't deal with the full page cache at all, rather just uses the standard Magento cache and we add the ability for Magento to cache category lists. In this short howto, we show you how to leverage this cache to speed up your category lists.
10 Dec, 2011 | Posted in Magento Errors & Problems Magento Development By
Matthew Campbell
A bug in 1.5.2 (and possibly other versions) was pointed out to me by a customer today regarding the WYSIWYG editor in Magento wherein subfolders you create are later not displayed when you open up the image chooser again
06 Dec, 2011 | Posted in Magento Extensions By
Matthew Campbell
28 Nov, 2011 | Posted in Magento Extensions Online Marketing By
Matthew Campbell
Magento doesn't have the native ability to export well-formed feeds that can be consumed by Google Shopping , Getpric e Shopbot , MyShopping  and other Shopping Comparison websites like Shopwiki  and Ozbargain  but as is nearly always the case with Magento, there's some good extensions to help with that. In this post, we describe why you need to be on Australian Shopping comparison websites to market your ecommerce business and how best to do that.
27 Nov, 2011 | Posted in Magento Errors & Problems By
Matthew Campbell
There's a small / frustrating Bug in Magento 1.5.0.1 where dates in the months July to September prior to 1970 are no validated correctly and so the order cannot proceed.
25 Nov, 2011 | Posted in Magento Extensions Online Marketing By
Matthew Campbell
Choosing software to run your Magento Newsletter Campaigns is no small feat. We choose Mailchimp for a very good reasons. Read on to find out why using Mailchimp is great for Magento Newsletter Campaigns.
09 Nov, 2011 | Posted in How to, Tutorials & Training By
Matthew Campbell
So, you've setup 4 columns, and a default page limit of 16 in your configuration somewhere but somewhere, you'd like to run a 3 column count with 12 products per page? Here's how you do it.
08 Sep, 2011 | Posted in Magento Extensions By
Matthew Campbell
Are you trying to choose an Australian merchant gateway provider for your ecommerce store or want to quickly see if your bank or payment provider is supported by Magento? We've compiled a great list of supported payment providers in Australia.
24 Aug, 2011 | Posted in Magento Errors & Problems Magento Extensions By
Matthew Campbell
Magmi is a Magento Mass Importer developed as a magento DATABASE client, (ie not a magento extension) , that operates directly in SQL and is the result of a deep analysis of the Magento Database Model. The first magmi goal was catalog import & update. It can create products or update an existing catalog and deal with HUGE data (Millions of products could be managed by magmi,but even above a few 1000’s , you’ll see the real difference with dataSlow)
30 Jul, 2011 | Posted in How to, Tutorials & Training By
Matthew Campbell
These Magento Developer Toolbar extensions make it much easier to develop themes and modules in Magento. The first is primarily aimed at theme development and allows you to quickly access Template Paths, Clean Cache, Merge CSS, Merge JS. The second is aimed primarily at debugging speed and development models and is aimed at extension developers.
10 Jul, 2011 | Posted in How to, Tutorials & Training By
Matthew Campbell
There's multiple ways to theme Magento. In this 20 minute how-to, we show you the quickest way to wrap your head around Magento themes. It's not the ideal way but it's certainly the easiest when you're trying to learn.
17 Mar, 2011 | Posted in Magento Extensions By
Matthew Campbell
How to get Securepay Merchant Gateway working with Magento Commerce.
1. Remember to always initiate your Merchant account with your Bank asap. It often takes weeks. Some of our thoughts working with different Banks
Westpac - you can utilise the Fontis Westpac Payway and Quickgateway Extension . This extension communicates directly with Westpac so there's no need for an Eway / Securepay account
St George - allows direct communication also using another Fontis extension - be aware that it only works for their IPG product and it cannot be run on a shared server. You will need to have your own VPS or Dedicated Server and sufficient Linux skills to compile the PHP module. In short, it's quite a pain.
ANZ, CBA or NAB - You are required to use a 3rd Party like Eway or Securepay  to communicate with these banks. Both Eway and Securepay have extensions available for Magento.
Getting Started with SecurePay (eway to come later)
We tend to favour this particular SecurePay Extension Magento SecurePay Extension  over the Fontis one but I forget why we're not using the Fontis one now. I recommend enabling debugging in the extension and also in Magento Admin -> Advanced -> Developer -> Log Settings. These log files are written to:
var/log/exception.log
var/log/system.log
var/log/Sxml.log
(the last one is for securepay - for some reason, this sometimes won't get created with an error: var/log/Sxml.log" cannot be opened with mode "a" in the exceptions.log file, so we manually create an empty file with the correct permissions)
MerchantID & Password are not the ones they send you (or your client) in the email. Those are just the details required to login to the Merchant's interface. Securepay's technical support is actually fantastic, so I suggest you call them, tell them you need to confirm the XML API Gateway MerchantID & Password with them and they will help you out.
We generally use the well known test card: 4111-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx for testing and just test against the live gateway. Be aware that numerous bad attempts to SecurePay can trigger their firewall systems to block your server. The final line below means our gateway is working but the card is wrong. It's sufficient for the time being.
INFO (6): Preauth Declined. The remote Gateway reported the following status error: 504 Invalid merchant ID INFO (6): Preauth Declined. Transaction Declined (56): No Card Record
Have fun and we hope this helped. Of course, if you get stuck at any stage, we can provide remote assistance via Skype or do it all for you.
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